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In his contribution to the Cambridge History of Latin America (vol. 6.2) political scientist Laurence Whitehead points to the deficit of historical studies on the development of the State’s ‘cognitive’ capacity. He defines this term
as the sustained organisation to collect, process, analyse and deliver the types of information about society needed for a modern state to monitor and interpret the impact of its measures, and to adjust them or reformulate them when they prove ineffective or counter-productive.
Whitehead then suggests two analytical questions for such a historical study:
First, what types of information are available to the central authorities – how accurate, how comprehensive, how timely, and how easily processed? Second, when the authorities formulate a public policy, how difficult is it for those affected to discover what the policy is and what impact it might have on them; and what scope might exist for corrective measures if the process of implementation diverges too radically from the intentions of the policymakers?
This conference borrows Whitehead’s concept and invites papers which
address three of its (inter-related) aspects:
• the compilation of reliable statistics
• the gaining of territorial cognition and
• the development of a rational state organisation.
In addition, we intend to look at
• the perceptions, images and representations of a modernising and increasingly
functional state.