Rule by decree dominates empires efficiently by withholding information and overriding local autonomy

Evidence

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 621

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism of rule-by-decree vs rule-by-law in Arendt’s vocabulary, contrasting cleverness with wisdom.
• XREF: Carries forward to the Islamophobia module’s biopolitics/necropolitics section — decree-based administration of colonial populations. — connects to: A public authority can build quasi-sovereign autonomy over territory — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 69; Pre-nineteenth-century empires ruled indirectly through autonomous regional power-holders. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 182
• QUESTION: How does Arendt’s decree-vs-law distinction map onto later work on administrative discretion in racialized governance?