In this period you have processes such as the creation of a national narrative, a heroic story (often involving, among other things, gathering around a charismatic leader, inventing a semi-mythic past, and sometimes killing off some poor minority that happens to stand in the way and offer a convenient common enemy and/or scapegoat for mounting social and economic problems), spreading literacy, homogenizing language and scrapping local identities, instituting market laws and standardized court systems, getting rid of large parts of corporal punishment, gradually increasing the emotional and economic enfranchisement of larger groups into the state (vote for bourgeois men as well as conscription into the armies), i.e. turning people into “citizens”. And, of course, there is schooling: turning kids into pupils and pupils into citizens. “Everyone” learns to read and write.
Classical social anthropologists of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, have noted there was an inherent link between the growth of 19th century nationalism and the requirements of the capitalist-industrialist economy, and they are probably right.
From these nation-building efforts, another great modern sociological force is awakened. When citizens begin to read, gather in smaller spaces, communicate more easily, and have more in common in terms of interests and sorrows, a “civil sphere” is born.
People download a whole mental world of “ongoing events” fitting within a greater story, shared largely by any random person you meet on the street. Memes (ideas and cultural patterns) spread more easily. Strangers become oddly acquainted by means of a new world of abstractions: What is the time, what is this address, what is your nationality?—and later: What is your passport, your personal identity number? The French Marxist theorist Althusser has argued that an “ideological state apparatus” comes online, one that appeals to each person as a citizen, which thereby “creates” the citizen, the subject of a state.
And with the nation state and the civil sphere, “the individual” can be born since our “selves” no longer remain as intimately tied up with our clan, our family, our land. People start identifying with their nationalities, their class, their ideas, their professions and intimate relationships—a betrayal of all identities of old, but an expansion of our overall freedom to find our own paths, and, in some ways, an expansion of our circle of solidarity. We now care about people we’ve never met, given we share the same nationality.
But the birth of a nation is a dangerous affair. You grab thousands—no, millions—of people’s attention for years; mold and discipline their minds: they become school teachers, doctors, professors, engineers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, scientists, military officers. Then you direct the awesome power that emerges as all of these specialists collaborate. Before you know it, you are capable of sending manned expeditions to the moon and taking pictures from within the rings of Saturn.
It’s true, the Chinese had been educating mandarins—the culturally refined and meritocratically organized administrative class of the empire—for millennia. Medieval Europe had monasteries with monks, nuns and scribes, and some corresponding structures had appeared in the Arab empires and India. But this was different. The extent of differentiation and specificity of the modern professions were staggering. And then all of these people, competencies, forms of knowledge, forms of control, were unleashed—upon nature, yes, but even more so, upon the human soul: working, molding, transforming, transmuting, controlling, steering; all stimulating new shared patterns of thinking, sensing, feeling and behaving.
The birth of a nation is dangerous business because of the great powers unleashed when an emergent pattern coordinates millions of people’s time and attention. What will this power do? In what image will it shape humanity? What will it do to nature and the environment? What ethics will restrain it? Who will control the controller? Wonders arise and abound: the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the World Fair. And when this power turns to murder and oppression, there is horror unbound: colonial oppression, the Belgian Congo, mechanized warfare, eventually Gulag. And because there is a civil sphere, it can be manipulated by relatively small groups or even a single person—for noble purposes or wicked ones.
There are any number of candidates for the lead roles in this story of the nation state, but I would like to specifically mention two. The first is Napoleon Bonaparte. It is true, of course, that Napoleon became the dictator of France and was crowned emperor, even marrying a Habsburg princess, in effect betraying the ideals of the French Revolution he claimed to serve. But if you look at his political regime: citizen enfranchisement, nationalism, standardization, rationalization, homogenization, the modern legal system (called Code Napoleon )—this is certainly a herald of, and model for, the modern nation state. The philosopher Hegel noted that Germany should follow suit. And Germany did.
The second protagonist is the public school. That many, then most, then all people go to public schools, is a development so radical and pervasive that it really has no counterpart in history. Not only is basic literacy spread to everyone—from the piano playing mansion girl to the drunk, train hopping hobo looking for work—but the nation state begins to mold the breed, in the role of pupils, into its mental framework. Millions of people taught and taught, and disciplined and manipulated for years on end. This even includes physical education for military purposes and public health. The democratic states legitimize their control over years of children’s lives in terms of civic virtues the children are thought to acquire: reasoning, independence, a sense of equality, responsibility, self-discipline. All of this works in tandem with the stimulation of science and engineering. Armies of school teachers are raised and in turn taught to respect the authorities of universities within natural sciences and humanities. The public school transformed humanity in the image of the nation state.
