Progress in Human Geography 25,4 (2001) pp.

615–619

States, scales and households: limits

to scale thinking? A response to
Brenner
Sallie A. Marston1 and Neil Smith2
1Department of Geography and Regional Development, Harvill Building Box 2,
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 84721, USA
2Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue,

New York, NY 10016, USA

Neil Brenner’s response (this issue) to ‘The social construction of scale’ (Marston, 2000)
raises a host of excellent points that might, as he intends, help focus and refine the
blossoming discussion of geographical scale. His larger argument, that the popularity
of scale theories has led to a certain ‘analytical blunting’ of this sharply defined concept
and that scale is increasingly conflated with broader discussions of space, is surely
correct. Yet two aspects of Brenner’s response are troubling: first, the idiosyncratic
genealogy of scale theories he wishes to assert; and second, the refusal of feminist
arguments about the scale of the household. Both moves compound and exemplify
rather than resolve the problem he identifies. In the hope of sharpening the analytical
debate, therefore, we would like to offer a brief sympathetic critique of these two
foundations of Brenner’s approach to scale theory. Our argument is that the analytical
blunting of scale can best be countered through the constant reinvention of scale theory
ahead of the fetishist juggernaut. For exactly this reason the original article insisted on
the constitutive but largely unheralded role of social reproduction and consumption, in
conjunction with social production, in the production of geographical scale. It seems to
us that Brenner’s commitment to a politics of scale is, following Lefebvre, only ‘space-
deep’.
Brenner argues quite astutely that in the current literature there is a ‘noticeable
slippage’ between ‘notions of geographical scale’ and other geographical concepts such
as ‘place, locality, territory, and space’. At least methodologically, he wants to establish
a radical separation between arguments concerning the production of space and the
production of scale to retard any morphing of scale into space and vice versa. This
argument makes sense, up to a point: scale is a produced societal metric that differenti-
ates space; it is not space per se. Yet ‘geographical scale’ is not simply a ‘hierarchically

© Arnold 2001 0309–1325(01)PH344XX

616 States, scales and households: limits to scale thinking? A response to Brenner

ordered system’ placed over pre-existing space, however much that hierarchical
ordering may itself be fluid. Rather the production of scale is integral to the production
of space, all the way down. Scaled social processes pupate specific productions of space
while the production of space generates distinct structures of geographical scale. The
process is highly fluid and dynamic, its social authorship broad-based, and the scale of
the household (or the home) is integral to this process. So too, we contend, is the scale
of the body.
Brenner’s larger argument about geographical scale is actually premised on a mobi-
lization of the same slippage between scale and space that he rejects. In a series of
overlapping papers he has produced some fascinating and highly suggestive analyses
that insist on centering the state in our comprehension of contemporary ‘rescaling
processes’, as Erik Swyngedouw has called them, and the contemporary politics of scale
(Swyngedouw, 1996). For theoretical inspiration he turns to Henri Lefebvre. The
problem here lies not so much with the Lefebvre connection but with the abundance of
meanings read back into Lefebvre. Brenner reads scale through Lefebvre, effectively
installing him as the patron saint of scale theory, but this reading depends on the
insinuation of many statements about space as statements about scale.
Lefebvre actually had very little to say about scale. Brenner repeatedly cites two or
three phrases in Lefebvre’s four-volume De l’Etat (Lefebvre, 1976) as the source of scale
theory. There Lefebvre talks about a ‘hierarchical stratified morphology’, and the need
to know the conditions of ‘genesis’, ‘stabilization’ and ‘rupture’ of different scales in
order to ‘study them completely’ (1976: 69). Lefebvre’s brief comments on scale are
made in a specific context; they are methodological rather than theoretical. ‘The
question of scale and of level’, Lefebvre says, ‘obliges one to choose at the outset the
scale one wishes to study’, and the results of analysis ‘depend on the scale chosen as
initial or essential’ (1976: 68). These are very suggestive comments, but they are
preliminary, do not add up to a theory of geographical scale, and do not necessarily
even point in that direction. Lefebvre’s brief comments on scale are embedded in a
chapter on ‘method’ and he is very ambivalent about whether or how to translate such
methodological insights into more substantive theoretical arguments. The ‘problem of
scale’ (Lefebvre, 1976: 67) for Lefebvre is just that, a ‘problem’ not a theory, a shorthand
for a problem he never works out. To suggest otherwise – to hold Lefebvre as the font
of scale theory – represents a truly dramatic ‘overstretching of the concept of geo-
graphical scale’ (Brenner). Brenner’s abiding commitment to methodological issues
marks his consanguinity with Lefebvre, but the greater value of his work lies in helping
to make the translation from methodological to substantive treatment of scale in the
context of the state. The attempted grounding of such work in a putative ‘scale theory’
in Lefebvre not only encourages a deep-seated conflation of the production of space
with theories of scale but hinders the theorization of scale. Theoretical concepts such as
‘the politics of scale’, ‘re-scaling’, ‘the production of scale’, ‘scales of social reproduc-
tion’, ‘scalar fixes’, ‘scale jumping’ and so forth, that did not emerge until the 1980s and
1990s, take us well beyond Lefebvre. Our collective efforts to develop theories of scale
are severely limited by squeezing them back through Lefebvre’s rudimentary
ambivalence.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating intellectual questions which cannot be asked if we
accept Brenner’s genealogy is why Lefebvre – whose brilliance gave us ‘the production
of space’ (and so much more), and who was so unambiguously committed to the ‘right
 Sallie A. Marston and Neil Smith 617

to difference’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 396) as both political strategy and a condition to be

