We’re here to help: Expertise as power - Ryan Schram's Anthrocyclopaedia

The concept of the state derives from a belief in a great divide in history

The concept of the state itself is associated with a tradition in European thought of conceiving of history as a series of distinct eras, each representing a step forward in progress toward a better system.

Ferdinand Tönnies (Tönnies [1887] 1957)
- Gemeinschaft (community): a system based on personal relationships
- Gesellschaft (society): a system incorporating a large population and organized in terms of categories of people, rather than person-to-person ties
Henry Maine (Maine [1861] 1963, 163–65)
- status (inherited position or membership in a group)
- contract (voluntary agreement between two people)

Max Weber, rationality, the state, and modernity

While Durkheim and Marx also have their own theories of states, they aren’t that original. The most influential theorist of the contemporary state as a type is Max Weber, for whom it is crucially linked to his idea of modernity.

Weber looks at society from the ground up, in terms of patterns of social action.

Forms of social action can be more or less rational, and can be rational in different ways. Social actions can be motivated by

Tradition: This is the way it has always been done
Emotion: This action expresses how I feel personally
Value-rationality (Wertrationalität)
Instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität)

What can you do with an army of bureaucrats?

Weber argues that all social forms will gradually become more and more rational over time.

An institution based on tradition or value-rationality will develop within itself a capacity to administer itself.
It will develop a bureaucratic organization within itself.
- A bureaucracy is a system of offices governed by explicit rules, procedures, and policies.
- Because bureaucracies are rationally planned, the role of individual occupant of an office is merely to do a job, to follow rules.
- Bureaucracies are powerful. When a body of people can administer their own affairs using a permanent structure of offices, who needs a ruler?

A state is a central bureaucratic authority. It is defined as the organization that has a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” (Weber [1921] 1946, 78).

As legislator, regulator, and enforcer of the law, the state is an adminstration of administrations.

Some thought experiments

What would a prison without walls and without guards look like?

The “Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility” is one example (DeMola 2022; Jaafari 2017).

The “shock” is the busy schedule that the prisoners maintain.
Nobody needs to be coerced or punished; there’s too much else going on: Boot camp, drills, classes, therapy sessions, etc.
This is a prison that frees people, literally, by giving them new abilities and skills, many quite practical.
The prison in its time reported a great success, less recidivism. What does that mean? It was good at funnelling its inmates into the working class.

Are schools prisons for children?

Everyone in a typical school is there because they want to contribute to education of children.

Schools pervasively rank children as individuals and groups.
- This is not a plot against children, or a conspiracy to control them.
- Grades are a well-intentioned tool to help teachers teach and to help students learn.
- Students always have clear incentives to learn, and to graduate from school. There is a real payoff for them.
Students are learning, but as they learn, they also discipline themselves to be a specific kind of person.
- A school system that uses a national language as a medium will churn out a bunch of speakers of the standard language, no matter what their grades are.
- Students don’t have to memorize official doctrines to internalize social norms; They are good citizens because they are good school students.

In a prison without walls, the inmates guard themselves

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

Remember the story from Week 8.

All the cells face inward toward a single, central watchtower.
A person standing in the watchtower can see every cell all at once.
Each person in every cell can see the watchtower at all times.

No one really needs to be in the watchtower; the prisoners assume someone is there, and so they monitor themselves.

Contrast this with the essence of power for Weber

Stated succinctly, this is: A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957, 202–3).

Power is the ability to control another person, to make them do what you want, or to stop them from doing what you don’t.

Michel Foucault gives us another view of power

While they overlap in some ways, I want to emphasize the difference between Weber and Foucault.

Political arithmetic

For Foucault, the nature of state authority has changed. It’s not about controlling people, it’s about shaping the conditions of a whole population.

Government is an art of making a whole population safe, healthy, prosperous, and happy. It does not operate on individuals, and it does not directly control or coerce people as individuals.

A government deals in statistics, that is, estimates of a population and its parameters: safety, health, GDP, etc. Statistics are the science of the state.

Knowledge is power

Power is that which shapes people into members of a mass population that can be measured. Power acts on action, not on people (Li 2007).

There are two crucial differences to this sense of power:

When you play your part in social life, power is operating on you. Even (and especially) in settings where you have a reason to play a role, you make it possible to create official knowledge of populations.
The watchtower is everywhere, and no one is in it. Many different, independent social institutions require people who participate in them to modify themselves to fit into their roles. All of these roles teach you to see yourself the ways others see you.

This leads to an important implication for the meaning of power:

Power does not stop you, deny you, force you, or make you do anything. It is you. Without your agency as an individual, there is no fuel to maintain social order. Power is the mechanisms by which your own agency is co-opted.

Small group discussions

Break up into small groups by number
Check-in
Share personal experiences and perspective on bureaucratic organizations and systems. What is your definition of bureaucracy?
Read about Foucault's idea of “pastoral power” (Foucault 1982, 783–784). Foucault argues that there has been a shift in the politics of social change away from challenges to who exercises power and toward challenges to how power is exercised, or the effects of power as such. This involves a focus on people and things that would not normally be considered powerful.
- What are some examples of pastoral power?
  - How do you know that something is an expression of pastoral power?
  - Does this matter for the practice of development? How?

References and further reading

Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2 (3): 201–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303.

DeMola, Pete. 2022. “New York Closes a Shock Camp and Staggers an Adirondacks Community.” The Albany Times Union, March 25, 2022, sec. News. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Moriah-Shock-closes-17019991.php.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181.

———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jaafari, Joseph Darius. 2017. “A Prison With No Walls.” NationSwell. August 4, 2017. https://nationswell.com/news/new-york-shock-incarceration-recidivism/.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. “Governmentality.” Anthropologica 49 (2): 275–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25605363.

Maine, Henry Sumner. (1861) 1963. Ancient law; its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas. Boston: Beacon Press. http://archive.org/details/ancientlawitscon0000main_u5e5.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. (1887) 1957. Community and society [Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft]. Translated by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper & Row. http://archive.org/details/communitysociety00tnrich.

Weber, Max. (1921) 1946. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1991. “Bureaucracy.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 196–244. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group.