Enlightenment knowledge’s sovereignty enabled state-citizen engineering projects

Evidence

I argue that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually produced particular and unprecedented kinds of knowledge that indeed made themselves substantively and inherently amenable to the manipulation of power, giving the latter its distinctive and complex meaning. Once it constituted itself as sovereign and above nature, this form of knowledge opened the flood gates for the state to embark on the colossal nineteenth-century project of forming its subjects as citizens, and this by means of creating a number of “engineering” institutions that brought out their potential. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Foucauldian genealogy of the modern subject and state institutions like schools and courts. — connects to: Beijing’s social engineering mirrors Silicon Valley’s technological solutionism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1253