DESPOTIC VS. INFRASTRUCTURAL REGIMES OF POWER

Why are ghettos policed, not destroyed? Thinkers such as Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Michael Mann, and Charles Tilly offer some tentative answers.^[24] In the pre-modern period, sovereigns used intense but sporadic violence against internal rebels, believing that a few dramatic punitive acts would keep others in line. Modern states, conversely, cut back on the intensity of methods, shifting to smoother but more comprehensive regimes of control. Although the modern state's ability to

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shape society has increased enormously, the sheer deadliness of domestic state coercion has declined.^[25] Scholars offer different interpretations of this trend, but historical sociologist Michael Mann's distinction between despotic and infrastructural power seems particularly useful. Mann writes that pre-modern despots could do as they wished with their victims, but they had less access to powerful technologies of control over society at large.^[26] Modern "infrastructural" states, by contrast, can penetrate society and implement their policies more widely, but are also obliged to operate within certain recognized moral and legal limits. Modern states, Mann notes, cannot "brazenly kill or expropriate their [internal] enemies" without exciting intense opposition, and they cannot change fundamental rules of state behavior at will.^[27] As infrastructural power grows, in other words, despotic power declines. Social theorist Anthony Giddens views this as an increase in the "scope" of state power at the expense of intensity, while French social philosopher Michel Foucault writes of transitions from "punishment" to "discipline."^[28]

What prompted this shift? Some argue it stems from the material interests of capitalists seeking predictable, routinized, and low-key methods of rule to promote trade, while others suggest it stemmed from shifts in the balance of state-society power. As rulers demanded greater loyalty, taxes, and military service from their citizens, the latter discovered they could successfully press sovereigns to modify their ways. Still a third group believes that state elites initiated the shift themselves to rationalize and improve techniques of mass control. Regardless of the precise explanation, most agree that an important change in state-society relations took place during the move from pre-modern to modern European statehood, forcing states to become increasingly bound by rules they themselves created.

Infrastructural power relies on centralized control over the means of violence. In states with low infrastructural capacities, the means of coercion are broadly dispersed through the population, but when sovereigns successfully concentrate the means of violence, infrastructural power rises. Ironically, however, centralized coercion does not grant states unlimited powers, but is rather associated with rules, regulations, and norms limiting the state's methods against the now defenseless citizenry. Under infrastructural regimes of power, weaponless citizens are to be policed, not destroyed. Clearly, any notion that modern infrastructural power invariably limits state repression is wrong, since some states with high infrastructural power massacre their own populations. As the examples of Nazi Germany and Rwanda demonstrate, powerful state

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apparatuses can be used to commit genocide against their own citizens.^[29]Yet broadly speaking, the more securely the state dominates society, the more incentives it faces to reduce its reliance on despotic methods.

This trend is illustrated by the Soviet experience, where Stalin's tyranny was eventually replaced with a smoother system of control. Post-Stalinist "socialist legality," one observer writes, "was not wholly without content when it came to restraining regime behavior," since Soviet internal security forces often went to "extraordinary lengths … to pretend—sometimes it seems almost to themselves—that the rules [were] being followed."^[30] As theorists of the modern state might anticipate, increased Soviet infrastructural control eventually limited its resort to despotic methods. Like other high-capacity states, the post-Stalinist Soviet Union adopted a more encompassing, but less spectacularly brutal, regime of social control. Importantly, this suggests that states will be reluctant to openly flout laws they themselves have created. Nevertheless, it seems clear that some institutional settings are more conducive to one type of regime over another. Densely institutionalized settings such as ghettos are areas of high infrastructural power, explaining the state's reliance on police-style or infrastructural methods. Weakly institutionalized arenas such as frontiers, conversely, are subject to lower levels of infrastructural strength, leading to more despotic regimes of power.

Most of us would probably prefer to face infrastructural rather than despotic state power, just as ghetto ethnic policing seems preferable to frontier-style cleansing. Still, it would be wrong to regard the shift from despotism to infrastructural regimes of violence as an unproblematic improvement, a point often made by those skeptical of modernization's benefits. As Foucault persuasively argues, pervasive modern disciplinary techniques can be more invasive than occasional acts of kingly punishment.^[31] Despotism is explicit, dramatic, and awful but is often irregular and fleeting. Infrastructural power is less blatant, by contrast, but often penetrates social life to a much greater extent. Policing, moreover, excites less broad condemnation, as Palestinians have discovered.