James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
Dashboard
Blog Stats
10/21/10 7:53 PM
Edit Post
Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, RealityBased, and Even-Handed Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.
Economics 210a Weblog Archives DeLong Hot on Google DeLong Hot on Google Blogsearch September 14, 2010
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Robin of Locksley, Rebecca Daughter of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. Cato Unbound: James Scott: The Trouble with the View from Above. A comment: In 542 AD the late Roman (early Byzantine?) Emperor Justinian I wrote to his Praetorian Prefect concerning the army--trained and equipped and paid for by the Roman State to control the barbarians and to "increase the state." Justinian was, Peter Sarris reports in his Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, upset that: certain individuals had been daring to draw away soldiers and foederati from their duties, occupying such troops entirely with their own private business.... The emperor... prohibit[ed] such individuals from drawing to themselves or diverting troops... having them in their household... on their property or estates.... [A]ny individual who, after thirty days, continues to employ soldiers to meet his private needs and does not return them to their units will face confiscation of property... "and those soldiers and fioderati who remain in paramonar attendance upon them... will not only be deprived of their rank, but also undergo punishments up to and including capital punishment." Justinian is worried because what is going on in the country he rules is not legible to him. Soldiers--soldiers whom he has trained, equipped, and paid for--have been hired away from their frontier duties by the great landlords of the Empire and employed on their estates and in the areas they dominate as bully-boys. One such great landlord was Justinian's own sometime Praefectus Praetorio per Orientem Flavius Apion, to whom one of Flavius's tenants and debtors, one Anoup, wrote:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 1 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
No injustice or wickedness has ever attached to the glorious household of my kind lord, but it is ever full of mercy and overflowing to supply the needs of others. On account of this I, the wretched slave of my good lord, wish to bring it to your lordship's knowledge by this present entreaty for mercy that I serve my kind lord as my fathers and forefathers did before me and pay the taxes every year. And by the will of God... my cattle died, and I borrowed the not inconsiderable amount of 15 solidi.... Yet when I approached my kind lord and asked for pity in my straits, those belonging to my lord refused to do my lord's bidding. For unless your pity extends to me, my lord, I cannot stay on my ktema and fulfill my services with regard to the properties of the estate. But I beseech and urge your lordship to command that mercy be shown to me because of the disaster that has overtaken me... The late Roman Empire as Justinian wished it to be would consist of (a) slaves, (b) free Roman citizens (some of whom owned a lot of land), (c) soldiers, (d) bureaucrats, and (e) an emperor. The slaves would work for their masters. Slaves along with their citizen masters and non-slaveholding citizens would farm the empire (some of the citizens owning their land; some renting it). All would be prosperous and pay their taxes. And the emperor would use the taxes to pay the soldiers who dealt with the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals; to fund the building of Hagia Sophia and other works of architecture in Constantinople; and to promote the true faith and extirpate heresy. If the countryside were legible to him, that is how things would be-slaves and citizens in their places, landlords and tenants in their mutually-beneficial contractual relationships, all prosperous and all paying their taxes to support the empire. But Justinian knows very well that the countryside is not legible to him. The contracts that Flavius Apion makes with his tenants are made under the shadow of the threat that if Flavius Apion does not like the way things are going he will send a bucellarius to beat you up. Anoup is not pointing out to Flavius Apion that their landlord-tenant relationship is a good thing and that keeping him as a tenant rather than throwing him off the land for failure to pay the rent is in both their interests. Instead, Anoup is calling himself a slave (which he is not). Anoup is calling Flavius Apion a lord (which he is not supposed to be). Anoup is appealing to a long family history of dependence of himself and his ancestors on the various Flavii Apionoi and Flavii Strategioi of past generations. Justinian thinks that things would be better served if the countryside were properly legible to him and he could enforce reality to correspond to the legal order of slaves and citizens, tenants and landlords interacting through contract, and taxpayers. Flavius Apion would prefer that the order be one of proto-feudalism: that all the Anoups know and understand that they are at his mercy, and that the emperor is far, far away. And we don't know what Anoup thinks. We do know thait does