Discovered by economists and political scientists in the 1990s, the notion of “governance” has had a surprising career. Despite its rather arbitrary definition, it was used to scrutinize the performance of companies, administrations, and eventually any kind of institutional arrangement. The concept’s fuzziness itself seemed useful since it allowed focus on processes and structures alike. Focusing on “governance” makes it possible to highlight the ways in which legislation, culture, discourse, society, or traditions frame and shape institutions. It also tacitly turns away from approaches that center on the personal skills of managers, rulers, or commanders. The concept’s popularity is also built on its capacity to assess and weigh everything in the light of ultimately just one single factor, which is success.
Both qualities, its fuzziness and its broad applicability, are a legacy of antiquity. Literally, the Greek term kybernáo and the Latin gubernare signify “to steer a ship.” As a metaphor, it set the pilot’s navigation skills against the background of rough waters. But since the safe arrival of the ship never depends on the pilot’s skills alone, the metaphor also reminds us to take other factors into account, like the crew’s training and order, the ship’s construction and condition, and, not least, the available resources: the charts, navigational instruments, and knowledge aboard.
This article aims to trace the roles historically ascribed to information within concepts and practices of governance through a focus on examples from Western and Chinese history. Its two main concepts, information and governance, are fuzzy, and the objects and ideas they refer to have undergone many transformations in the course of history. The path chosen here is to select a set of typical constellations between information on the one hand and tasks of governance on the other. This opens up the opportunity to discuss different theoretical and scholarly approaches along the way.
With interesting parallels to the Western classical tradition, the Chinese character of si, literally “to direct,” “to have charge of,” or “to manage,” was used for a range of official titles during the period of the Western Zhou, a ruling dynasty in ancient China (ca. 1045–771 BCE). In these times ideals of governance derived, at least in part, from the necessity of justifying a new ruler. The “Mandate of Heaven,” for example, was instrumental for the Zhou kings in order to counter the rule of the competing Shang dynasty. It remained a justification for several dynasties of Chinese emperors until the twentieth century and depended almost exclusively on the conception of a dynasty’s “generally good character” and its success in governing the land and its people.
In European history information and knowledge are often seen as the true basis of good and effective government. Cicero (106–43 BCE), in De Re Publica (On the commonwealth), argued that “as the farmer knows agriculture, and the scribe knows penmanship, and both seek in their respective sciences, not mere amusement only, but practical utility; so our statesmen should be familiar with the science of jurisprudence and legislation, even in their profoundest principles. But he should not embarrass himself in debating, arguing, and lecturing and scribbling. He should rather employ himself in the actual administration of government, as skillful superintendent, and become a farmer of the revenue, so as to make the state as flourishing as possible by a wholesome political economy.”
Information was also crucial for government in the thinking of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English scholar and politician best known for embracing empiricism as a means to reform natural philosophy. While Bacon never developed a theory of government, he clearly favored quantification on the one hand and administration on the other in his Essays: “the greatness of an estate, in bulk or territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters, and the number of cities and towns by charts and maps.” Bacon’s views on governance and information were subtle and complex. He warned the reader not to take such numbers at face value, and he gave a more nuanced advice in practice. Serving as attorney general and later as Lord Chancellor of England until 1621, he had considerable influence over King James I as well as over his favorite George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham. In 1616, Bacon wrote a “Letter of Advice” to Villiers instructing the “new-risen star” at court and intimate friend of James I about the ways of government, in which he now took a leading role as “the Favourite of the time.” The duke should use his outstanding social position to influence the royal government not in the fashion of secretively whispering to “him in the ear and say[ing] nothing,” but methodically in observing the rules of government. First, every procedure of importance should be put in writing. Second, petitions should be sorted, answers prepared, and the secretary instructed to keep the papers in order, for example, in underlining matters of concern. Third, this procedure should be performed by only a few chosen persons, among whom duties of preparing petitions should be divided. The division of labor should guarantee, as Bacon explains in his fourth point, an objective handling of the papers. And fifth, to “return answers to petitions of all natures as an oracle.” Such a genealogy of governmental knowledge, reaching from the Roman Republic to modern empiricism, fits well into the history of the modern state. Yet it obscures the fact that knowledge and information were not only scarce in political practice but also of little interest to the art of government from ancient times until the modern era.
