Legibility

James Scott ( Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) ) suggests that “legibility” is a central problem of politics.  ”The premodern state,” he writes, “was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity.  It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people.  It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to ‘translate’ what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view.”  This mean that “its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.”

Modern states make society legible through many mechanisms: “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation” are all “comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.”  In short, “much of early modern European statecraft” was about “rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.”