not sound as though he experiences the lack of legibility of the countryside to the emperor and his state as a full and complete liberation. And we do know that the Emperor Justinian was gravely concerned about the transformation of his soldiers into bucellarii, into the dependent bully-boys of the landlords--both because it meant that they were not on the borders where they belonged and because it disturbed what he saw as the proper balance of power in the countryside and what he saw as the emperor's justice. Justinian's big (and to him insoluble) problem was that the Flavius Apion whose bullyboys beat up his tenants when they displeased was the same Flavius Apion who headed Justinian's own bureaucracy. Thus when James Scott speaks of how local knowledge and local arrangements having http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 2 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
the ability to protect the people of civil society from an overmighty, blundering state, I say "perhaps" and I say "sometimes." It is certainly the case that the fact that Sherwood Forest is illegible to the Sheriff of Nottingham allows Robin of Locksley and Maid Marian to survive. But that is just a stopgap. In the final reel of Ivanhoe the fair Rebecca must be rescued from the unworthy rogue Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (and packed offstage to marry some young banker or rabbi), the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne must receive their comeuppance, the proper property order of Nottinghamshire must be restored, and Wilfred must marry the fair Rowena--and all this is accomplished by making Sherwood Forest and Nottinghamshire legible to the true king, Richard I "Lionheart" Plantagenet, and then through his justice and good lordship. A state that makes civil society legible to itself cannot protect us from its own fits of ideological terror, or even clumsy thumb-fingeredness. A state to which civil society is illegible cannot help curb roving bandits or local notables. And neither type of state has proved terribly effective at constraining its own functionaries. In some ways, the "night watchman" state--the state that enables civil society to develop and function without distortions imposed by roving bandits, local notables, and its own functionaries, but that also is content to simply sit back and watch civil society--is the most powerful and unlikely state of all. Brad DeLong on September 14, 2010 at 10:40 AM in History, Philosophy: Moral, Political Economy | Permalink Favorite
Reblog (0) | del.icio.us | Tweet This!
| Digg This | Save to
TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e551f080038834013487543f11970c Listed below are links to weblogs that reference James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Robin of Locksley, Rebecca Daughter of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others..:
Comments Robert Waldmann said... Ah yes Apion one of the bad guys in Count Belisarius by Robert Graves. I'd note the rather long list of Justinian's uses for taxes " to pay the soldiers who dealt with the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals; to fund the building of Hagia Sophia and other works of architecture in Constantinople; and to promote the true faith and extirpate heresy. " I might add that "increase the state" sure didn't mean "protect the state" as Justinian sent his soldiers do conquer North Africa and Italy. The tyranny of Apion sure doesn't seem to me to be one of the innnumerable proofs that libertarians are wrong -- I don't think it was easy back then to be any farther from http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 3 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
libertarian than Justinian (with improved technology more effective tyranny is possible). When land is the only real wealth, men at arms are very key to wealth and power. Less so when there is active commerce. One aspect of the change from the Roman empire to Feudal Europe was reduced use of money. It is hard for the emperor to collect taxes in grain. That might have been the point. By the way, did you ever read a very interesting article entitled "Princes and Merchants" written by a couple of guys whose names I forget ? Could it be that the great power of Apion over Anoup had something to do with the elimination of all institutions laws and rights which interfered with collecting taxes ? Might it be that the Apion's became extremely wealthy because the ability to stare down tax collectors gave them a great competitive advantage ? Reply September 14, 2010 at 10:57 AM christofay said... Where the banks are Apion: "The Great American Stickup': It Was The Economy, Stupid" 'The facts are otherwise. It is not conspiratorial but rather accurate to suggest that blame can be assigned to those who consciously developed and implemented a policy of radical financial deregulation that led to a global recession. As President Clinton's Treasury secretary, Rubin, the former cochair of Goldman Sachs, led the fight to free the financial markets from regulation and then went on to a $15-million-a-year job with Citigroup, the company that had most energetically lobbied for that deregulation. He should remember the line from the old cartoon strip Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." 