Infrastructural Power Revisited

Excerpt

I am naturally delighted that the concept of infrastructural power (IP) has elicited such interest among such a talented group of scholars. In 1983–1984, when I wrote my essay, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” I had two principal goals. The first was to specify the sources of state autonomy from civil society. To that end, I suggested that states provided power relations that were confined within a defined territory, which confined their subjects to that territory, and which derived from a central place. No other major form of power organization did this. Autonomy therefore derived from the social utility of services that were necessarily territorial and centralized—law is the obvious example. Thus, those who controlled the state had the opportunity to exploit their utility to further their own interests: from collective power there derived a measure of distributive power. My second goal was to assess how much power states actually possessed. That led me to distinguish two quite different kinds of power: first, despotic power, the range of actions that the state elite is empowered to make without consultation with civil society groups; and second, infrastructural power, the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and implement its actions across its territories. …