Planning as a Response to Complexity

Every society develops instruments, institutions, and strategies through which it seeks to defend itself against its own fears, translating uncertainty into procedures, complexity into categories, and unpredictability into mechanisms of governance capable of conveying at least the impression of an intelligible order. This conviction emerged from observing, for professional reasons, a field that might appear far removed from anthropological or philosophical inquiry: public waste management. Yet it is precisely in this domain that the progressive proliferation of plans, implementation programmes, observatories, steering committees, regulatory authorities, and control apparatuses makes particularly evident the tendency of contemporary administrations to respond to complexity by expanding the structures responsible for observing, classifying, and governing it.

These instruments are generally presented as technical responses to requirements of efficiency, coordination, and administrative rationalisation, almost as though their establishment were a neutral and necessary consequence of the growing complexity of social, economic, and environmental phenomena. Far less frequently, however, attention is directed towards the cultural and cognitive act that precedes their creation: the belief that every problem can be rendered manageable through the intensified production of information, indicators, prescriptions, and decision-making centres.

Behind the apparent neutrality of administrative technique there thus seems to emerge an unresolved relationship between human beings and the complexity of the world they themselves have helped to construct: a relationship in which the need to govern what appears elusive is accompanied by the conviction that such governance can in fact be achieved through the progressive conversion of reality into a legible and orderly form.

The hypothesis advanced here is that two apparently different but fundamentally complementary impulses lie at the origin of this drive towards control. On the one hand, there is fear of the consequences produced by a system left to itself, perceived as potentially disorderly, inefficient, or dangerous; on the other, there is the presumption that reality can be made entirely knowable through measurement, classification, and planning. Fear fuels the need for control, while presumption persuades us that such control is genuinely possible.

The point at which these dimensions converge is aggregation, namely the process through which a multiplicity of local forms of knowledge, particular situations, behaviours, and qualitative differences is reduced to categories, indicators, statistics, and synthetic information that can be used by decision-making centres. Aggregation makes reality administratively more legible, but it also inevitably impoverishes it, since every simplification preserves only what is compatible with the framework designed to collect it.

It should be clarified from the outset that the argument developed here does not seek to demonstrate a historical or theoretical continuity among Michel Foucault, James C. Scott, Friedrich A. von Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, nor to attribute to these authors a unified thesis that does not belong to their respective intellectual projects. The connection between fear, presumption, and aggregation is instead proposed as an interpretative framework, a lens through which to examine the growth of contemporary apparatuses of planning and surveillance, while clearly distinguishing between what emerges directly from the works discussed and the theoretical use made of them here.

Freedom Governed Through Danger

The most explicit support for interpreting control as a response to fear can be found in the thought of Michel Foucault, particularly in the lectures delivered at the Collège de France during the 1978–1979 academic year and subsequently published in Naissance de la biopolitique, devoted to the genealogy of the liberal art of government.

In the lecture of 24 January 1979, Foucault describes liberalism neither as a simple withdrawal of public power from intervention nor as a doctrine of spontaneous social self-regulation, but as a specific governmental rationality that produces and organises freedom while simultaneously determining its conditions, limits, and costs. To govern liberally does not mean allowing individuals to act in the absence of constraints; rather, it means constructing an environment within which certain freedoms may be exercised, while controlling their risks and neutralising effects considered incompatible with the overall stability of the social order.

Freedom is therefore not the opposite of security, but one term within a relationship in which government is required constantly to assess how much space should be granted to individual initiative and which procedures of control should be established to contain its dangers. In Foucault’s reading, liberalism thus becomes a “manager of dangers”, since the production of freedoms necessarily entails the cultural, political, and administrative construction of the risks that those same freedoms may generate.

From this perspective, the modern individual is progressively educated to perceive existence as exposed to a multiplicity of threats: economic risk, unemployment, illness, crime, accident, environmental degradation, and the loss of social security. Foucault’s expression “to live dangerously” does not therefore designate an invitation to adventure, but the psychological and cultural correlate of a form of government that makes danger an ordinary component of subjectivity and, precisely through this perception, legitimises the growth of the mechanisms intended to prevent it.

If economic and social freedom carries with it a specific culture of danger, the apparatus of control does not constitute a pathological or occasional deviation from liberalism, but its internal counterweight. Foucault observes, indeed, that the liberal art of government produces a considerable expansion of procedures of control, constraint, and coercion, which are required to make the exercise of freedoms compatible with the security of the whole.

