In a State's Eye

Jesse Walker from the May 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Lest readers assume that this had more to do with the moral deficiencies of Stalin than with the innate flaws of high modernism, Scott also discusses Julius Nyerere's efforts to "villagize" the population of Tanzania. Unlike Stalin, Nyerere was an undeniably well-meaning leader; he even hoped, initially, that his people would move into his so-called ujamaa villages of their own free will. But most Tanzanian tribesmen refused, for perfectly good reasons, to be settled. The voluntary program soon became compulsory: People were forced into the villages, the villages themselves lost their early autonomy, and thousands died.

None of this is to glorify traditional society, which contains many gross injustices of its own. But--and Scott does not explore this as much as he could have--the state is not necessarily the best means for redressing those injustices. Statism substitutes one form of inequality for another, leaving future generations to determine which poison was worse. But change can come from within the traditional community as well, by evolution or by revolution; or from the interaction of that community with the outside world, through trade and cultural exchange.

Traditional cultures, contrary to stereotype, are remarkably flexible and dynamic. They are constantly evolving, constantly examining, adopting, and discarding the tools and practices of other peoples. And they contain their own contentious divisions, sometimes leading to uprisings. Such revolts are capable of eliminating local injustices without also destroying the folkways that make the community resilient and strong. (The Russian peasants' revolution is a case in point.)

Scott is ambivalent about markets, noting that they can standardize cultural diversity as surely as the state can. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a difference between institutions that evolve as communities trade with one another--the Law Merchant, standardized weights and measures, etc.--and institutions imposed by force from above. The latter are coercive and homogenizing. The former are more plural, more syncretic; they represent not the obliteration of local cultures but the evolution of those cultures over time.

Of course, "the market" can mean different things. Business interests often use the state to standardize things that the population would otherwise let be. The most obvious example of this is, again, compulsory enclosure. Enclosures continue to be imposed to this day in the Third World, where they are sometimes promoted as a "market reform." They have less to do with free action or free enterprise than with granting favored companies access to indigenous peoples' lands and the natural resources they contain; or to the natives' labor, as they are forced from their small plots or nomadic paths and compelled to eke out a living in a factory or on a plantation.

The difference is those simplifying fictions. A mercantile state can get in the habit of seeing things through a market lens, eliminating informal institutions that can't be expressed in cash. Commerce itself need not do this: The point of trade is for people to satisfy their subjective needs through exchange, not to substitute exchange for those subjective needs.

That distinction sometimes seems lost on Scott, who at one point criticizes F.A. Hayek for treating markets as though they were "natural." I'm sure this book will find an audience among those opposed to virtually any international trade; John Gray, the conservative philosopher, has already endorsed it warmly, though with the proviso that he wishes it were harder on the global marketplace. To judge from a few off-the-cuff remarks in the book, Scott might be glad to oblige him next time.

No matter. Once one has distinguished high modernism from metis, one can bend that distinction to any number of ideological ends. Seeing Like a State remains a tremendous achievement, easily one of the most impressive and important books of recent years.