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Chapter 7 Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal A Different Kind of State Jess Gilbert Democracy is about the utilization of knowledge. A democratic society is one in which all members are able to develop and express their capacities to the full in the running of that society. One of the tasks of a democratic state is to create the conditions for this. -Wainwright 1993:120 Modernisms and New Deals In Seeing Like a State, agrarian scholar James C. Scott explains "how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed" (the subtitle). "High modernism" is his term for the ideology behind such human disasters as Soviet collectivization and peasant villagization as well as lesser fiascos like the city of Brasilia, rural resettlements, and agricultural modernization. He defines high-modernist ideology as a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied-usually through the state-in every field of human activity. (1998:89-90) High modernists are also extremely and "unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production" (1998:4). Scott argues that this ideology, when joined with an administrative, authoritarian state and a weak 130 Jess Gilbert civil society, led to the large-scale development failures of the twentieth century. He notes that the liberal democracies have tended to resist authoritarian high modernism. Yet he names three U.S. political figures-David Lilienthal, Robert Moses, and Robert McNamaraalong with Saint-Simon, Lenin, Nyerere, and the Shah of Iran, to high modernism's hall of fame (1998:88-90, 101-2).1 Statist social engineering, Scott further claims, is "inherently authoritarian " (1998:93). He criticizes high modernism also for its "radical authority" based on scientific rationality and its disallowance of other bases for judgment. For instance, it denigrates folk knowledge and local cultures. It breaks with history and tradition; the "past is an impediment" to be overcome (1998:95). Myth, religion, and other irrational superstitions are to be transcended. Authoritarianism follows from this stance, Scott asserts: Only the knowledgeable elite-scientific experts separated from the people-ought to rule society, and the ignorant or recalcitrant re-educated. Thus, high modernists usually devalue or banish politics, and they like to create new public authorities for giant development projects (e.g., the Tennessee Valley Authority). It is not surprising that the ideology appeals especially to bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, and planners (1998:93-96). The agrarian New Deal would seem to be a classic case in point: It engaged in typically modernist state actions such as long-range planning of economy and society, the. administration of huge public programs , policy education for the masses, and applied scientific research. Planned and led, in significant part, by expert social scientists (particularly economists) steeped in a Progressive state-building tradition, the New Deal assumed that a larger, administrative state was necessary to manage the modern economy. It used a massive public bureaucracy to plan, implement, and enforce the reduction of farm output in the hope of raising commodity prices; millions of farmers thereby received "benefit payments" if they signed legal contracts with the federal government (the Agricultural Adjustment Administration). The New Deal placed technical experts in every rural county to advise and assist farmers in preventing soil erosion (the Soil Conservation Service ). Moreover, the government acquired millions of acres of settled but "submarginal land" (scientifically determined), then uprooted and resettled thousands of the poor farm families elsewhere, usually into new houses of a strikingly modernist design, and occasionally into entirely new rural communities (the Resettlement Administration). Late in the New Deal, political and technical elites at the federal and state levels established land-use planning as a priority. Local farmer committees , together with scientists and administrators, were to coordinate these and other new federal programs. This mechanism, in theory, Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal 131 would create a national plan for agriculture (the Bureau of Agricultural Economics' land-use planning program). This all smacks of "social engineering" deep within the New Deal Department ofAgriculture (USDA). Such considerations lead Scott to conclude that the intellectual leaders of USDA were high modernists. Indeed, Henry A. Wallace and M...

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