330 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
What follows is rather crude and provisional, but it will serve as a point of depar-
ture. High-modernist ideologies embody a doctrinal preference for certain social
arrangements. Authoritarian high-modernist states, on the other hand, take the
next step. They attempt, and often succeed, in imposing those preferences on their
population. Most of the preferences can be deduced from the criteria of legibility,
appropriation and centralization of control. To the degree that the institutional
arrangements can be readily monitored and directed from the centre and can be eas-
ily taxed (in the broadest sense of taxation), then they are likely to be promoted. The
implicit goals behind these comparisons are not unlike the goals of premodern state-
craft.^81 Legibility, after all, is a prerequisite of appropriation as well as of authoritarian
transformation. The difference, and it is a crucial one, lies in the wholly new scale
of ambition and intervention entertained by high modernism.
The principles of standardization, central control and synoptic legibility to the
centre could be applied to many other fields; those noted in the accompanying
table are only suggestive. If we were to apply them to education, for example, the
most illegible educational system would be completely informal, nonstandardized
instruction determined entirely by local mutuality. The most legible educational
system would resemble Hippolyte Taine’s description of French education in the
19th century, when ‘the Minister of Education could pride himself, just by looking
at his watch, which page of Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at
that exact moment’.^82 A more exhaustive table would replace the dichotomies with
more elaborate continua (open commons landholding, for example, is less legible
and taxable than closed commons landholding, which in turn is less legible than
private freeholding, which is less legible than state ownership). It is no coincidence
that the more legible or appropriable form can more readily be converted into a
source of rent – either as private property or as the monopoly rent of the state.
The Limits of Authoritarian High Modernism
When are high-modernist arrangements likely to work and when are they likely to
fail? The abject performance of Soviet agriculture as an efficient producer of food-
stuffs was, in retrospect, ‘overdetermined’ by many causes having little to do with
high modernism per se: the radically mistaken biological theories of Trofim
Lysenko, Stalin’s obsessions, conscription during World War II and the weather.
And it is apparent that centralized high-modernist solutions can be the most effi-
cient, equitable and satisfactory for many tasks. Space exploration, the planning of
transportation networks, flood control, airplane manufacturing and other endeav-
ours may require huge organizations minutely coordinated by a few experts. The
control of epidemics or of pollution requires a centre staffed by experts receiving
and digesting standard information from hundreds of reporting units.
On the other hand, these methods seem singularly maladroit at such tasks as
putting a really good meal on the table or performing surgery. This issue is addressed