Medieval and *early modern scholarly treatises on the art of government were mainly addressed and dedicated to monarchs. They focused on the ruler’s personal ability to provide justice and to form decisions guided by values and faith. Authors praised wisdom (sapientia) and prudence (prudentia), education, some personal experience, and, above all, the ability to surround oneself with the right advisers, in brief: everything that was thought to lead to a reliable and good decision. It might come as a surprise to the modern reader that this did not include acquiring as much knowledge as possible or accumulating empirical information. For example, in the Middle Ages mirrors of princes (a *genre of political advice literature) often remarked only that the knowledgeable prince was supposed to possess elementary genealogical and geographical information.
In a different but not completely dissimilar manner, Chinese thinkers were often far from envisioning that a ruler should acquire much knowledge and information about the state of his realm. Indeed, Sinologists have stressed the importance of a Daoist concept called wu wei, literally meaning “without exertion,” which was supposed to make the art of statecraft look like “effortless action.” The Chinese statesman and philosopher Shen Buhai stated in the fourth century BCE that a good ruler should rely on his ministers and not exert himself in trying to learn everything about his subjects. Rather he should “refrain from taking the initiative, and from making himself conspicuous—and therefore vulnerable—by taking any overt action” (Creel, 66–67).
The Chinese art of governing was thus based on a seemingly uninformed ruler who depended on able ministers and administrators. At the same time the emperor could resort to his mandate from heaven, which made him immune to criticism in managing everyday affairs of his government. According to the Confucian scholar Mencius (ca. 370–ca. 290 BCE) this ideology of governance was founded on a moral basis and entailed commitments to the people in order to secure their livelihood and their support for the government. Thus good governance in the land depended not on short-term administrative successes to sustain the livelihood of the people, but ultimately on the wisdom of the emperor and his ability to maintain the social order as an equilibrium within the limited technologies of rule available.
This lack of interest in a theoretically elaborated concept of governmental knowledge and information is easier to understand in the light of two long-term developments that we overlook when we focus just on a few peaks of thinking marked by Cicero and Bacon, or on the scholarly art of government. The first is a semantic one: alongside sensory metaphors in China and later in Europe, new terms for knowledge did not arise before the late Middle Ages, among them “information” in a modern occidental sense. The second is practical: secular and ecclesiastical administration grew dramatically starting in the late Middle Ages, based in no small measure on the availability of cheaper writing materials with the introduction of paper. Both of these phenomena are highly relevant.
The topical use of visual and auditory metaphors in relation to governance dates back at least to the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), which first ruled the whole of China. Han Fei (ca. 280–233 BCE), whose works were popular during the rule of the Qin emperor, wrote “because the ruler sees with the eyes of the entire state, there is none who can see more clearly; because he hears with the ears of the entire state, there is none who can hear more keenly” (Ames, 144).
In 1573, the Venetian ambassador in Madrid reported home that the Spanish king Philip II “has such an intelligence, that there is no thing that he does not know or see.” Two generations later the young Louis XIV of France had himself depicted as a face in the sun with the emblematic title digna deo facies (a face worthy of God). This emblem meant that he, like God in the world, was visible to everyone. Other emblems and medals extended the solar metaphor to the sphere of knowledge and information. Later in life, Louis reflected in his memoirs on the information overload that resulted from his announcement in 1661 that he would govern alone, signing every document himself. In a collection of texts from the 1660s meant to instruct the dauphin (his heir), the king is styled as the focal point of all knowledge, who wants “to be informed about everything (informé de tout).” Now it was considered the king’s job “to keep open eyes on the entire world,” “to be informed [about an] infinite number of things,” and not least to “discover the most remote views of our own courtiers, their darkest interests.”
The allegorical self-fashioning of Louis XIV as “sun king” also included a paradoxical stance maintaining that, while needing to be informed about everything, he could also not afford to engage in every detail of the affairs of state. Similarly, “to govern by virtue,” according to Confucius (ca. 551–479 BCE), could be compared to the “North Star staying in its place, while the myriad stars wait upon it” (Analects 2.1). The polar star, like the sun, signified the immobile constant in the universe that guaranteed the glory or virtue of the ruler. The metaphor implicitly relates to the concept of wu wei: that the less the king or emperor does, the more gets done. He remains the calm center around which his subjects turn while he allows everything to run smoothly without having to interfere with the individual parts of the whole.
