ON DOGE, The Articulate State, and Witnessing Truth

Alex Aragona from the Curious Task (a podcast that explores "philosophy, politics, economics, and other ideas from a classical liberal perspective") and myself have an hour-long conversation (here) on Serene Khader’s book, Faux Feminism. I doubt her street cred on the political, intersectional Feminist Left can survive the stanning, raving, and fan-boying by us. You might enjoy (after you read today’s Digression).

Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.

These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. The predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Now, Foucault and James C. Scott and their followers have done immensely important work to show that the state’s ability to make populations legible is an instrument of control not just for (let’s stipulate) the oligarchs and political elites in whose favor things are run, but also for the technicians and technocrats who control the instruments of data gathering and classification (and so on), and who can implement and guide policy that presupposes authoritative data and knowledge. And so, more subtly, the statistical revolution — accompanied by the development of ‘social’ sciences — helped cement an alliance, or a mutually supportive relationship, between State and (big) Science. If you want you can trace that back to that great mercantilist, Colbert, in the seventeenth century who also helped organize the French Academy of Science. (But I am confident there are earlier examples.)

But, as many theorists throughout the millennia have recognized, the state’s possession and distribution of (ahh) information played three other often mutually supporting non-trivial roles. (By the way what follows is not a contradiction to the projects of Foucault and Scott.)

First, it is a symbol of sovereignty. (I return to this below.) This is most evidence in the monopoly control over the Mint and coinage. This symbol also had direct financial benefits (through seigniorage, taxation, etc.) to the Crown, of course, but also indirect ones because it made long distance trade possible (which may well be a monopoly or interest of that Crown).

Second, as is well recognized (especially by economists), the provision of information is itself a public good, and may reduce coordination costs and uncertainty immensely and itself allows the development of all kinds of private and other public goods. This is, in part, the flipside of a legible population. As my co-author Nick Cowen and I emphasize, what we call the “machinery of government” creates an “articulate state.” This sounds fancy, but it really involves all kinds of record-keeping of (deeds, births, deaths, property, geography, climate, etc.) that is the quiet background condition for much of our individual and associative agency.

Third, and this is already tugged into features of the first and second roles: the state witnesses truth, and thereby makes a shared lifeworld possible. (Recall the stamp of sovereignty above.) Now, as regular readers know, I have adopted this terminology from the work of the philosopher Tom Pink (who uses it to describe the mission of the Church). Pink, who is an integralist, has some non-trivially different theoretical views than I. But his terminology is quite useful.

Now, as a descriptive fact the modern State is constantly witnessing truth. This is because it has the power and authority to help create and (sometimes) constitute social facts, and sometimes because it is the only instrument that can disseminate any facts or categories that we use to organize our lives on a massive scale at all. Of course, some of this witnessing is highly contested [think about formal sex assignation or citizenship], and in most societies the state doesn’t have a monopoly on witnessing and has rivals or competitors in the Church/churches, the Academy, non-profit Encyclopedias, and even private industry (Google, Bloomberg, etc.).

The previous paragraph hints at the fact that from a normative perspective witnessing truth is a non-trivial matter in a number of complex (and sometimes) interacting ways. Because of the major fault-lines in twentieth century political philosophy, the witnessing truth element in the building blocks of the articulate state have been under-theorized.

In addition, in the processes that I have called witnessing truth and the machinery of government there is never a fixed line of what should be a government monopoly and what can be organized in the non-profit or even profit private sphere. Many contemporary societies have non-trivially different practices (and non-trivially different privacy protections). A digression cannot wish to pontificate on all the normative and practical principles at once.

The last two weeks have seen a number of highly irregular practices develop Stateside since the creation of The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as controlled by Elon Musk, apparently the world’s richest person. DOGE’s own status within the government is highly unorthodox, and its practices thus far, too. There seems to be little regard for conflicts of interests (and a whole range of other concerns one might have).

But DOGE’s actions have immediately impacted the second and third of the functions I have mentioned above. When it comes to the three roles established above, a non trivial number of websites have gone dark, government agencies appear to be closed down, and research halted, and even ended. In addition, some of the public provision of goods and witnessing of truth is being privatized for profit.

So, the second Trump administration is embarking on some dramatic actions that will destabilize existing conventions in and the known workings of the machinery of government and the state’s witnessing of truth. Quite a few of DOGE’s immediate targets are central to both functions (CDC, NSF, NOAA, etc.). To the best of my knowledge no group with such evident oligarchic tendencies has ever embarked on this road before. And whatever their motives — most of these strike me unfortunately as quite craven — I am pretty confident that they have no idea what kind of effects they will generate.

I do want to make one exception for the blanket claim I just made. It’s predictable their actions in the disrupting of the machinery of record and state’s witnessing of truth will reduce social trust and so increase social conflict and coordination costs (and reduce long term growth rate). I suspect that the more politically savvy among them expect to be make a profit of that, too, (as they have done already in the last few decades). Yet, we’re soon entering territory where the cascade effects will be quite unforeseen and uncontrollable and, if copied elsewhere, where the state’s role in shaping our life-worlds and social practices will inevitably be quite different than the pattern of (say) the last hundred years.