'For it was this Wall Street and Democratic Party darling, along with his clique of economist super-friends -- Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, and a few others -who inflated a giant real estate bubble by purposely not regulating the derivatives market, resulting in oceans of money that was poured into bad loans sold as safe investments. In the process, they not only caused an avalanche of pain and misery when the bubble inevitably burst but also shredded the good reputation of the American banking system nurtured since the Great Depression. 'If we accept a broad dispersal of blame or a sense of inevitability -- or simply ignore the details, since they can be so confusing -- we lose the opportunity to rearrange our institutions to prevent such disasters from happening again.' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/the-great-americansticku_b_715928.html Reply September 14, 2010 at 11:51 AM Petey said... "Thus when James Scott speaks of how local knowledge and local arrangements having the ability to protect the people of civil society from an overmighty, blundering state, I say "perhaps" and I say "sometimes." Well, sure. Local knowledge and local arrangements are best thought of as short-term buffers to slow the Emperor's desire for complete control.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 4 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
No sane person wants a state that makes everything 100% perfectly legible to itself. But a sane person does want a state that slowly, and with accountability to local knowledge, makes civil society legible to itself, so it can thus function as a better government. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution is a nice attempt to grapple with the issue, I think, even though it doesn't specifically require the Feds to get a LOCAL judge to sign off on probable cause... ----(I do wish you'd enable the bold and italic tags in the comment section, Brad. I hate marking for emphasis with ALL CAPS, and I've lost the ability to write in short form without bold and italics.) Reply September 14, 2010 at 11:53 AM Neal said... "Unlikely" is correct. Reply September 14, 2010 at 12:02 PM John Howard Brown said... Apropos of this post, the proponents of the libertarian project of privatizing everything, including justice, rarely acknowledge that this has been tried. It was called feudalism, and scarcely represents a high point in the history of human freedom. The paradox of liberty is that a strong state may be necessary to prevent the local bully boys from depriving others of their freedom. Reply September 14, 2010 at 12:14 PM Nathanael said... NIIICEE. Professor DeLong: Make this a book, or at least a published article in a major journal (of what? political theory?). This is the most insightful thing I've read in ages. Seriously. This is really good stuff, and really important stuff. Reply September 14, 2010 at 12:28 PM Nathanael said in reply to Robert Waldmann... "Could it be that the great power of Apion over Anoup had something to do with the elimination of all institutions laws and rights which interfered with collecting taxes ?" No. That's just absurd and unhistoric. There never were any such institutions, laws, or rights. "Might it be that the Apion's became extremely wealthy because the ability to stare down tax collectors gave them a great competitive advantage ?" Sort of but not exactly. The truth is more obvious: "Justinian's big (and to him insoluble) problem was that the Flavius Apion whose bully-boys beat up his tenants when they displeased was the same Flavius Apion who headed Justinian's own bureaucracy." Who watches the watchmen? Reply September 14, 2010 at 12:32 PM Nathanael said in reply to Nathanael... "There never were any such institutions, laws, or rights." I mean in the background of Roman imperial history of course, not "never" universally. Reply September 14, 2010 at 12:44 PM http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 5 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
jcb said... Here's a recipe for this article: 1.Hypostatize, hypostatize, hypostatize. Turn the abstract concept of a state into a historical actor. Make The State an all-knowing, all-seeking, all-encompassing -- and malign! -- force. But . . . 2. Show the unintended unfortunate consequences of State power. The State thinks he's smart, but he really f***s up. Fewer windows to avoid taxes means more disease, etc., etc. 3. Bring together apparently disparate pieces of knowledge -- much of it interesting -and show that they all possess an underlying similarity. Bet you didn't know what naming practices, scientific forestry, windows' taxes, power and "legibility" have in common? The State! 4. Romanticize the traditional, small, natural community of folk wisdom and timeless mores. Standardization = Bad! Forget that members of traditional small communities also sing kumbayas holding hands around bonfires that burn witches, expel strangers, and in general demonstrate a remarkable suspicion of anyone who is not a member of the small clan, tribe, lineage. Forget, too, that anything good coming out of the Enlightenment ("We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . ") consists in setting new standards of common humanity -- sorry, in making a new concept of humanity "legible." 