achieved – theorized so little about the production of spatial difference. It is precisely
because a theory of scale goes some way toward tackling that question and filling a
certain silence that so many geographers and growing numbers of social scientists are
so attracted to analyses of scale. This leads us to the question of the household.
The central argument in the original paper is that due to a heavy emphasis on the
state, capital and the politics emanating from the sphere of production, theorizations of
scale have inadequately addressed the processes of social reproduction and
consumption. An additional point is that scale-making should be understood as an
embodied process undertaken by social agents themselves shaped by gender, race, class
and geography operating within particular historical contexts. The brief case study of
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US domestic feminism outlined in the
original paper argues for the importance of understanding the household as a key scale
at a key moment. The struggles around the construction of the household scale rever-
berated with the restructuring of other scales from the body through the neighborhood
and city to the national state. This was the period, records historian Robert Wiebe (1994)
in his classic study, The search for order, in which the national-state scale first crystallized
in the USA. Feminist contributions to the literature on US state formation demonstrate
quite convincingly that the domestic feminism, municipal housekeeping and social
welfare provision movements were all part of this process (see, for example, Baker,
1984; Flanagan, 1990; Gordon, 1994; Hayden, 1981; Skocpol, 1992). At the turn of the
nineteenth century, the modern state was remade with new responsibilities and
transformed roles in direct response to the prolonged political activism of urban
women, organized around a discourse of domesticity and maternalism. Middle-class
women’s identity struggles over domestic ideology and practice not only transformed
the home and the household around the turn of the century but simultaneously
provided a scale basis from which women’s organizations contributed to a powerful
reshaping of state territorial organization in the USA, dramatically altering the
prevailing ‘gestalt of scale’ for nearly a century.
We have to say, too bluntly perhaps, that it is disappointing in 2001 that Neil Brenner
can read this argument as little more than a special pleading that feminist concerns and
questions of social reproduction (not the same thing) also deserve a place at the high
table of scale theory. Even more disappointing is the rather patronizing dismissal of
such concerns for gender, social reproduction and political mobilization as they
crystallize into the discrete scale of the household, an argument that he himself
recognizes as a ‘first . . . attempt to theorize this role systematically and historically’.
The suggestion that questions of social reproduction and consumption have ‘long been
analyzed in quite scale-sensitive ways’ and the implication that this is therefore
sufficient (he cites Castells’, 1977, equation of collective consumption with ‘the urban’)
betrays a deep prejudice and blindness toward the issues at stake in discussions of
social reproduction. The Federalist papers were ‘scale-sensitive’ (Hamilton et al., 1961) but
no one uses that fact to diminish the importance of contemporary theorization around
the scales of the state. The inability to see the theoretical relevance of the social repro-
duction argument is especially surprising given the centrality of social reproduction to
the making of the state throughout the twentieth century and underscores the limits to
that vision of scale.
Brenner may well be right that our debates ‘are beginning to revisit unreflexively the
618 States, scales and households: limits to scale thinking? A response to Brenner

intellectual terrain already covered quite thoroughly’, but the sources of that
unreflexive revisitation may be closer to his doorstep than he suspects. How else are we
to understand the insistence that, despite clear statements in the original paper about
the multiscalar embeddedness of constructions of the household scale, the scale of the
household is dismissed as a ‘singular’ rather than ‘plural’ construction? It is simply
arbitrary that the home is relegated to a ‘place’ or ‘arena’, while the state gets to be a
multifaceted ‘scale’.1 His contention that households comprise ‘relatively stable
background structures to many of the sociospatial transformations in question’ speaks
volumes. One can imagine the response if the original article had dismissed states as
‘relatively stable background structures’.
All of this is not to say that the argument about the construction, stability and
volatility of the household scale, or its embeddedness in other scales, is well worked
out, only that it should not be smothered in the cot just because it looks strange to some
people. The expansive generosity granted Lefebvre whereby a couple of methodologi-
cal hints and phrases are elevated into a grand foundational theory is not extended to
the effort to rethink questions of the household and the body in terms of scale; and it
should be. It should be for theoretical as well as historical reasons. As feminist theorists
have argued about the present, the making of identities involves a layered interpella-
tion of bodily, domestic (household), community, national and global productions, con-
structions, and performances (Berlant, 1997). Indeed the whole emergence of identity
politics in the last three decades is a consummate expression of the restructuring of
spatial scales. Theoretical generosity ought also to be extended for historical reasons,
for, as Robert Wiebe (1994: 113) has noted about the period spanning the turn of the
twentieth century, the crystallization of the national scale in the USA was accompanied
by a distinct ‘revolution in identity’. Future historical research may yet reveal the
household to be a ‘stable background structure’ in all of this, but the smart money will
be wagered elsewhere. In the mean time, if we are indeed to stay ahead of the fetishist
juggernaut, our thinking about scale needs to be rigorous, as Brenner commends, but it
also needs to transcend the limits he imposes. Understanding the ways in which
practices of social reproduction and struggles over social reproduction contribute to the
making of scales, and the simultaneous expression and containment of such struggles
at the behest of scalar structures seems to offer some very exciting ways of breaking the
limits of scale thinking.

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Cindi Katz for her enlightening comments on a draft
of this piece.

Note

1. Throughout Brenner’s past work on scale there has been a periodic conflation of the national
scale with the state. In the response to the original paper there is a clear recognition that the modern
state is multiply scaled at national, local and regional levels. The consistent omission of the global
scale of state formation is interesting especially since, of course, it was the ‘globalization of the state’
that provoked Lefebvre’s methodological comments on scale in the first place.

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