ABSTRACT
“Literacy,” whether in scholarly texts, policy documents or as “common sense” knowledge, tends often to be taken as an unqualified good, a mark of individual advancement and broader social progress. A more critical investigation of the path of mass literacy in western social development, while it in no way denies the liberating power of literacy, shows literacy also to have been a powerful force for broader processes of social control in the emerging capitalist nation states. Current debates on the conceptualization of “state” and “state formation” are highly suggestive for new ways to think about mass literacy. In tracing out the development of state forms under capitalism, the questions of language, literacy and textually mediated forms of governance are fundamental. The centrality of mass literacy disseminated through state-sponsored schooling systems for creating social order and a social identity of “citizenship” is clear. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