5. Send article to the libertarian Cato Institute, who will publish it. "See! The State wants to make healthcare "legible." And upset the traditional, nurturing doctor-patient relationship!" But . . . 6. Because the Romantic Reaction against power often joins conservative libertarians with radical revolutionaries, include a brief coda in which you acknowledge that "largescale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state," and thereby set up yet another hypostatized entity: Large-Scale Capitalism. LSC is as separate from TS as . . . economics is from politics. I agree with a truncated version of BD's comment that: "Thus when James Scott speaks of local knowledge and local arrangements having the ability to protect the people of civil society from an overmighty, blundering state, I say "perhaps" and I say "sometimes."" But let's leave out the specification: "from an overmighty, blundering state." If I want reheated German metaphysics I will go to the master, Max Weber, who said much the same thing and scrupulously avoided romantic cliches. We do need deeper study of the social and cultural expressions of rationalization. We don't need romanticized myths about the past. Reply September 14, 2010 at 03:08 PM Jed Harris said... Would be nice to have an analysis of "legibility". I don't think it is only or mainly information -- more information can reduce legibility. Legibility seems to be limited largely by our cognitive abilities and the quality of our models. Given weak cognition and models we have to drastically simplify the parts of reality we want to render legible. My guess is that a lot of the problem with legibility are due to the (over)simplification we impose to compensate for our weakness. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 6 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
Conversely that implies that if we could sufficiently empower "readers" we would not have to simplify nearly as much, and the problems due to simplification could be avoided. I'd argue that the reason open source and open content succeed is that "readers" are empowered. Nearly all the history and interaction is visible, and the environment is structured to enhance legibility (through searching and filtering) while giving participants nearly free reign to organize their activities however they want -- up to but not including the destruction or alteration of history. Note that these open domains are very much reflexive "panopticons" -- within them, everyone's behavior is entirely visible to everyone else, and furthermore leaves an indelible record. Such visibility is often portrayed as a source of bleak nightmares, but in fact the participants find it entirely hospitable. I'll refrain from conclusions to avoid foolish optimism. Reply September 14, 2010 at 03:41 PM John said... In short, the state must control the powerful interests or the powerful interests will control the state. At first glance, it seems a recipe ripe for dictatorship of either the monarch or the oligarchs. Fortunately, democracy is quite adept at controlling the state... so long as no one else does. Reply September 14, 2010 at 05:28 PM Ron Calitri said... Very nicely done; and your example quite the antedyne to Scott's essay. I'd only add that the practice of sovereign intervention to relieve increases of inequity obtained by the powerful dates into the 3rd millennium BCE, preceding Justinian bt about 2,700 years. (Khurt, 1995) Reply September 14, 2010 at 07:13 PM Altoid said... It seems to me that most libertarians (and maybe Scott) are confused by European usage of "the state" when talking about our federal government. And in that connection it's interesting that his only American example is an at worst benign, at best life-saving imposition of power by the State of Connecticut that disambiguates locations for ambulances. That in recent decades we may have been developing a more "state"-like national government with similar over-arching claims derives from the pleas of national security more than anything else, and surely we have much more to fear from the Patriot Act than from welfare benefits. In the abstract Scott's point seems pretty clear and not really worthy of the hoopla his book got-- imho "legibility" is more or less a synonym for "abstraction," so governments (primarily those professing ultimate authority on their particular bits of earth) have abstracted the kinds of information they considered useful and used their authority to force these abstractions on locales. The other side to that, as jcb points to, is that locales have their own abstractions imposed by local authority structures. Only some of what happens locally is the volksmund at work; again, the benign example of road and locality names in Connecticut, but why not, say, the Venetian island of Giudecca? Though he may have only thrown in his reference as a sop, other entities clearly do this kind of abstraction and imposition too; oil and gas drillers see land as places to put platforms and hold waste, for example, and use the power of land ownership or
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 7 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
