The state’s files, censuses, and laws persist unchanged through revolutionary turnover
Evidence
In fact, there are very few, if any, socialist leaderships which have not clambered up into such worn, warm seats. At a less obvious level, successful revolutionaries also inherit the wiring of the old state: sometimes functionaries and informers, but always files, dossiers, archives, laws, financial records, censuses, maps, treaties, correspondence, memoranda, and so on. Like the complex electrical system in any large mansion when the owner has fled, the state awaits the new owner’s hand at the switch to be very much its old brilliant self again. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 626
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The state-as-wiring metaphor — bureaucratic rationality persisting through regime change — is a dense image of how power outlives its owners, relevant far beyond the chapter.
- XREF: connects to: National state regulatory power persists, so no capitalist epochal break has occurred — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 215