Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The incipient modern state penetrated far more deeply into everyday life
than did the feudal one. For Foucault (1972), the Enlightenment consisted
of a vast, organized, and systematic attempt to calculate similarities and
di
erences among objects, peoples, and places. Foucault stressed that under
the disciplinary logic of modernity, vision became supervision: it lost the
benign status of the detached observer and became a means of enforcement
and surveillance. He (1984:241) argues that subtle social mechanisms of
control—the police, the medical system, education, etc.—produced modern
subjects, extending the power of the omnipotent sovereign to produce sub-
jects who self-monitored their behavior, conforming with the taken-for-
granted notions instilled in them from birth: “A state will be well organized
when a system of policing as tight and e
ff
cient as that of the cities extends
over the entire territory. . . . What was discovered at that time was the idea of
society.”
Like capitalism, many of the antecedents of the nation-state are to be found
in the northern Italian city-states of late medieval era. For example, the Italian
city-states contributed enormously to the institutions that facilitated the rise
of capitalism, including contracts, partnerships, insurance loans, and bills of
exchange (Mann 1986). Italian city-states also pioneered the use of imper-
sonal salaried bureaucrats who served for limited terms. Many Italian city-
states initiated the practice of land surveying and the rationalization of space
that it entailed. The transformation from the city-state of the late medieval era
to the nation-state under early modernity re
ected, then, both an extension of
older social institutions across space as well as the invention of qualitatively
new ones.
Given that cities were loci of innovation, it is worth stressing that from its
inception, capitalism was primarily urban in nature. Indeed, the spatial divi-
sions of labor coming into being during this period ampli
fl
erences
between urban and rural regions. Lefebvre (1991:277) noted the rising
importance of the town in early modernity:
fi
ed the di
ff
Society in the sixteenth century stood at a watershed. Space and time
were urbanized—in other words, the time and space of commodities and
merchants gained the ascendancy, with their measures, accounts, con-
tracts and contractors. Time—the time appropriate to the production of
exchangeable goods, to their transport, delivery and sale, to payment and
to the placing of capital—now served to measure space. But it was space
which regulated time, because the movement of merchandise, of money
and nascent capital, presupposed places of production, boats, and carts
for transport, ports, storehouses, banks and money-brokers. It was now
that the town recognized itself and found its image.
Within cities, the agglomeration economies of the new division of labor facili-
tated interaction among dense, vertically disintegrated groups of artisans,
and contributed to the “synekism” or self-sustaining processes of creativity
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