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The imaginary state: Paperwork and ...

Kafka, Benjamin.

The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx).

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx).
Author:	Kafka, Benjamin.
Description:	259 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Keith Michael Baker.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-09, Section: A, page: 3527.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-09A.
Subject:	History, European.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3145547
ISBN:	0496044982

The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx).
Kafka, Benjamin.

The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx). - 259 p.

Adviser: Keith Michael Baker.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2004.

Critiques of the state have tended to invoke two apparently contradictory master narratives. On the one hand, there has been the story of the state's increasing power over people and things as it perfected its methods of administration, communication, mobilization, and surveillance. On the other hand, there has been the story of the unfailing incompetence of public officials in the face of the massive proliferation of documents and details required to govern the modern nation-state. Occasionally these two narratives have even coexisted in the same discourses, with Weberian ideal types stumbling over Balzacian stereotypes. Over the last decade or so, however, this opposition has begun to be deconstructed by scholars from various disciplines engaged in a more rigorous examination of the writing practices on which the state relies. This dissertation situates itself alongside these works. Its organizing concept is the "culture of paperwork:" the ensemble of material, semiotic, and ideological conditions of state-sponsored document production, reproduction, and exchange. This dissertation demonstrates that the French Revolution created a new culture of paperwork based on the belief that paperwork could serve as an instrument of political accountability and formal equality. But this new culture of paperwork was structured around a fundamental contradiction. As handwritten documents proliferated, so did a bewildering variety of material and semiotic errors. Paperwork, the condition of possibility of the liberal, equitable, and effective exercise of state power, sporadically, spontaneously rendered the state illiberal, inequitable, and ineffective. The first part of the dissertation combines political history, media history, and microhistory to examine the causes and effects of this contradiction. The second part of the dissertation describes how post-revolutionary political thinkers, including Balzac, Tocqueville, and Marx, struggled to come to terms with it, ultimately seizing on the idea of "bureaucracy." Modern political thought, I argue, was both founded and confounded by its encounters with paperwork.

ISBN: 0496044982Subjects--Topical Terms:

212425
History, European.

The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx).
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245 1 4 $a The imaginary state: Paperwork and political thought in France, 1789--1860 (Honore de Balzac, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx).
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2004.
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