Modern supervisory authorities, observatories, steering committees, and monitoring systems can therefore be interpreted not only as instruments intended to improve the efficiency of decision-making, but also as security mechanisms through which the legal and institutional order seeks to contain the dangers generated by the economic, social, and environmental processes that it claims to allow to develop freely. Planning does not therefore necessarily replace the market or individual autonomy; it may instead present itself as the structure through which those freedoms are rendered governable.

Complexity as Administrative Anxiety

A different yet convergent representation of the relationship between control and anxiety emerges in the work of James C. Scott, especially in the sections of Seeing Like a State devoted to high modernism, urban planning, and the figure of Le Corbusier. Scott describes high modernism as an especially intense form of confidence in the capacity of science and technology to transform society, increase production, organise space, and dominate nature—a confidence that tends to regard existing complexity not as the outcome of historical adaptations and accumulated forms of knowledge, but as an obstacle to be removed.

In Le Corbusier’s urbanism, intolerance towards the traditional city initially appears as an aesthetic judgement directed against irregularity, the coexistence of different functions, historical accumulation, and the apparent disorder of urban settlements. Behind this judgement, however, there emerges a more radical epistemic anxiety, produced by the difficulty of the mind in orienting itself within a multiplicity of relationships that resist project-based simplification and thereby render control conceptually and operationally unstable.

When elements multiply, relationships become fluid, and concrete situations resist classification, the planner’s mind perceives the risk of becoming lost in a labyrinth of possibilities, since whatever cannot be reduced to a general scheme also appears difficult to govern. The demand for control thus arises not only from a desire to improve reality, but also from the anxiety generated by a complexity that exceeds the observer’s cognitive capacities and forces them to confront the limits of their own knowledge.

Scott depicts social engineering as an attempt to immobilise a reality in constant motion, comparing it to the ambition of governing a whirlwind—an image that effectively conveys the relationship between the vastness of the project and the instability of the object upon which it seeks to intervene. The more reality appears mobile, relational, and mutable, the stronger becomes the temptation to crystallise it into maps, classifications, and models capable of reducing its indeterminacy.

Planning therefore responds to a dual necessity: to make the world modifiable and, even before that, to make it cognitively bearable. The plan is not merely an operational instrument, but a form through which complexity is stripped of its excess and brought within an order in which each element possesses a defined position, function, and relationship to the whole.

The Presumption of Centralised Knowledge

If Foucault and certain passages in Scott allow control to be interpreted as a response to danger and to the anxiety produced by complexity, the reflections of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. von Hayek shift the problem onto the terrain of epistemological presumption: the belief that a decision-making centre can possess sufficiently extensive knowledge to replace the plurality of social behaviours with a rational design.

Scott defines high modernism as an especially powerful version of confidence in scientific and technical progress, in increased production, and in the possibility of rationally ordering nature and society. From this perspective, the planner appears not only as someone who fears disorder, but as someone who believes themselves to possess a superior vision, free from the limitations and partiality of ordinary forms of knowledge.

Le Corbusier thus assumes the features of the philosopher-king, the subject who believes that he can see what others cannot and who, precisely by virtue of this alleged cognitive superiority, considers himself entitled to replace the existing order with a designed construction. The formula according to which “the despot is not a man, but the Plan” expresses with particular force the transformation of personal authority into the impersonal authority of technical rationality: it is no longer an individual who commands arbitrarily, but a project that claims the right to impose itself because it is scientific, necessary, and objective.

Mises develops the critique on the terrain of the uncertainty inherent in human action, recalling that the impossibility of knowing the future is a structural condition of action rather than a temporary deficiency destined to be overcome through the greater availability of information. Those who claim to possess certain knowledge of future developments ultimately attribute to intuitions, convictions, or theoretical constructions the value of knowledge that they cannot possess, thereby implicitly assuming a position of omniscience.

The most rigorous formulation of the problem, however, belongs to Hayek, since his critique is not primarily based on a psychological or moral assessment of the planner’s arrogance, but on the very structure of social knowledge. In his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek observes that economically relevant knowledge never exists in a fully concentrated and integrated form, but appears instead as a plurality of incomplete, dispersed, and sometimes contradictory fragments held by individuals situated in different circumstances.

The fundamental problem of society therefore does not concern how an authority may use a quantity of information already available in unified form, but how forms of knowledge that cannot be fully collected by any single subject may nevertheless be coordinated. According to Hayek, centralised planning arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of this problem, produced by the improper transfer to social phenomena of categories developed for the study of natural phenomena.

