Bureaucrats of the Soul. Infrastructuring the Delegation of Interpretive Power in Northern Italy, circa 1750–1800.

• In Event: 40210 - Violence, Interpretation, and the State: Authoritarian Strategies from Coercion to Consent

Abstract

While the Catholic Church has often been considered a “model case” for the development of sociological theories on rationalization and centralization typical of Western modernity, the conceptualization of one of its central features—sacramental penance, that is the act of receiving eternal forgiveness for one’s sins through the mediation of an ordained minister—has remained anchored primarily to the understanding of Weber and Foucault. Whereas the former has hastily commented on the doctrine underlying confession as incapable of fostering a disciplinary ethos, the latter has granted confession a crucial role in creating the Western subject but has failed to specify the theoretical model and lacked empirical rigor. Taking stock of historiographical literature and historical sociological research, this paper shows how the inscrutable character of confessional encounters resulted from the successful work of infrastructure. Thus, far from being the ‘irrational’ foil of Calvinism, Catholic institutions included and articulated a set of infrastructures that were managed bureaucratically. By examining different types of hitherto disregarded archival sources (such as printed licenses to hear confessions and registers of licensed confessors), the paper shows how even what might have resembled the most ‘magical’ course of action required constant training, mediation, surveillance, and a good amount of arbitration and paperwork. Combining historical and cultural sociology, the paper provides a unique formation story of this infrastructure, qualifies some intuitions about the relationship between religious beliefs and institutions and bureaucratic practices, and deploys a set of concepts elaborated using early modern states and empires to examine the workings of a Catholic diocese, probing their soundness as analytical tools beyond the sphere of the “secular.”

Author

• Giovanni Zampieri, University of Padova (Italy)