James C. Scott: Pathologies of the Institutional Life.

 We live most of our lives in institutions: from the family to the school, to the army, to the business enterprise. These institutions to some considerable degree shape our expectations, our personalities, and our routines. Recognizing that these institutions are varied and that they are not static, can we nevertheless say something about the aggregate effects of such institutions in shaping us?

I believe we can, in a rough-and-ready way. The first thing to notice is that since the Industrial Revolution and headlong urbanization, a vastly increasing share of the population has become propertyless and dependent on large, hierarchical organizations for their livelihood. The household economy of the small farmer-peasant or shopkeepers may have been just as poverty-stricken and insecure as that of the proletarian. It was, however, decidedly less subject to the quotidian, direct discipline of managers, bosses, and foremen. Even the tenant farmer, subject to the caprice of his landlord, or the smallholder, deeply in debt to the bank or moneylenders, was in control of his working day: when to plant, how to cultivate, when to harvest and sell, and so forth. Compare this to the factory worker tied to the clock from 8 a.m. To 5 p.m., tied to the rhythm of the machine, and closely monitored personally and electronically. Even in the service industries the pace, regulation, and monitoring of work are far beyond what the independent shopkeeper experienced in terms of minute supervision.

The second thing to notice is that these institutions are, with very few exceptions, profoundly hierarchical and, typically, authoritarian. Training, one might say, in the habits of hierarchy begins, in both agrarian and industrial societies, with the patriarchal family. While family structures in which children, women, and servants are treated virtually as chattel have become less authoritarian, the partiarchal family still thrives and could not exactly be called training ground for autonomy and indenpence, except perhaps for the male head of the household. The patriarchal family historically was rather a training in servitude for most of its members and a training ground for authoritarianism for its male heads of household and its sons-in-training. When the experience of servitude within the family is reinforced by an adult working life lived largely in authoritarian settings that further abridge the workers' autonomy and independence, the consequences for the GHP [Gross Human Product] are melancholy.

The implications of a life lived largely in subservience for the quality of citizenship in a democracy are also ominous. Is it reasonable to expect someone whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has acquired the habits of survival and self-preservation in such settings to suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking, risk-taking model of individual sovereignty? How does one move directly from what is often a dictatorship at work to the democratic citizenship in the civic sphere? Authoritarian settings do, of course, shape personalities in profound ways. Stanley Milgram famously found that most subjects would administer what they imagined were severe, even life-threatening electric shocks to experimental subjects when directed by authorities in white coats to do so. And Philip Zimbardo found that subjects assigned to role-play prison guards in a psychology experiment were so quick to abuse this power that the experiment had to be aborted before more harm was done.

More generally, political philosophers as varied as Étienne de La Boétie and Jean-Jacques Rosseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subject learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgement and moral direction.

Under the most severe forms of “institutionalization” (the term is itself diagnostic), such as prisons, asylums for the mentally ill, orphanages, workhouses for the poor, concentration camps, and old-age homes, there arises a personality disorder sometimes called “institutional neurosis.” It is a direct result of long-term institutionalization itself. Those suffering from it are apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in the surroundings, make no plans, and lack spontaneity. Because they are cooperative and give no trouble, such institutional subjects may be seen by those in charge in a favorable light, as they adapt well to institutional routines. In the severest cases they may become childish and affect a characteristic posture or gait (in the Nazi concentration camps, such prisoners, near death from privation, were called by other prisoners “Musselmänner”) and become withdrawn and inaccesible. These are institutional effects produced by the loss of contact with the outside world, the loss of friends and possessions, and the nature of the staff's power over them.

The question I want to pose is this: Are the authoritarian and hierarchical characteristics of most contemporary lifeworld institutions – the family, the school, the factory, the office, the worksite – such that they produce a mild form of institutional neurosis? At one end of an institutional continuum one can place the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy and initiative of their subjects. At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy composed of independent, self-reliant, self-respecting, landowning farmers, managers of their own small enterprises, answerable to themselves, free of debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for servility or deference. Such free-standing farmers, Jefferson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and indpendent public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies: a relatively open public sphere but a quotidian institutional experience that is largely at cross purposes with the implicit assumptions of the public sphere and encouraging and often rewarding caution, deference, servility, and conformity. Does this engender a form of institutional neurosis that saps the vitality of civic dialogue? And, more broadly, do the cumulative effects of the life within the patriarchal family, the state, and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists.

If it does, then an urgent task of public policy is to foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry. How is it possible to adjust the institutional lifeworld of citizens so that it becomes more in keeping with the capacity for democratic citizenship?

The text is an excerpt from James C. Scott's "Two Cheers for Anarchism", Princeton Univerity Press (2012), p. 76-80.