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Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the longue durée: Obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2023

Esther Liberman Cuenca  and
Asif A. Siddiqi
Esther Liberman Cuenca*
Affiliation:
University of Houston-Victoria, Victoria, TX, USA
Asif A. Siddiqi
Affiliation:
Department of History, Fordham University, The Bronx, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: CuencaE@uhv.edu
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Extract

In his now-classic mediation on the sociology of secrecy, Georg Simmel cautioned that while ‘human interaction is conditioned by the capacity to speak, it is [also] shaped by the capacity to be silent’.1 As historians, we are trained to see what is present, what is material, and what has effect. Investigating absence, on the other hand, as rewarding as it can be when we are able to reconstruct the seemingly unknowable, can lead us astray with speculative banalities or even counter-factual histories. Yet, as one manifestation of absence in society – in this case, the absence of knowledge – secrecy has had a fundamental place in the constitution, shaping, and functioning of the premodern and modern worlds. It has operated in many registers and appeared in many forms, such as censorship, coded language, classification regimes, and in oaths promising secrecy. All these modes in which we find practices related to secrecy operated within bureaucracies where the regulation of knowledge was either explicitly or implicitly part of their functioning. In looking at manifestations of absences – in particular, practices designed to regulate and then render knowledge absent – bureaucracies represent an emblematic and instructive site to explore questions on the co-constitution of power and knowledge.2

Type
Introduction
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 38 , Special Issue 1: Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the longue durée: obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing , May 2023 , pp. 1 - 8
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 Simmel, Georg, ‘The sociology of secrecy and of the secret societies’, American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906), 441–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The classic political science meditation on secrecy in bureaucracies highlights authority as its central goal. See Rourke, Francis E., ‘Secrecy in American bureaucracy’, Political Science Quarterly 72, 4 (1957), 540–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 David B. Frost, Classified: a history of secrecy in the United States Government (Jefferson, NC, 2017); C. A. Bayly, Empire and information: intelli (Cambridge, 1996); Deborah Susan Bauer, ‘Marianne is Watching: Knowledge, Secrecy, Intelligence and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (1870–1914)’, Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2013.

4 Christopher Moran, Classified: secrecy and the state in modern Britain (Cambridge, 2013).

5 Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the past: official history, secrecy and British intelligence since 1945’, English Historical Review 119, 483 (2004), 922–53; Kate Doyle, ‘The end of secrecy: U.S. National Security and the imperative for openness’, World Policy Journal 16, 1 (1999), 34–51; Wesley K. Wark, ‘In never-never land? The British archives on intelligence’, Historical Journal 35, 1 (1992), 195–203. See also the special issue of Diplomatic History 35, 4 (2011) dedicated to ‘Cultures of Secrecy in Postwar America’.

6 Alex Wellerstein, Restricted data: the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States (Chicago, 2021).

7 Michael D. Gordin, Red cloud at dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the end of the atomic monopoly (New York, 2009); Alex Wellerstein, ‘Patenting the bomb: nuclear weapons, intellectual property, and technological control’, Isis 99, 1 (2008), 57–87; Janet Farrell Brodie, ‘Radiation secrecy and censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, Journal of Social History 48, 4 (2015), 842–64.

8 Brian Balmer, ‘A secret formula, a rogue patent and public knowledge about nerve gas: secrecy as a spatial-epistemic tool’, Social Studies of Science 36, 5 (2006), 691–722; J. B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography 40, 1 (1988), 57–76; David B. Resnik, ‘Openness versus secrecy in scientific research’, Episteme 2, 3 (2006), 135–47; Maria Portuondo, Secret science: Spanish cosmography and the New World (Chicago, 2009). See also the special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science 45, 2 (2012) on ‘States of Secrecy’.

9 Asif Siddiqi, ‘Soviet secrecy: toward a social map of knowledge’, American Historical Review 126, 3 (2021), 1046–71; Asif Siddiqi, ‘Cosmic contradictions: popular enthusiasm and secrecy in the soviet space program’, in James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi eds., Into the Cosmos: space exploration and soviet culture (Pittsburgh, 2011), 47–76.

10 Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the culture of secrecy in early modern Europe (Berkeley, 2009); Robin J. Ives, ‘Political publicity and political economy in Eighteenth-Century France’, French History 17, 1 (2003), 1–17; Ellen R. Welch, ‘State truths, private letters, and images of public opinion in the Ancien Régime: Sévigné on Trials’, French Studies 67, 2 (2013), 170–83; Marco Fioravanti, ‘Toward a Legal Lexicon of Transparency. Publicity and secrecy in France between the Ancien Regime and the revolution’, Giornale di Storia Costituzionale 31 (2016), 27–46; Antonio Calvo Maturana, ‘“Is it useful to deceive the people?” The debate on public information in Spain at the end of the Ancien Régime (1780–1808)’, Journal of Modern History 86, 1 (2014), 1–46; David Coast, News and rumour in Jacobean England: information, court politics, and diplomacy, 1618–1625 (Manchester, 2014). See also the essays in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron eds., The politics of information in early modern Europe (London, 2001).

11 Pamela O. Long, Openness, secrecy, authorship: technical arts and the culture of knowledge from antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001). See also Karel Davids, ‘Craft secrecy in Europe in the early modern period: a comparative view’, Early Science and Medicine 10, 3 (2005), 341–8, and Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Guilds, patents, and the circulation of technical knowledge: Northern Italy during the early modern age’, Technology and Culture 45, 3 (2004), 569–89.

12 Steven A. Epstein, ‘Secrecy and Genoese commercial practices’, Journal of Medieval History 20, 4 (1994), 313–25; Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and authority in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London’, Historical Journal 40, 4 (1997), 925–51; Michael Jucker, ‘Urban literacy and urban secrecy? Some new approaches to an old problem’, in Georges Declercq et al. eds., New approaches to medieval urban literacy (Wetteren, 2008), 15–22; Christoph Friedrich Weber, ‘Trust, secrecy, and control in the medieval Italian communes’, in Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska eds., Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I (Turnhout, 2014), 243–65; Jonathan M. Elukin, ‘Keeping secrets in medieval and early modern English government’, in Gisela Engel, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder eds., Das Geheimnis am Beginn der europaschen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 111–29. One of the most important works on the rise of bureaucratic cultures and literacy in the Middle Ages is M.T. Clanchy's From memory to written record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Malden, 2013).

13 Max Weber, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills ed., From Max Weber: essays in sociology (New York, 1958).

14 We concede, of course, that secrecy can be manifested in many non-institutional settings including the social, personal, and intimate domains of everyday lives of people. This distinction is expertly highlighted in Lisa Blank, ‘Two schools for secrecy: defining secrecy from the works of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Edward Shils and Sissela Bok (2008)’, in Susan L. Maret and Jan Goldman eds., Government secrecy: classic and contemporary readings (Westport, 2009), 59–68.

15 Shils notes that ‘[s]ecrecy is the compulsory withholding of knowledge, reinforced by the prospect of sanctions for disclosure’. See Shils, , The torment of secrecy (Glencoe, 1956), 26Google Scholar.

16 Simmel, ‘The sociology of secrecy and of the secret societies’, 464.

17 Nelson, Andrew J., ‘How to share “A really good secret”: Managing sharing/secrecy tensions around scientific knowledge discourse’, Organization Science 27, 2 (2016), 265–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

18 Such cases are masterfully illuminated in Gordin, Red cloud at dawn.

19 Bellman, Beryl L., ‘The paradox of secrecy’, Human Studies 4 (1981), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.