But of course, there are other contenders for the protagonist role of the nation state. The police is one. Police forces emerged in France and England—first in 1667 in Paris, when law enforcement was centralized under Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy.
But criminological historians generally draw a line at the so-called Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 in London. At this moment the police was given a lot of its present shape. The originator of the reform, Sir Robert Peel, explicitly relied upon the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who also suggested the panopticon model of criminal justice: a prison where all cells are open to surveillance from a central tower with shaded windows.
The army redcoats were redressed in blue and armed with batons rather than rifles so as not to cause confusion among the unruly workers. With this kind of organized, centralized monopoly of violence, targeting not foreign powers, but the delinquents and rioters of the population itself, you have a new kind of state formation. This model is then exported across the world until more or less all countries have police forces—today sometimes larger than the regular army.
But who were the police officers expected to discipline? The workers, of course—another contending protagonist in the history of the nation state. Workers. There were so many of them, crammed into such narrow spaces, under such strong pressures and strains, during such chaotic and dramatic upheavals, with such high-stake games and so many temptations.
The police show up in tandem with the industrial proletariat. To this day, all over the world, our criminal justice systems and policing target the lower classes of society. It is also the children of this segment who were first given basic education on a mass scale, before the peasants, which turned urbanized workers into citizens before the rural peasantry.
The bourgeois class existed already in the early modern period. But it was only with industrial capitalism that the proletariat emerged in full. Historians have perhaps insufficiently
emphasized the intimate connection between the industrial worker and the nation state.
Napoleon and schools—or perhaps the police and the proletariat, played the major roles. The nation state is an emergent pattern of governance, of human self-organization, of the management of complexity.
The central insight here is that the sheer volume of political power increases. People begin to be freed from their immediate social surroundings (your extended family and vocation) and to be integrated instead in a more abstract common social reality: the nation state. Your individuation as a unique person is married, as it were, to your integration into a nation. (I will return to the issue of (in-)dividuation and integration towards the end of this chapter.)
When the individual “becomes” something more than her social role in the family or the village, she gains a kind of individual identity. And thus her “soul” can be conquered, tamed, seduced, manipulated in new and more profound ways. Napoleon’s words echo through this period:
“A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.”
In other words: You no longer buy power with mercenaries, because power lies in the minute control of the soul. The greatest power—the greatest force of birth, creation and destruction—lies beyond the early capitalist structures, beyond the human agency coordinated by money.
The individual’s innermost thoughts and dreams can be aligned with a more abstracted social order of things, her longing and lust and search for immortality can be tied to the nation, its victories, tragedies and progress. Again, there it is: the increasing intimacy of control.
Who, then, will control the mechanisms and institutions that awaken and shape these powers, and for what purposes? The history of the 20th century, and its great wars, seem to revolve around this very question.
3. The Welfare State
In the 20th century this tendency towards greater intimacy of control takes on yet another level of magnitude. With the emergence of the welfare state, built “on top of” the nation state, forms of coordination and control that hitherto had been unimaginable become reality.
The strangest part is perhaps that the dramatic expansion of the state’s control mechanisms happens so effortlessly, so inconspicuously. Nobody notices, really; it just sneaks up in the most self-evident manner. And it changes everything.
Early signs of a welfare state show up already in Bismarck’s Germany, beginning in the 1880s. Even if some sprouts are visible already in the 1840s in Prussia, it is only with Bismarck’s united Germany that redistribution of wealth is quite deliberately used as a means to increase the enfranchisement of citizens into the state project (and, as many have noted, to curb socialist movements and reduce the threat of revolution). [29]
The manner in which I here consider the welfare state is not only a matter of redistribution of wealth. It is rather, and primarily, a whole world of interrelated mechanisms of controlling and coordinating people’s bodies, minds, personalities and behaviors.
At a very basic level, we see how the social expenditures of states went up, especially after the Second World War. In the US, for instance, income taxes went up dramatically from 1935 (14.6%) to 1940 (40.7%), due to the war effort. After the war taxes stayed at that level, even slowly increasing (by 2015 it was 46.5%). [30]
What you see here is a vast expansion of the capacity of the state to collect taxes in an orderly fashion over longer periods of time—earlier forms of states had simply not permeated the economic life of society to any comparable extent. Also, the economies were much larger, so the de facto revenues were increased by powers of ten. What, then, is this increased revenue used for?