mineral rights to force their abstractions on locales. It's happening right now in the Marcellus shale formation a few miles from me. @jcb, your 3rd point brings to mind James Burke's Connections, and reading Scott's essay I had pretty much the same sense of schoolboy cleverness on show. But in light of work on cadastral surveys, etc, the point seems unexceptionable. What the libertarians want to make of it, though, is something else, and they need to remember that the federal government is declaredly not a successor state of imperial Rome. Reply September 14, 2010 at 09:11 PM John Howard Brown said... A fascinating discussion, well worth developing into something more. Don't quite know what. Reply September 15, 2010 at 07:47 AM aimai said... I feel like I've been out of the loop a long time because I don't really get what's going on in this discussion at all or how Brad's point rebuts Scott's. I've been reading a lot of Roman history recently, the late Republican period specifically, and I don't see "The Roman State" as an entity that lacks "legible" knowledge of its specifically Roman communities. It had quite a bit of knowledge, perhaps dispersed among different kinds of sub state organizations, of its Italian provinces and each client holder had extensive knowledge of his own clients. In the Empire, or the proto-Empire, local knowledge was certainly left in the hands of intermediaries. Tax farmers are a good example of a go between whose specific function was to leave the State free of the duties of collecting taxes directly. There are lots of other States, and States in transition between more and less centralized. How does what Scott argues have anything to do with Egypt under the Pharoes? Or China? or Japan? I guess I'm wondering why Scott focuses on weak, feudal, states instead of strong, centralized, states? I'll go back and read the Scott essay again. Its good to have some fiber in your diet, intellectually, even if it is indigestible. aimai Reply September 15, 2010 at 09:21 AM aimai said... On the subject of places being "legible" and therefore being "controlled" I suppose I should get with the swing of things and say that Cambridge and its environs are popularly supposed to have removed all local signage to prevent the British Troops from being able to find the arms depot at Concord. The lack of good street signs here is, again, popularly attributed to the need to keep outsiders confused. We also, of course, have a street which is named "Lexington Street" when you are in Waltham heading to Lexington and Waltham Street when you are in Lexington headed to Waltham but I think the "solution" to the brain teaser is to grasp that lots of streets have always changed name midway--the longer they are the more likely they are to do so--and that local knowledge includes using that name change to pinpoint locations not to obfuscate them. I'd also like to point out that books like "The Mafia of a Sicilian Village" argued, quite some time ago, that crime and oppression rush in where the state is too weak to enforce law. aimai http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 8 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro…of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
10/21/10 7:53 PM
Reply September 15, 2010 at 09:29 AM Mike said... Perhaps I've misinterpreted, but does Don Boudreaux think the costs of Social Security should be weighed solely against its value in providing us with handy identification numbers? Is he being serious? Reply September 15, 2010 at 03:25 PM Petey said... "I feel like I've been out of the loop a long time because I don't really get what's going on in this discussion at all or how Brad's point rebuts Scott's. I've been reading a lot of Roman history recently, the late Republican period specifically, and I don't see "The Roman State" as an entity that lacks "legible" knowledge of its specifically Roman communities." Well, that's the difference between Julius Caesar's office and Justinian's office... Reply September 15, 2010 at 03:58 PM Comments on this post are closed.
Economics Is not a Morality Play
economics DeLong
Me:
New York Times (blog) - Sep 28, 2010 Brad DeLong catches someone wondering if I am actually advocating war as a solution to our problems. Against stupidity, the gods themselves … ... Related Articles » « Previous Next »
Economists: Juicebox Paul Mafia: Krugman Ezra Klein Mark Thoma Matthew Cowen and Yglesias Tabarrok Spencer Chinn and Ackerman Hamilton Dana Brad Setser Goldstein Dan Froomkin
Moral Philosophers: Hilzoy and Friends Crooked Timber of Humanity Mark Kleiman and Friends Eric Rauchway and Friends John Holbo and Friends
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api…peror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
Page 9 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro‌of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api‌eror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
10/21/10 7:53 PM
Page 10 of 11
James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Ro‌of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others.. - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/james-scott-legibility-flavius-api‌eror-justinian-robin-of-locksley-rebecca-daughter-of-mordecai-king.html
10/21/10 7:53 PM
Page 11 of 11