Week 4: Villagization and African socialism: State power and utopian imagination

DVST 6901: The global politics of development (Semester 2, 2026)
August 24, 2026

Left (socialist) and right (bourgeois) ideological visions of modernity are intrinsically utopian and thus necessarily involve an almost willful blindness to practical reality and practical wisdom

Main reading: Scott (1998), intro. and chap. 7; Lal (2015), chap. 4

Other reading: Rist (2014), chap. 8

Modernity and modernization

The idea of modernity is ideological, but it is also part of a language.

• Many people think that history is and should head toward a goal, a perfect society.
• Many people also have learned to talk about societies, both in the past and now, in terms of a linear scale.

What is power?

Dahl (1957) gives the classic definition:

A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.

An illustration (Dahl 1957, 202):

• I stand on a corner and announce, “I command all drivers to drive on the left.” Everyone does. I have no power — they were going to anyway.
• A police officer stands in an intersection where traffic normally goes straight, and directs cars to turn. They turn.

What kind of power were you subject to today? Make a list.

Max Weber, rationality, the state, and modernity

Dahl is channeling a Weberian understanding of power, politics, and the state. The most influential theorist of the contemporary state as a type is Max Weber, for whom it is crucially linked to his idea of modernity.

Weber looks at society from the ground up, in terms of patterns of social action.

What can you do with an army of bureaucrats?

Weber argues that all social forms will gradually become more and more rational over time.

• An institution based on tradition or value-rationality will develop within itself a capacity to administer itself.
• It will develop a bureaucratic organization within itself.
  • A bureaucracy is a system of offices governed by explicit rules, procedures, and policies.
  • Because bureaucracies are rationally planned, the role of individual occupant of an office is merely to do a job, to follow rules.
  • Bureaucracies are powerful. When a body of people can administer their own affairs using a permanent structure of offices, who needs a ruler?

A state is a central bureaucratic authority. It is defined as the organization that has a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” (Weber [1921] 1946, 78).

• As legislator, regulator, and enforcer of the law, the state is an adminstration of administrations.

The “modern” state according to Weber

The state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Weber [1921] 1946, 78).

Governmentality: the population as a thing to be improved

Foucault builds on Weber (Foucault 1991)

A shift from sovereign power — the right to take life, to compel obedience — to governmental power: the state tends a population as if it were a living body with measurable, improvable indicators. Health. Productivity. Fertility. Literacy.

The population becomes an object of knowledge: census, statistics, survey.

Once a population is something to be optimized, intervening in daily life stops looking like domination and starts looking like care.

States are weird

Archaeologists and biological anthropologists think in deep time. Everything is give or take a few thousand years. For them modern has a distinct definition, and only means people who are otherwise indistinguishable from present-day people.

• Anatomically modern humans: roughly 300,000 years ago (300 Kya).
• Behaviorally modern humans (abstract thinking and symbolic communication): The timing of the emergence is debated, but evidence exists for behavioral modernity between 150 Kya and 50 Kya.
• States of any kind: roughly 5,000 years ago.

States cover well under 2% of the human career — and for most of those 5,000 years, most people on earth lived outside the reach of any of them.

Crops were domesticated around 10-11 Kya.

People farmed for roughly four thousand years without producing states. Sedentism does not automatically produce centralized permanent offices. This could all be a blip. It isn’t normal, natural, or inevitable.

The first states

Seeing like a state

Scott’s relationship to this lineage is fluid. The most important thing to know about him is that he is an anarchist. He isn’t married to any strong Foucauldian theory of power or governmentality (and if anything his argument sounds like Weber might sound on a day after an annoying faculty meeting, i.e. we’re all trapped in the iron cage of modern rationality).

Scott (1998) identifies four elements to the failure of state plans to intervene in society:

1. Legibility — state simplification. Maps, cadastres, standardized names, uniform measures.
2. High modernism — a confident, linear, technocratic faith in progress.
3. An authoritarian state willing to use its full power to realize the vision.
4. A prostrate civil society unable to resist.

You can ask of any scheme: What did it have to stop seeing in order to act?

Ujamaa, 1973–1976

Tanzania. Ujamaa — “familyhood.”

Nyerere’s programme: relocate a scattered rural population into planned, nucleated villages. Deliver schools, clinics, water, extension services. Build African socialism on communal production and self-reliance.

Explicitly anticolonial. Explicitly socialist. Explicitly not a foreign donor’s project.

By 1973, persuasion gives way to compulsion. Millions are moved, many by force.

For Scott, this is the case study: scattered settlement was illegible; the grid village was legible; and the plan could not see what it had destroyed — soil knowledge, drought strategies, dispersed planting as insurance.

Activity: Make the case for Nyerere

[AI-generated activity: The AI bot saw what your weekly assignment was, and got really excited about it, saying that it was worthy of extensive discussion. Let’s try it and see… (I edited this a lot after.)]

Before we criticize, let us do the harder thing.

In your groups, build the strongest possible argument in favour of villagization — not a caricature, the real case.

Consider these questions:

• What does a newly independent state owe its rural majority?
• How do you deliver a clinic or a school to people living scattered across a district?
• What does self-reliance require, if you refuse dependence on foreign capital?
• If you wait for unanimous consent, what happens to the people the plan was urgent for?

Activity: You are the district committee, 1974

In groups. You are a district committee. You have to bring a scattered population into a planned village. Voluntary change has been uneven as best and progress is slow.

Sketch, in bullet points, what you think the strategy should be (using ideas from the previous discussion)

1. What’s the goal?
2. In what time frame will this unfold?

Then, sketch, in bullet points:

1. What must you know about every household to do this at all?
2. What powers do you need? What happens when someone refuses?
3. What will you measure to report success upward?

Power is a relationship

Recall Dahl’s classical definition of power, which is him channelling Weber. Foucault’s radical rereading of the idea of an iron cage leads him to reconsider this basic idea, and is his biggest contrast with Weber.

Imagine power as something that people participate in, but no one controls.

• We are all collaborators and we are all bystanders.
• No one decides and there is no cabal of powerful people engaged in a conspiracy.
• The effects of power—domination, inequality, oppression—are byproducts of the relationships in which we are involved.

Appendix