Written by James C. Scott: How certain schemes to improve the human conditions have failed.

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> state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arraange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their locaiton, their very identity. It lacking anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. > A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. In premodern times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive—patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s problem. With a device called a “queen excluder,” it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space”—the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, “legible” hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully.
Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to proboke a riot by directly violating the “just price”, managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changed in the price of wheat and rye flour.
We beg them (the king, his family, and his chief minister) to join with us in checking the abuses being perpetrated by tyrants against that class of citizens which is kind and considerate and which, until this day has been unable to present its very grievances to the very foot of the throne, and now we call on the King to mete out justice, and we express our most sincere desire for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure.
A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear, like a fly caught in amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man’s father was (Fitz-, 0'-, -sen, -son, -s, Mac-, -vich). At the time of their establishment, last names often had a kind of local logic to them: John who owned a mill became John Miller; John who made cart wheels became John Wheelwright; John who was physically small became John Short. As their male descendants, whatever their occupations or stature, retained the patro nyms, the names later assumed an arbitrary cast. The development of the personal surname (literally, a nare added to another name, and not to be confused with a permanent patronym) went hand in hand with the development of written, official documents such as tithe records, manorial dues rolls, marriage registers, censuses, tax records, and land records.48 They were necessary to the successful conduct of any administrative exercise involving large numbers of people who had to be individually identified and who were not known personally by the authorities. Imagine the dilemma of a tithe or capitation-tax collector faced with a male population, 90 percent of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William, Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry)
> As individuals, high modernists might well hold democratic views about popular sovereignty or classical liberal views about the inviolability of a private sphere that restrained them, but such convictions are external to, and often at war with, their high-modernist convictions. > The practical effect is to convince most high modernists that the certainty of a better future justifies the many short-term sacrifices required to get there.
Le Corbusier wrote: “From the huddle of hovels from the depths of grimy lairs (in Rome - the Rome of the Caesars-the plebes lived in an inextricable chaos of abutting and warren-like skyscrapers) there sometimes came the hot gust of rebellion; the plot would be hatched in the dark recesses accumulated chaos in which any kind of police activity was extremely difficult… St. Paul of Tarsus was impossible to arrest while he in the slums, and the words of his Sermons were passed like wildfire, stayed from mouth to mouth.”
Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs. “the public peace–the sidewalk and street peace–of cities …is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” The necessary conditions for a safe street are a clear demarcation between public space and private space, a substantial number of people who are watching the street on and off (“eyes on the street”), and fairly continual, heavy use, which adds to the quantity of eyes on the street.
> That explain why “freedom of criticism” among the revolutionary forces could only favor opportunists and the ascendency of bourgeois values. > Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion of the masses but also must do their thinking for them.