The State in the Field: Official Knowledge and Truant Practices

Abstract

ONE OF THE MORE HOPELESS TARGETS of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian zeal was the confusion prevailed in eighteenth-century England. It is to be regretted, he wrote in his Principles of Penal Law, that the proper names of individuals are upon so irregular footing. Those distinctions, invented in the infancy of society to provide for the wants of hamlet, only imperfectly accomplish their object in great nation.1 His remedy was to propose a new nomenclature ... so arranged, that, in whole nation, every individual should have proper name, which should belong to him alone. Bentham recognized it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to impose such rationalized system of uniquely proper names on England. Still, he recommended it to new states, offered them standardized three-part nominal system (in which he incorporated an anticipation of the ID number), and even speculated on the advantages of adopting the common custom among English sailors, of printing their family and christian names upon their wrists, in well-formed and indelible characters.2 In other words, Bentham wanted us to tattoo our names on our bodies as the ultimate identity card, ensuring we would never leave home without it. If no great nations or new states have in fact adopted such scrupulous system, it may not be for want of motive or effort, and indeed some have come pretty close, as James C. Scott explains in his deeply absorbing and imaginative new book, Seeing Like State: How Certain Schemnes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. For some two hundred years after the revolution, for example, the French state limited its citizens' choices of officially recognized names and made it extraordinarily difficult for people to change their names once registered.3 Similar systems have prevailed in many German states since the nineteenth century. In SachsenWeimar, for example, the tidy official mind took first step in the Benthamite direction in 1876 by declaring no one could be registered with the same name as anyone else in the district-a rule might well impugn local family naming