Maya Boyle—boyle22m@mtholyoke.eduThursday, April 17, 2014

Joan CocksPivotal Political Ideas: The Concept of Power

How do Scott’s concepts in “Seeing Like A State” and “The Art of Not Being Governed” stand against the market econ-

omy?

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L I V I N G O N T H E O U T S I D E : A C O N S E R V A T I V E A N D E C O N O M I C C R I T I Q U E O F S C O T T ’ S Q U A S I -

A N A R C H I S M

Since Adam Smith conceptualised the “invisible hand” of the market in

The Wealth of Nations, economists and political theorists alike have idealised

a free capitalist market as the greatest arbiter of value. Within the past cen-

tury, market capitalism has enjoyed unprecedented popularity and growth,

becoming an omnipresent and ubiquitous force in the international economic

consciousness. However, for James C. Scott, his target is not the capitalist

order, but the role of the state within. James Scott’s delineation of govern-

ment motives in Seeing Like A State, as well as his chronicle of the evolution

of anarchist societies in The Art of Not Being Governed challenge a high

modernist conceptualisation of society—that is, a society that favours techni-

cal knowledge over practical knowledge in the name of progress and effi-

ciency. However, neither work fully addresses the economic motives behind

the creation of a high modernist society, and as such, its quasi-anarchist pre-

scriptions do not fully combat the capitalist motivations that direct the cur-

rent trajectory of the international political economy.

Scott’s description of high modernism resembles Oakeshott’s depiction of

a rationalist society, and with it, carries the same appeal to value practical

knowledge despite the lure of high modernism. “High modernism,” in

essence, describes the attempt to engineer society to fulfil scientific “laws”

of production. High modernists attempt to satisfy human needs through

maximising functions of productivity, which Scott explicates through his

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analyses of high modernist influence on agriculture and industrial produc-

tion. High modernism values technical knowledge over practical knowledge

insofar as technical knowledge allows for delineable practices which trans-

late to delineable expectations for productivity. Seeing Like A State provides

a startlingly Oakeshottian critique of this trajectory, insofar as it concludes

that “high modernist” society holds the ultimate responsibility for state fail-

ings through its devaluation of metis – learning that is acquired through the

absorption of knowledge through action— in favour of technical knowledge.

Because technical knowledge requires no practical component, it is dispos-

able and cheap. Likewise, workers who use only technical knowledge in their

trade are equally disposable. A state that treats its people as disposable

units of production effectively takes the humanity out of collective gover-

nance. Assembling a product on an assembly line, for instance, may be

learned through a standardised education and thus, may be objectively

judged for consistency and quality. High-level crafts and cooking, by con-

trast, demand a certain level of knowledge by doing, a métis, if the practi-

tioner is to achieve mastery. This learning by doing, which is unique to each

apprentice does not mesh with universal rational design. However, instead

of recognising the need for less industrialised forms of production in a flour-

ishing society, high modernists eschew tradition, uniqueness, and individu-

alised learning in pursuit of a uniform and efficient modernity.

Although high modernism is alluring in its simplicity, its intent to control

individual humans through unindividualised means frays the relationship be-

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tween a state and its people, because it endeavours to treat them as tools,

not people. As such, it destroys the connections between the government

and the governed, which creates a disassociated political environment that is

more susceptible to civil unrest. Indeed, Scott writes of “high modernism” as

a shared characteristic of political discord, chronicling high modernism’s

emergence with the rapid rise of Germany during World War I. He traces its

roots to shared liberal and totalitarian state practices in their emphases on

mass production and technical knowledge.

Scott looks to the post-industrial urban explosion to exemplify the high

modernist imposition of “rational order” on political economies that undergo

an industrial revolution. Since the Enlightenment, Scott argues, governments

have striven to make society comprehensible in order to facilitate their politi-

cal control over their citizens. The winding roads of feudal cities required

prior knowledge to navigate with ease, and as such, locals held an advan-

tage. The lives of inhabitants of medieval cities and peasant farmers could

not easily be known by outsiders; to understand these lives, visitors needed

unique understandings of each city. To generate the maximum revenue from

their citizens, modern states need standardised conceptualisations, mea-

surements, and techniques of production that fit within their capacity to mo-

bilise their resources. Feudal life was convoluted, with their road structures

as unique as their resource distribution. To move beyond the feudal system,

states required a standard process that obstructed neither surveillance nor

taxation, which prompted a reorganisation of city structure to attain this ca-

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pacity. By orchestrating grids for city roads and mandating surnames for its

citizens, the post-feudal state developed a city structure that, by facilitating

its need for surveillance, granted the state pervasive control over its re-

sources and its people.

From road creation to robotisation of labour, sates have since shifted their

interest from political protection to maximising productivity and output, with

the intention to improve their citizens’ standards of living over time. How-

ever, high modernist policies have actually led to an increase in inequality

and poverty, with the poor becoming poorer over time. In point of fact, Scott

argues that this shift in state intent from maximising social welfare to max-

imising profit has caused “the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social

engineering.” Four primary conditions, he claims, account for this tragedy.

