The president of Rutgers University, a large public American university recently wrote a column in its alumni magazine titled, “For Good, Measure.” In it he described how the university was “using metrics to ensure it stays on mission” by collecting data measuring 50 aspects of the university’s mission. These include one-year retention rates, graduation rates, academic satisfaction, fundraising goals, research grants received, endowments, and debt. One can imagine the incentives that went along with reaching or failing to reach targets for these indicators. The result of all this data tracking is “more efficiency,” staff and faculty “working smarter”, greater accountability, and helping the university stay “on mission.”^{Footnote 1} Alain Supiot’s engaging, ambitious and sweeping book helps us understand how we arrived at a place where we valorize numbers and treat universities (and most organizations) like businesses.

In a wonderful book that merits careful scrutiny, Supiot argues that we have lived through a profound transformation in work, law, the state and economic life. He characterizes this shift as one from governing by law to governance by numbers. Supiot sees this as a global institutional crisis, one that leaves workers profoundly alienated from work, politics, and each other. Just what does this shift entail? One major change is that the notion of government is replaced by “the terminology of management” [29]. Workers become human capital. Justice is supplanted by efficiency. Rules give way to objectives. Unions become social partners. Under the liberal regime, law was a prerequisite for the market but retained some autonomy from it; it was not purely an instrument of the market, as it is now. And, globally, firms are now free to pit nations against each another in their search for the most lenient fiscal, labor and environmental laws. Where government is the subordination of individuals to the rule of law, governance by numbers relies on the programming of individuals to continually respond to information and quantified objectives. This shift to a cybernetic view of work entails “mutually adjusting calculations of individual utility.”

Central to Supiot’s method is “treating the law as a cultural fact.” By this he means situating law in its historical and material context, and making judicious use of comparison. He characterizes law according to its aesthetic and poetic dimensions. These are the imaginary metaphors that we use to capture the predominant normativity of an era, to conceptualize law and society, and determine how it is we recognize ourselves in relation to it. We have variously understood rulers and subjects as helmsmen of ships, as shepherds of flocks. However, the most dominant metaphor, at least since the Enlightenment, has been the image of society as a machine in which individuals are interdependent cogs.

The first part of Supiot’s book traces the development of various aesthetic imaginaries. Under the Greeks, law was first conceived of as being man-made rather than divine. Nomos was the Greek term for laws made by and for citizens, where man is subordinate to impersonal law. The Roman conception of lex which eventually came to mean text, and ius, which originally referred to specialized secret knowledge but came to mean law as both a set of rules to follow and a right to act, was combined in Roman law with nomos to create a system of law that was separate from the philosophical and political associations it had in Greece. During the Middle Ages, the Gregorian Revolution combined Roman law with canon which gave rise to an understanding of government in which law is not simply an instrument of sovereign power but also a force that helps to create it where the sovereign is subordinate to impersonal law. This conception shaped the early sovereign states and the development of both civil law and common law. Rule by law became the dominant aesthetic imaginary.

The image of society as a machine is associated most famously with Hobbes. This image of machinery that is guided by elites that are informed by science remained the dominant aesthetic until well into the 20th century. As Supiot notes, Taylorism was the culmination of this normative order, where a few were paid to think and many simply followed orders. But the mechanics of work are now being driven by images of dispassionate science and technology.

Under the neoliberal order, workers are no longer cogs in a machine but are part of “programmable systems of interacting unity adjusting automatically to signal inputs and feedback” [25]. As Supiot puts it, the “physico-mechanical model of the clock, linked to the idea of the reign of law, has been supplanted by the model of the computer. The organization of work is no longer conceived of as a machine controlled by the lay of weights and forces but as a programmable system of interacting units adjusting automatically to signal inputs and feedback” [25]. These inputs are typically the metrics and indicators that are now routinely used to control and organize work. Quantification has long been fundamental to the control of labor, be it piece work, wages, or legislation about the length of the work day. What is new, for Supiot, is that it is no longer just the body which is subordinated. Now the mind is dominated, too.