Enter the minions of the welfare state: social workers, psychologists, sociologists, statisticians, public health officials, urban planners, more doctors and nurses and assistant nurses, dentists, accountants, economists, political scientists, public relations experts, employment counselors, more teachers, liberal professors—and, of course, administrators, administrators, administrators. An endless onslaught of highly educated people—professionals—monitoring and controlling increasingly complex and intimate parts of human interactions.
It is difficult to overestimate the scope and force of this transformation. These highly specialized people develop innumerable competencies in everyday life: how to measure us, how to avoid conflict, how to nudge us in different directions, how to steer conversations, how to elicit replies from us.
The sociologists Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose made a name for themselves by studying these many minute and subtle techniques social workers, counselors and accountants use to govern society. Without these many micro-techniques of control, the state we know today could hardly exist.
Miller and Rose noted, quite clearly, that the modern state apparatus relies entirely upon this massive, ongoing everyday activity. They also note these activities often underpin the existing economic and social power structures in society, in everything from social work to accounting. [31] Being leftwing sociologists, Miller and Rose naturally worry this intricate web of control may have become too influenced by “neoliberal” market logics of present-day capitalism. This political stance aside, Miller and Rose still touch upon something crucial: the enormous amount of coordinating and controlling “micro actions” people perform every minute of the hour, every day.
This is, unsurprisingly, also what I have found in my earlier ethnographic studies of the police. Sitting in the backseat while the police patrolled the inner city, I noticed any number of subtle strategies of control. Similar findings are present in other police ethnographers like Loïc Wacquant, Abby Peterson and William Ker Muir. The security and social services serve us, but they also control us. Serving one person often means controlling another’s behavior.
Welfare and control, to a large extent, go hand-in-hand. They are two sides of the same coin. Think about it. In Sweden today, this “free” society, the state keeps almost everyone in school for twelve years, gets involved with broken families, brokers toxic marital relations, teaches us about safe sex, sexuality and gender equality, peers into the very cavities of our bodies: the mouth, the vagina, feeling through our breasts for cancerous lumps, recommends us what to eat, funds our smaller newspapers, supports us in getting our lazy buts to the gym, treats our madness—if necessary, force-feeding the non-compliant patient with drugs and liquid nourishment. Is this level of control not approaching what George Orwell imagined in his novel, 1984 ?
And yet—strangely—the people of Sweden (and other welfare states) hardly seem to mind. Sure, there are a few frustrations and scoffs at exaggerations here and there, but by and large, people appear to feel relatively free, not oppressed nor violated.
Even if the Nordic countries offer a prime example, the growth of the welfare state is not isolated to these. The Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen famously described the “three worlds of welfare capitalism” in his 1990 book with the same title, noting there are different systems: the social democratic (Nordic countries), the conservative (Germany, Japan) and the liberal (the US). Other taxonomies have been proposed, but they tend to largely overlap with Esping-Andersen’s. Even if the welfare systems are different and their levels of pervasiveness vary, the overall pattern holds across the developed world: the rise of the welfare state, and with it, a great leap in the level of intimacy of control.
Never before have societies controlled the bodies and souls of their populations to a comparable degree. Never before have abstract patterns of power encroached this much on everyday life: minds molded with cognitive behavioral therapy and drugs, bodies shaped with health campaigns and changed with surgery, relations affected with counseling, brokering and advice. What a strange matter of affairs!
But it doesn’t have to be oppressive. For the most part it isn’t. Rather, what we see is a steady expansion of social rights or positive freedoms . Social rights are, in opposition to negative freedoms, the services people can expect from society. Negative freedoms have to do with what you can expect people not to do: imprison you, stop you from going about your business, stop you from expressing an opinion, harm your body. These are human rights or civil liberties expressed negatively, by what people must not do. Positive freedoms deal with the things people are legally bound to give you, if you ask: basic education, healthcare, a subsistence minimum. Not then the “freedom from ”, but rather, the “freedom to ” (as many theorists of social rights, e.g. Erich Fromm, Sir Isaiah Berlin have noted).
There will always be a tension between the positive freedoms and the negative ones. If you, for instance, use the forced labor of one person to give someone else a basic subsistence, it would obviously mean you have sold out basic human rights. Hence, many libertarians and conservatives have argued, we would do best to scrap the idea of social rights altogether. Furthermore—so the argument goes—too many social rights can lead to unrealistic expectations and foster a population of spoiled brats, unwilling to and incapable of taking responsibility, lacking any industriousness and resourcefulness.
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