Control

[1897]  Piotr Kropotkin,  The State [L'Etat - Son role historique], Freedom Press, London, 1987

-  "The State demands from its subjects a direct, personal submission without intermediaries; it demands equality in slavery; it cannot admit of a 'State within a State'." (p. 48)

[1922]  Eugénij Ivànovic Zamjàtin,  Noi [My], Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1963

-  "Mi è capitato di leggere o ascoltare molte cose inverosimili su quei tempi in cui gli uomini vivevano in uno stato selvaggio, libero, cioè non organizzato. Ma proprio questo m'è sembrato il più inverosimile, come mai il potere statale di allora, fosse pure un potere embrionale, poteva ammettere che gli uomini vivessero senza nulla di simile alle nostre Tavole della legge, senza passeggiate obbligatorie, senza un preciso regolamento delle ore dei pasti e si alzassero e andassero a dormire come passava loro per la testa; alcuni storici dicono perfino che a quei tempi nelle strade per tutta la notte c'erano lampioni accesi e tutta la notte la gente camminava e passavano i veicoli." (pp. 27-28)

-  "Oh, grande, divina saggezza dei muri che circondano e proteggono!  È questa, forse, la più grande di tutte le invenzioni! L'uomo ha cessato di essere un animale selvaggio solo quando ha costruito il primo muro. E l'uomo ha cessato di essere un uomo selvaggio, quando noi costruimmo il Muro Verde, con questo muro verde isolammo il nostro perfetto mondo meccanizzato dal mondo irrazionale e mostruoso degli alberi, degli uccelli, degli animali ..." (pp. 73-74)

[1938]  John Dewey,  Experience and Education, Britannica Great Books

-  "Even the theoretical anarchist, whose philosophy commits him to the idea that state or government control is an unmitigated evil, believes that with the abolition of the political state other forms of social control would operate: indeed, his opposition to governmental regulation springs from his belief that other and to him more normal modes of control would operate with abolition of the state." (p. 111)

[1944]  F. A. Hayek,  The Road to Serfdom, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986

-  "Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining of individual energies was the marvellous growth of science which followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and beyond." (p. 12)
-  In the past "the few attempts towards a more extended industrial use of mechanical inventions, some extraordinarily advanced, were promptly suppressed, and the desire for knowledge was stifled, so long as the dominant views were held to be binding for all." (p. 12)

[1948]  George Orwell,  Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999

-  "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU."

-  "You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised." (p. 5)

-  "To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction." (p. 19)

-  "If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened  - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?" "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'." (p. 37)

[1950]  Alex Comfort, Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State. A criminological approach to the problem of power, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1950

-  "The actual control ... which the delegate rulers exercise over the life of ordinary citizens, is more effective and through than that which older monarchs could contemplate, and the fact of delegacy limits to some extent the resistance of the public to such control." (p. 14)

[1964]  Vance Packard,  The Naked Society, Lomgmans, London, 1964

-  "Millions of Americans are living in an atmosphere in which peering electronic eyes, undercover agents, lie detectors, hidden tape recorders, bureaucratic investigators, and outrageously intrusive questionnaires are becoming commonplace, if often only, suspected, facts of life."
"Mr. Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court has commented : 'The forces allied against the individual have never been greater'."
"In 1962 the Department of Defence alone conducted security investigation on 826,000 individuals."
"The United States Government employs more than 25.000 professional investigators, not including counterintelligence and espionage operatives." (p. 5)

-  "In ... Connecticut the legislature seeks to decree in part the conditions under which every man and wife in the privacy of their bedroom will make love or conceive children. It does this by forbidding the use of contraceptives and prohibiting physicians from giving advice with respect to the use of contraceptives." (p. 162)
-  "In Cleveland a mother was arrested and sentenced to a fine for telling her unmarried daughter to use birth-control devices after the daughter had had three illegitimate children." (p. 163)
-  "... regulations in ... Connecticut permit an administrative board of three, upon a majority vote, to sterilize a person. Under the statute no notice need be given." (p. 276)

-  "The U.S. Congress ... ordered the Post Office Department to create another kind of label that is capable of stigmatizing. It is hung on anyone receiving  [what looks like] 'Communist political propaganda' from abroad." (p. 277)

[1996]  Matt Ridley,  The Origins of Virtue, Softback Preview, England, 1997

-  "Concentrating the control of irrigation systems in bureaucratic hands has been a favourite game of governments since at least the pharaohs. It continued in colonial days, and is enthusiastically pursued to this day by aid agencies. It underestimates the ability of people to run their own systems, and overestimates the ability of bureaucrats." (p. 237)

[1999]  Martin van Creveld,  The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

-  "Possibly by way of compensating for their growing impotence, many states have also developed a disturbing habit of meddling in the most minute details of people's lives. In the Republic of Ireland you cannot obtain information about contraception; in the Netherlands one has to ask government permission before painting one's front door in the color of one's choice. Some governments will tell you that you cannot place a bet outside the state-run lottery system (which insists on raking the profits to itself). Others decree that as a smoker you are a pariah, others that under certain circumstances you must turn informer on your family and neighbors (a method formerly reserved for the worst totalitarian regimes), others that you are only allowed to listen to so many foreign songs on the radio, others still that you do not even control your own body to the extent of using drugs or having an abortion." (pp. 410-411)

[2000] John Torpey,  The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000

-  "... in the course of the past few centuries, states have successfully usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises the 'monopoly of the legitimate means of movement' - that is, their development as states has depended on effectively distinguishing between citizens/subjects and possible interlopers, and regulating the movement of each. This process of 'monopolization' is associated with the fact that states must develop the capacity to 'embrace' their own citizens in order to extract from them the resources they need to reproduce themselves over time." (pp. 1-2)

-  "... we speak of 'illegal' migration as a result of states' monopolization of the legitimate means of movement." (p. 9)

-  "Specific historical forces  such as the development of welfare states and the rise of labor movements seeking to control access to jobs and social benefits certainly played their part in promoting immigration controls and the sharpening of state's capacities to distinguish between 'them' and 'us'." (p. 121)

-  "The 1921 conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Stockholm expressed its condemnation of the passport system and called for greater freedom of movement." (p. 127)

-  "... many Jews were condemned to death by the immigration barriers and documentary identification requirements raised by many countries of Europe and North America during the preceding period and by the unwillingness of most countries to admit Jews as refugees, as suggested by the Evian conference." "According to the now standard view, the immigration restrictions that emerged from the First World War and their strict enforcement during the 1930s in an effort to protect national labor markets during the depression consigned many Jews to their deaths because they were unable to find a refugee from Nazi persecution." (p. 137)

-  "In its 1953 report, the Legal Committee [of the Council of Europe]" ...  "in view of the delays entailed by passport controls at the frontiers of European countries, ... concluded that 'despite the remarkable technical achievements of the twentieth century, the journey from Paris to London by rail and sea could be done in less time at the beginning of the century than in 1953'." (p. 146)

-  "Then as now, state-builders see the authority to issue one's own passport as a vital element of sovereignty." (p. 126)