Social complexity is treated as though it were an object that could be observed from the outside, broken down into variables, and reduced to a unified calculation, whereas it is constituted by practical knowledge, local circumstances, expectations, preferences, and adaptations that acquire meaning only within the specific situations in which they arise.

From this perspective, the apparatus of control does not derive primarily from the fear of not knowing, but from the conviction of possessing knowledge sufficiently extensive to permit the replacement of social complexity with a rational design. The Plan, in its various forms, therefore represents the attempt to transform a problem of coordination among dispersed forms of knowledge into a problem of centralised calculation.

Aggregation and the Statistical Shadow of Reality

Interpretations of control as fear and as presumption may initially appear incompatible, since the former emphasises the anxiety produced by uncertainty, while the latter attributes to planning excessive confidence in the capacities of rational knowledge. On closer examination, however, they can be understood as two moments within the same cognitive process, in which fear of complexity generates the demand for control and epistemological presumption makes plausible the belief that such control can effectively be exercised.

The point at which these two dimensions converge is statistical aggregation, namely the set of operations through which the multiplicity of reality is transformed into a manageable form by means of maps, categories, tables, indicators, graphs, and percentages. Aggregation responds simultaneously to the need to reduce uncertainty and to the desire to make reality available for decision-making, since the number creates the impression that a phenomenon, once measured, has also become knowable and governable.

Every institution called upon to intervene in a complex phenomenon inevitably requires simplifications, since no administration could make decisions while preserving the infinite variety of concrete situations in its entirety. The problem therefore does not lie in the use of statistics or in the construction of indicators, but in the possibility that the synthetic representation may gradually come to be treated as equivalent to the reality it is intended to describe.

Hayek identifies with particular precision the limits of the statistical transmission of dispersed knowledge, observing that many forms of knowledge decisive for action cannot, by their very nature, enter statistical representations and are therefore not transferable to a central authority in aggregated form. The production of data requires abstraction from differences regarded as minor, bringing under the same category elements that differ in location, quality, availability, conditions of use, and other details which, although irrelevant within the general representation, may be of decisive importance for an individual decision.

What reaches the decision-making centre is therefore not the phenomenon in its concrete articulation, but its administrative translation: a statistical shadow constructed through the selection of certain characteristics and the exclusion of others. Simplification is not necessarily false, but it is inevitably partial, because it can only reproduce what the system of observation has been designed to recognise.

Scott describes the same process through the concept of legibility, showing how the simplifications produced by the state do not represent society in its entirety, but only the part of it that is relevant to the official observer. Administrative maps are abbreviated maps, constructed for fiscal, military, health, urban-planning, or regulatory purposes and, precisely for this reason, incapable of reproducing the totality of relationships, meanings, and forms of knowledge embodied in social practices.

The categories through which administration observes natural and social systems are inevitably more static, coarse, and stylised than the reality they seek to represent, because they must enable the comparison of different phenomena, the standardisation of procedures, and the uniform application of decisions. Their usefulness depends precisely on the reduction of differences, but the same process that makes them operational also entails a loss of knowledge.

In fields such as waste management, this dynamic becomes especially evident. Quantities, collection rates, treatment capacities, recycling indices, and forecasts of future demand are indispensable planning tools, but they do not exhaust the territorial, organisational, economic, and social complexity of the phenomenon. Behind an apparently uniform figure may lie decisive differences in territorial characteristics, the quality of waste streams, the actual accessibility of facilities, logistical costs, the structure of production, and the behaviour of local communities.

Aggregation therefore makes the world more legible, but also inevitably poorer, because whatever cannot be classified, counted, or compared tends to disappear from the decision-making horizon. It reassures because it reduces complexity to a stable and orderly form, yet precisely for that reason it may conceal part of the reality it claims to govern.

The mentality of control is therefore neither fear alone nor presumption alone, but the attempt to reduce complexity to an observable, comparable, and administratively manageable configuration. The risk arises when the technical success of simplification produces the illusion of exhaustive knowledge and when the institution, instead of using indicators as partial instruments, ultimately assumes that only what enters its systems of measurement possesses relevance.

Regulating Without Replacing Reality with Its Representation

Recognising the epistemic limits of planning does not imply automatically endorsing the political conclusions of the authors discussed, nor does it necessarily lead to the belief that the market or spontaneous order can resolve every problem of coordination. To employ Hayek’s argument concerning dispersed knowledge means recognising that no decision-making centre has complete access to all the information necessary to govern complexity, but it does not mean denying the existence of market failures, informational asymmetries, externalities, and concentrations of power that make regulatory intervention indispensable.