In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kings were regularly referred to as all-knowing and well-informed rulers. The claim to know everything has itself a remarkable history. In papal documents from the end of the twelfth century, we can find a striking formulation that the pope makes decisions ex certa scientia—“on the basis of secure knowledge.” In fact, the papal administration in Rome had lost track of earlier decisions, and new papal decisions tended to duplicate or contradict earlier ones. Under Pope Alexander III (1159–81), it was thus determined that a letter had validity only if it contained a specific reference to previous letters on the same issue. Without this, the documents issued earlier would remain legally in force. Instead of explicitly mentioning all individual letters, one could also formulate a general statement that the pope was acting ex certa scientia. Claiming omniscience in such a formulaic way deprived all previous documents of their validity. What at first glance looks like an explicit tie to knowledge actually meant the very opposite: it was used especially when the pope himself had no complete knowledge of previous determinations and so was in no position to invoke them. It signified a detachment from such knowledge and from all possible normative restrictions in that matter. The decisive element of the formula hence was not “certain knowledge,” but rather the absolute and imperative will of the pope. The formula of ex certa scientia quickly entered into the toolbox of rulers who wished to emphasize the sovereignty of their decision making. It soon formed part of the Castilian and French kings’ edicts, the latter starting by expressing the king’s “certaine science, pleine puissance & authorité Royale (certain knowledge, full power and royal authority).”
Many other formulaic postulates of knowledge served similar purposes. They helped either to derogate existing (local) law or to enhance the effectiveness of orders by anticipating any possible objection that the ruler might lack information or that he was wrongly informed. It was within the same logic that the Latin term informatio gained a new meaning in late medieval times. The term’s old meaning of “teaching” or “instructing” was now complemented by a newer concept, in which informatio was closely connected to formal procedures. This novel understanding was supported by the new inquisitorial procedures, which were based on strict interrogation, exact memoranda in writing, and the idea of a formal legal truth. Similar procedures in politics and administration now fell into a sequence of three steps, whereby “information” was first collected, then encapsulated in written records, and finally offered as basis for making a rational and ostensibly objective decision—whether by a judge or a ruler. The semantics of information was tied in with these practices so closely that the word could designate all three stages of such an empirical procedure: its start (the interrogation), the resulting document (the report), and finally the goal of being informed and having mastery over that information. To a certain degree, the legacy of these procedures is still perceptible in our modern concept of information, especially if we associate information with rationality and truth.
In China, as in the Ottoman Empire and Mughal India, bureaucratic administration based on information gathering has a much longer history than in Europe. Since the first century BCE China had a centralized administration that was staffed by a professional bureaucracy drawn from all strata of society after the introduction of the civil service examination system. The administration, with the imperial chancellor at the center, amassed statistics; figures on land and population; maps of the empire; reports on harvests, banditry, and finances from all the provinces. The sources manifest little reflection, however, about the specific character of these bureaucratic procedures and, for that matter, about the semantic history of the Chinese term for information or knowledge. For the earlier periods it remains unclear if these administrative procedures were an early expression of a certain empirical spirit in Chinese government and if they reflected philosophical notions of truth or rationality in practice. Roy Bin Wong has remarked that for viewing the history of Chinese state formation it is necessary to choose a middle path between a Eurocentric model and Sinocentric exceptionalism. For him, Chinese political aspirations were connected to the moral and material order of society. The central administration depended on local means of implementing morally fueled ideals of governance across the different parts of the empire.
Among the earliest rulers in Europe, it was the advisers of the Norman kings of Sicily who in the twelfth century adapted techniques of administration from the Arabs, such as the diwan, the bureau of the Ishmaelite caliphate. To establish a government, monarchs did not select its members by birth, strength, or wealth but preferred qualified people who were able to read, write, and control the administrative procedures. The Norman kings used an administration of this kind not only to collect taxes and exercise control over land and populace, but also to reinforce, as Jeremy Johns has argued, an autocratic and despotic monarchy in which the king’s power was protected by the Arab minority in the kingdom (and vice versa).