The second part of Supiot’s book examines the consequences of governance by numbers with an emphasis on law and employment, considering the effects for individuals, corporations, states and global relations. Rather than being sovereign subjects, workers are constructed into “objective subjects” who react to signals rather than act freely [179]. Corporations become single-minded entities, focusing exclusively on shareholder value. Where, formerly, corporate sectors were integrated according to a Fordist model, they are now organized as networks of subcontractors subordinate to the contractor. Supiot’s compelling insight is to suggest that the legal relations among these entities are similar to a feudal system in which the prime contractor controls considerable capital of the subcontractor who controls the sub-subcontractors in a complex structure of obligation and deference.

A book of such scope cannot spend much time close to the empirical ground. Nonetheless, it would have been useful to have at least one or two concrete examples of how metrics affect behaviour in practical terms. One of the consequences of governance by numbers is the instability that is generated from more fluid labor markets and from the “autonomy” to determine the means to meet objectives. One form of flexible work is the gig or “click” economy, where workers rely on platforms to locate temporary jobs in transportation, housekeeping, home repair, or programming. It is estimated that some 70 million people have registered with on-line labor applications^{Footnote 2}. Gig workers are often treated as independent contractors and may not receive the benefits (health care, health insurance, training, paid vacations) and protections (the right to be organized) offered to employees. Supiot rightly emphasizes that one of the consequences of flexibility is the stress that workers experience in this form of governance, and its implications for their mental health. He does not provide much detail of what this feels like but others have done so. Part of this stress comes from the “on demand” economy and the precariousness of work—the uncertainty over wages and not knowing how many hours one can or must work. For Valenduc and Vendramin [2016: 34]^{Footnote 3} gig work is a “continuous employment relationship without continuous work”. In some cases, the market is global and competition is fierce. As one Nigerian working in social media advertising reported^{Footnote 4}, “immediately [as] you see an offer being posted… you will see 50 proposals have been submitted.” Needless to say, this drives wages down.

Another aspect of the stress associated with governance by numbers is the type of surveillance they achieve. Even if governance is not the stated goal, our fascination with performance metrics of all kinds has penetrated deeply into many spheres. Take educational rankings. First intended as useful consumer information, in an already market-driven conceptualization of students, they became such visible markets of quality that they came to penetrate higher education. As a result, extraordinary efforts are made to manipulate the statistics and data that comprise them. At the global level this means that universities across the globe are constructed in a relative hierarchy. Some countries have reorganized their universities and their missions in order to climb the rankings. At the organizational level, rankings are “engines of anxiety,” where efforts to improve the numbers are relentless and backed by powerful incentives^{Footnote 5}. Administrators feel intensive competition with former colleagues; they are suspicious of the numbers their peers compile; and they fear for their bonuses and their jobs each year as the rankings are released.

Supiot’s depiction of the “withering of the state” is, I think, overblown. If part of the neoliberal contract has been to “liquefy” labor markets, the state has certainly reasserted itself in the policing of its borders. As I write this, the children of refugees are separated from their deported parents, many of whom were fleeing for their lives, and housed in facilities that often seem like prisons. And it is exceedingly difficult to obtain a visa to work in the US. In Great Britain, of course, not just migrant labor but the entire economy is threatened by Brexit. And the current trade war between the US and China, with the imposition of thousands of tariffs, will put a damper on trade. Clearly the state retains the muscle to disrupt the free movement of labor and goods.

Who should read Governance by Numbers? Quantification scholars, of course. Economists. If only. Legal scholars, political theorists, social theorists, scholars of work and globalization, Marxists, management scholars, and anyone concerned with the state of contemporary politics. Supiot has written a book that should animate scholars for many years. One of the most stirring features of his work is his commitment to making work meaningful and workers dignified.

Saskia Brown deserves praise for a fine translation, as does The Collège de France and the Institut d’Etudes Advancées de Nantes for providing the support that made it possible.