When economic activity produces costs that are transferred to actors outside the exchange, as occurs in numerous environmental contexts, spontaneous order does not guarantee that such consequences will be adequately taken into account. Regulation arises precisely from the need to make visible interests, harms, and risks that market mechanisms do not autonomously incorporate into their decisions.

Questioning the form of control does not therefore mean denying the necessity of rules. Rules arise not only from a cultural construction of danger, but also from the concrete need to prevent economic, informational, and institutional asymmetries from becoming predatory relationships. The decisive problem does not lie in choosing between regulation and the absence of regulation, but in understanding through which instruments it is possible to regulate without attributing to institutions knowledge they do not possess and without transforming administrative simplifications into absolute representations of reality.

The necessity of regulation does not, moreover, exclude the possibility that the mechanisms established to contain economic power may themselves be captured by the actors who possess the greatest resources to influence their formation and application. Drawing on the reflections of Alexander Rüstow, Foucault describes the risk of a “predatory neo-feudalism”, in which large economic concentrations, rather than consolidating their position exclusively through competition, seek in public power, legislation, jurisdiction, and the shaping of opinion a system of protections capable of stabilising the advantages already acquired.

Regulation thus reveals an ambivalent nature: it is a necessary instrument for limiting private power and, at the same time, a possible vehicle through which that same power obtains institutional consecration. Rules designed to correct asymmetries may be shaped by those with the greatest access to decision-making processes, while surveillance apparatuses may ultimately reinforce actors already better organised to produce, interpret, and use the information required.

This ambivalence requires attention to shift from the mere quantity of rules to the epistemic and democratic quality of the institutions that produce them. An adequate regulatory system should not merely collect more data, increase controls, or multiply decision-making levels; it should also be capable of recognising the partiality of its own categories, maintaining open channels of engagement with local forms of knowledge, and subjecting the effects of its simplifications to verification.

Institutions cannot renounce classification, measurement, and programming, but they can avoid treating such operations as neutral and complete descriptions of reality. Every indicator incorporates a choice about what deserves to be observed, every category excludes differences deemed irrelevant, and every plan organises the future on the basis of an inevitably incomplete representation of the present.

Cognitive Limits as an Institutional Principle

The true alternative, therefore, does not lie between control and the absence of control, nor between planning and spontaneity, but between institutions capable of continually interrogating their own limits and institutions that ultimately confuse their representation of reality with reality itself.

The former regard data, statistics, and models as necessary but partial tools, intended to be supplemented, corrected, and sometimes contradicted by concrete experience. The latter transform measurement into a form of authority, assuming that what does not appear in the indicators is irrelevant or even nonexistent.

Planning that is conscious of its own limits does not renounce decision-making, but abandons the claim to exhaust complexity through the plan. It does not treat local knowledge as an irrational residue to be overcome, but as a source of understanding that no central apparatus can fully replace. Nor does it identify predictability with absolute control; rather, it constructs institutions capable of learning from the unforeseen effects of their own choices.

The recognition of uncertainty should therefore not be interpreted as a surrender of public authority, but as a condition of its rationality. An institution that acknowledges that it cannot know everything is better equipped to correct its errors than one that treats its own representation as definitive, just as regulation capable of incorporating dissent, anomalies, and situated knowledge is more robust than a discipline based exclusively on the internal coherence of its own models.

Ultimately, the decisive question concerns the capacity of institutions continuously to test the categories through which they observe and govern society, preventing necessary administrative simplification from becoming the presumption of exhaustive knowledge. When indicators cease to be regarded as partial instruments and are instead treated as equivalent to the reality they seek to describe, the risk lies not only in the loss of information, but in the progressive institutional inability to recognise everything that, although materially affecting the phenomenon, cannot enter the forms designed to measure it.

Planning can therefore preserve its function without becoming a metaphysics of order only on condition that it accepts that the world will always exceed the representations produced of it, that knowledge will remain dispersed among different subjects and contexts, and that no apparatus of surveillance, however elaborate, can entirely replace the diffuse intelligence embedded in social practices.

From this perspective, limitation is not an obstacle to be removed, but an institutional principle to be acknowledged: not the point at which the governance of complexity fails, but the condition through which it can avoid becoming an order impervious to the reality it claims to administer.

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Essential Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 2004.

Hayek, Friedrich A. von. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4, September 1945, pp. 519–530.

Mises, Ludwig von. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1998.