There comes a point in grad school where you realize that you're reading a Foucauldian ethnography of Soviet plumbing fixtures, and it's actually pretty good. Collier uses the distribution of heat as a lens to probe Soviet urbanism, the neoliberal reforms of the 90s, the way that the budgetary process reveals the substantive commitments of government, and the recalcitrance of things against reform.

The historical sections are some of the better parts of the book, as Collier reveals two different origins of normative commitments. In Soviet Russia in the 1920, visionary urban planners developed 'norms' as the telelogical goal by which centralized planning was organized. Industry and city came together, as the housing and services necessary to support a given major industry were calculable on the basis of the population (e.g. a tractor factory employing 5000 workers means housing for 5000 families means 3 elementary schools and 5 hospital beds means housing for teachers and doctors...) The result was a pattern of small cities based around a single heavy industry, acting as a khoziaistvo, the social and infrastructural support of the city, subsidized and directed by the local heavy industry. In the West, neoliberal economists following James Buchanan were working on the problem of government as an economic actor. Collier usefully elucidates the theory of federal redistribution of revenues based on equal regional burdens and benefits from government services that is practically axiomatic in American political thought.

Where this gets interesting, and messy, is in the clash of worldviews in 90s Russia. Neoliberal reformers demanded divesting local government services from unprofitable heavy industries; a division of political and economic spheres that had been linked in the socialist economy. The cash-poor and thoroughly Shock Therapied Russia government complied, but city-wide furnace systems remained a sticking point. Under the table transfers of gas, coal, and steam were the only way to keep entire cities from literally freezing to death, but the design of the system, from the furnaces that powered local industry and heated the city, to the way that it was impossible to link any given person or domicile to use of heat, ultimately foiled the neoliberal reformist vision.

Collier concludes with a argument on the critical stance; that both socialists and neoliberals have an idea of the political community, and the distribution of substantive goods within, and that academic work should not be based on bashing ideologies, but on revealing how those commitments and beliefs operate. The book doesn't quite come together as a project: I felt like there were gaps between the historical work, the ethnographic study of budgetary processes, and the assessment of the technology of centralized heating. As someone working on a similar project, Collier does a better job than I'm doing, but the chain of argument is not as smooth as it could be. And while this is pretty readable for high academic theory, it's still a slog through the Foucauldian taiga. Solid work, but not for everybody.