Starting with Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), the papal administration similarly underwent a process of refinement largely based on the Sicilian model. The apostolic chancellery and penitentiary were tasked with processing grievances and establishing a professionalized procedure of supplication and response. In the early seventeenth century, however, a more elaborate administration based on a system of nuncios and legates was established to govern the different cities and territories of the papal state. Relatives of the pope often filled these posts.
In such regimes, however, officials whose duty it was to inform and advise a superior could extend their scope of participation and influence in a micropolitical environment. They were able to secure their position at court as skilled administrators while avoiding appearing too ambitious or powerful. In the Spanish Empire, for example, information was a means of regulating and controlling government over large distances. The metropolitan administration possessed a considerable amount of information about its most remote territories and subordinates. The more systematically such information had been collected, however—for instance, by using printed questionnaires—the less it was actually used in politics. What was used instead was the stream of correspondence from abroad, often sent by ordinary subjects. Such a practice had several advantages. It allowed the king to respond to actual needs at the periphery, needs that he could otherwise know of only on the basis of a dense and costly institutional network. And it established a low-cost system of mutual control on the ground, based on the subject’s readiness to report deviant behavior to the Crown, which, in turn, set and maintained incentives for reporting. Such “triangles of vigilance” were extremely flexible and cost-effective and thus appropriate for colonial expansion. They did not, however, optimize the Crown’s knowledge as channels were overloaded with information of private interests and full of contradictions.
The practice of government in China depended similarly on its administrative resources, which were more extensive than in Europe, but nonetheless limited for the purposes of a centralized state. Given its vast size, the Chinese Empire faced many of the same problems of rule as the Spanish Empire. Qing China (1644–1912) is a case in point. According to Wong, the creation of domestic order was a complex task, and the number of local officials was not sufficient for ruling across the whole of the empire. Rulers had to rely on collaboration with the local administration and gentry.
The local governments in the departments and districts of the Qing Empire provide one example of this dependency on local experts. There were—in simplified terms—two important groups of administrators, the magistrates and the clerks. Both had to adhere to the control of their superiors and had to abide by the code of administrative regulations issued by the Board of Civil Office in the central government. While the magistrates were outsiders recruited from among the graduates of the metropolitan or provincial examinations, the clerks were recruited from within the department or district and were of lower social status. This led to a typical conflict for all information-based governance systems: clerks had not only more local knowledge than the magistrates, but also more control over the exchange of documents, since it was the clerks who prepared and received the files. They could also manipulate the information and thus local government affairs. Furthermore, they monopolized information in the documents by declaring them secret, and they regarded private copies of, for example, land tax records as their private property. In Qing China, officials were thus classified according to their distance from the central administration and proximity to the people. Local officials were even addressed as Fumuguan, literally “father and mother officials,” who had firsthand knowledge of the people’s condition and of the administration’s successes or failures.
Information thus played two central roles in early modern governments. On the one hand, it enabled the collector, keeper, and conveyor of information to achieve a position of power, and it could also function as a means of justifying an informed and rational rule. In some cases, information might help to make a decision. But on the other hand claiming to be informed also helped to keep the suspicion of arbitrariness at bay. The mere fact that a ruler or government accumulated information thus does not tell us to which of these ends such information was used in practice.
At the outset of this article, it was argued that both concepts, information and governance, lack a clear definition and are therefore not easy to reconcile. Nonetheless, at first glance, the use of information in governance in order to achieve a more efficient, functional, and rational system of rule seems to fit compellingly into the narrative of the formation of the modern state.
Since Max Weber (1864–1920), historians have looked for structures, discourses, and mentalities that could be responsible for the formation of both the state and the loyal citizen-subject. Weber’s articulation of the problem of modern state formation highlighted the role of bureaucracy and a certain rational administrative approach toward governance as the most important requirement. Information in the hand of bureaucrat-ministers and experts thus contributed to the undermining of charismatic and traditional forms of legitimate rule and helped to establish the third type of rule, rational-legal authority. Historians have followed this narrative, exploring the idea that the rational handling of information by administrations helped to form an impersonal state apparatus.
