According to the argument Higgs presents in his book, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens Since 1500, the “Information State” is modern central government as we know it in 2004. That is, this type of state is significantly different to any previous forms of central government because “without information on citizens they would cease to exist”. Furthermore, while the Information State is a relatively recent development, Higgs suggests that it is not actually doing anything different than it was 500 years ago, but rather, that it is simply doing the same thing in a new way. Specifically, he refers to the gathering of information in order to collect taxes, to prepare the nation for war, to prevent crime, and to provide some form of welfare for citizens. These aspects, so goes his argument, have always been evident, but it is only recently that citizens have changed the way they view the state's role and attempted to regulate it.
The book takes a broadly chronological approach, starting in Chapter Two with an overview of current thinking on the rise of the central state, and draws an important distinction between information gathering and the surveillance of citizens (in the theme of Dandeker and Giddens). Chapter Three examines whether information gathering linked to the state existed between 1500 and 1800, that is, pre‐industrialisation, and concludes that it did, albeit in a less centralised form than today. Chapter Four then switches to the more traditionally examined period of the nineteenth century, and looks at the development of information gathering in the light of a continuation of what had already been happening. The fifth chapter examines the pre‐war years, roughly 1880 to 1914, which are viewed as the period where the groundwork was laid for the current Information State, and more specifically, where the real switch from local to central governance began to take place. Chapter Six looks at the growing centralised state in “total war and total welfare” in the first half of the twentieth century, looking at the contradictory roles of the state and arguing that information gathering also has positive attributes that are often overlooked. The following chapter examines the Information State as we know it in the age of information technology, in the latter half of the 20th century. The focus is upon whether new forms of technology have changed the nature of the state itself, or merely allowed it to become more effective in its methods. Finally, Chapter Eight concludes the current position at the start of the 21st century.
Higgs's argument has interesting implications. By suggesting that information gathering by the state originated as early as 1500, albeit from a much more decentralised position, he challenges the traditional view that governmental information gathering and surveillance began as a result of industrialisation in the early 19th century. Furthermore, by arguing that the development of information technology did not lead to information gathering on citizens, but simply facilitated what had been happening previously (and for several centuries at that), he poses some interesting questions with regard to current debates on what the information society is, and when it can have been said to have originated. It also adds to the contemporary debates between the media, government, and some civil liberties groups, on how interventionalist the state has become, and what right it has to monitor its citizens in the name of national security.
Higgs also picks up on the issue of England's unique attitude to government control and information gathering, compared to Europe and the USA. He successfully argues that contemporary issues of central control of information revolve around a fundamental question of constitutional principles. The political revolution in Britain of 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) “led to removal of external impediments to the power of parliament, in the form of royal prerogative, rather than to the idealisation of individual rights, as in the American and French revolutions a century or more later”. This is crucial because it shows that, in England at least, the emphasis and concern for citizens has historically been on the balance of parliamentary power, rather than individual civil rights. However, recent developments in information technology, which have facilitated the gathering and manipulation of information on individuals to an unprecedented degree, are now challenging these traditional English attitudes for the first time, leading to the first legislative attempts to regulate the state itself through the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.
While Higgs does not pursue all these lines of thought in this book, instead using it as an introduction to a much wider topic, his argument does put forward some significant issues for information scientists and historians alike.
