Population Registration, Social Planning, and the Discourse on Privacy Protection in West Germany*
Population Registration, Social Planning, and the Discourse on Privacy Protection in West Germany* Larry Frohman State University of New York at Stony Brook At the beginning of Seeing Like a State, James Scott writes that “the premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity.” It was, Scott argues, population registries, which, in conjunction with the introduction of surnames and the development of means for pinpointing the loca- tion of these persons, first made it possible for state officials to dream of a per- fectly legible population.1 The collection of personal information—that is, information relating to identi- fiable individuals and their vital activities—is the sine qua non of diverse politi- cal rationalities: sovereign control of territory, the disciplinary fixing of individuals in social and geographical space, and the biopolitical cultivation of populations. However, the extent to which and the intensity with which such information can be used for any of these purposes depends on the ability to collect this informa- tion; channel it to the center of the organization, where it can be integrated with other information and analyzed; and then return it to the bureaucratic periphery, which is the site of encounters between the state administration and the individual citizen. In their original form, however, population registries simply represented * I would like to thank Carola Sachse and Janis Mimura, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the JMH, for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
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