The Long Way Back to Ourselves

3.2

Bureaucracy: How the State Learned to See

This episode follows how forests and people get turned into administrative categories, centered on anthropologist James Scott's 1998 study Seeing Like a State: German foresters reduced forests to yield tables and replanted them as single-species stands, after which later generations of trees failed. It corrects the assumption that hereditary family names are ancient: you learn Emperor Joseph II required Jewish subjects to adopt fixed German surnames in 1787, since an administration needs a marker that does not change. It also shows China's impersonal civil-service exam only arose under the Sui and Tang dynasties, roughly seven hundred years after the Han scholars credited with it. It argues a registry's coldness toward the individual is the same trait as equal treatment.