A preference for “rational” thought over tradition, the administrative order-

ing of a state through a ubiquitous hierarchy, a willingly coercive regime, and

an anaemic civil society that lacks the willingness to resist, together have

created a society that has disassociated from its regime, which threatens

state productivity and thus its justification for high modernist structure.

Scott derives this failure of a state to satisfy its productive intentions from

a fundamental flaw in its determination of human knowledge. High mod-

ernists and rationalists failed to actualise their hopes for productivity be-

cause they assumed that their scientific understanding was fundamentally

superior to common knowledge and practice. However, scientific knowledge

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cannot fully encompass the social minutia that govern common life—as

Oakeshott terms practical knowledge and as Scott terms “metis.” This prac-

tical knowledge, which high modernists cast aside in an attempt to mod-

ernise peasant villages and ways of life, creates a disconnect between state

perception and societal reality. This chasm of understanding renders a

“modern” societal construction imperfect because it does not reflect the

practical nuances of daily life, and allows lower classes to fall between the

cracks by systematically favouring the controllers of capital and technical

labour—which can be understood as technical productivity—over the con-

trollers of practical productivity.

Scott determines that the fundamental disaster of the high modernist

state is couched in the state’s refusal to acknowledge practical knowledge as

a legitimate facet of society. In fact, he concludes that the human ability to

acquire metis outside the acknowledgement of the state has prevented an

even more profound political harm. The only thing that has saved modern

society as it exists today is the practical knowledge that has defied state at-

tempts to reshape it.

While Seeing Like A State challenges modern state motives for gover-

nance, The Art of Not Being Governed provides the evolutionary process for

a type of non-state society. Scott turns this quasi-anarchist lens to the rural

and marginalised societies of the “hill people” of East and Southeast Asia.

By definition, the hill people moved to the outskirts of society over hundreds

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of years in order to avoid the coercive nature of the state through the impo-

sition of labour and taxes. In these cordoned areas, societies that eschew

the traditional state structure evolved unique ways of life, including separate

languages, subsistence economies, and geographic locations designed to

keep the coercive efforts of the peripheral state at bay. Scott offers a case

study of the fugitive people of Myanmar to elucidate resistance to and avoid-

ance of state coercion, while he argues that the lengthening arm of the mod-

ern state threatens the ways of life of peripheral societies.

Although Scott presents a convincing argument against high modernist

coercion, he neglects the possibility that a coercive force could exist beyond

the state’s power. Paradoxically, the true “higher power” in a market capi-

talist political economy exists not due to any outside coercive force, but from

its internal society’s demand for determination of value. Capitalism has a

knack for suffusing a society with the need to define all things, abilities, and

concepts in the term of a market economy. However, this need to value so-

ciety in pure and objective terms renders governing actors, including the

state itself, at the mercy of the economy’s imperfect valuation of human

qualities, for tasks that require metis, through their uniqueness and inex-

pendability cannot be identically valued.

While a high modernist state and a capitalist economy often function in

conjunction with one another, the growing disassociation between low-level

workers and their government suggests that the “invisible hand” may be op-

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erating beyond the purview of the state. Market capitalism sees no need for

maintaining a connection with technical workers, for if they fail to produce

effectively, they can easily be replaced. On the other hand, any state, even

a high modernist one, serves at the pleasure of the majority. Workers who

have been thrust out of the market economy by failing to meet standards of

productivity will lose their allegiance to a government that has failed in its

promise for a better life. While this matters not to an apolitical economy, in

large numbers, a collective disassociation and loss of loyalty to a state cre-

ates a political environment rife with the threat of civil unrest.

Although they challenge high modernist conceptualisation and societal re-

sponse, Seeing Like A State and The Art of Not Being Governed do not fully

critique the economic motives behind the usurpation of metis by technical

knowledge. By so doing, it ideates an incomplete political power structure

that does not fully reconcile why states would risk disillusioning its citizens in

the name of efficiency. The pervasiveness of economic incentives in driving

state actions provides a ruling authority that Scott does not fully address.

His evasion of the market economy as a separate and coercive influence

upon the state delegitimises Scott’s argument, insofar as this refusal to

recognise capitalist ambitions upends the sovereign power as a human, sub-

jective force in favour of an inhuman and objective demand for profit within

the market economy. Scott’s weakness thus lies in his assumption of the

ubiquity of a sovereign state in organising state society. However, this

premise is patently false. By disposing technical workers, high modernist

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states act outside of their self-interest in the pursuit of efficiency, challenging

their own sustainability. Capitalism’s interests, by contrast, are fully actu-

alised within a high modernist state. This disconnect between the state’s un-

derstanding and the true nature of its own power creates a misdirected ex-

pectation for accountability which ultimately paralyses the state and its peo-

ple alike. Wars cannot be fought until the enemy is known.

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