In drawing a comparison in English history between the eleventh-century Domesday Book, the great collection of information under William the Conqueror, and the Orwellian dystopia of total surveillance societies in the twentieth century, Edward Higgs challenged the Weberian interpretation. He grants that new systems of taxation and data collection enabled the modern state to consolidate its central power to an extent unknown to medieval and early modern rulers. Many sociological and historical accounts assume, he argued, that state information gathering is synonymous with the surveillance state and therefore connected with modernity. He points out, however, that historians of the period 1500 to 1800 often misinterpret the extent of information gathering, “mainly because they neglect the essentially decentralized nature of governance.” For Higgs, Britain in the twentieth century shows that “although information gathering expanded rapidly in this period, the British state did not always prove itself to be the sort of rational, Weberian state that some sociologists would have us believe.”
The multifaceted, practical uses of information prompt a reconsideration of not only the long-term narrative of the history of early modern state formation, but also other variations of informed governance in commercial enterprises and other networks, such as the early modern *Republic of Letters. Studies of early modern trade corporations such as the English and Dutch East India Companies underline the state-like nature of such enterprises largely based on their use of information in governance. Commercialization of information could thus create certain conditions that enabled the rise of colonialism and commercial empires based on epistemic supremacy over other societies.
The cases of local administration in Qing China and also in the early modern Spanish Empire illuminate the functions of information in binding local and imperial levels of government to each other. Chinese officials in the central administration had no access to information of local affairs, not only because they had too few magistrates and clerks to exercise direct control, but because it proved much more efficient to shape power into patterns of coordination, cooperation, and conflict. Nonetheless the limits of this form of long-distance administration surfaced, both in China and in the Spanish Empire, at the close of the early modern period. Grain seizures, tax resistance, and social revolutions were only three major factors responsible for the great transformation in governance experienced in nineteenth-century China and Europe. The Chinese imperial government proved unsuccessful in resisting foreign intervention and domestic challenges to central authority like the Taiping rebellion (1850–64).
Similar problems between the local and central administrative units can be observed in Europe. Governance in cities and church administration was much more efficient in controlling people by laws, statutes, and statistical records than were the large monarchical states in early modern times. Parish records, for example, “good public policy” (“gute Policey”), tax control, and supervision of schools and judicial affairs were managed closely and most of the time equally independent from the royal or imperial authorities as they were in Qing China. The interplay of information and governance thus enabled municipal autonomy, an independent clerical administration, and also the empowerment of the estates and thus helped to form self-governed polities in Europe. In China, however, as in Ottoman Turkey or the independent nation-states of postimperial America, the state struggled to uphold the older administrative functions during the period of transformation and was not able to successfully adapt them to the new political and social order. Instead, these polities turned to the Western model of governance.
Forms of political or economic governance in the modern era certainly used information in manifold and significant ways. Information was now systematically gathered and processed, stored in archives and desk drawers, and transformed into charts and tables, as well as finally called for, retrieved, and consulted at the hour of decision. It was an essential part of the tool kits of power. Such information management, however, did not always underpin good government or rational and efficient rule. The relatively fuzzy and open concept of governance asks us to put information into context. Doing so shows that information could serve very different and even contradictory ends. As we have seen, it could help to make a rational decision or to create the mere appearance of such decision making.
That both of these ways of using information could prove successful is visible in the case of the first circumnavigation the world, by Ferdinand Magellan. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few survivors of the journey, reported that nobody on board really believed Magellan could find a passage to the Pacific. He then described how Magellan persuaded them to head onward nonetheless. Magellan pretended to have secret information about a small passage and told the sailors that he had seen that passage on a map made by the famous mapmaker Martin Behaim, a map that probably never existed. The illusion of information was sufficient for success in this case.
The historical instances we have chosen show that in many cases, the relations between information and the tasks of governance remained complex and obscure. Neither in China nor in Europe did the concepts of government make any reference to something like information. Only late in the Middle Ages did a semantic transformation set in that gave the term information something like its modern functional sense. Practices of government give an even more fragmented picture of how information was linked with rational government. The helmsman used information not only to determine the course of his ship, but also to secure the political order on board; and to achieve that second end a rhetorical claim of exact knowledge could prove more effective than the real thing.
Arndt Brendecke and Benjamin Steiner
See also bureaucracy; coins; documentary authority; memos; petitions; quantification; surveilling; surveys and censuses; teaching