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

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'.