Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 · rating details · 587 ratings · 59 reviews

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for impro...more

Paperback, 445 pages

Published 1998 by Yale University Press

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Mar 21, 2012 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazing book--I haven't been this enthused about a social science text since I read Braudel's "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" about one zillion years ago.

The first chapter of “Seeing like a State” is a brilliant tour de force of how James C. Scott approaches his thesis and his method for analyzing it. Looking at the “acknowledgements” page of the book gives one indication why this chapter is so good: it has been worked and reworked a number of...more This is an amazing book--I haven't been this enthused about a social science text since I read Braudel's "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" about one zillion years ago.

The first chapter of “Seeing like a State” is a brilliant tour de force of how James C. Scott approaches his thesis and his method for analyzing it. Looking at the “acknowledgements” page of the book gives one indication why this chapter is so good: it has been worked and reworked a number of times, appearing as an article in a learned journal, an essay in a book edited by the author, a public lecture sponsored by the Centre for Asian Studies, a chapter in a textbook and a paper delivered at a conference. While it might be possible to say that Scott has dined out on state simplification, the establishment of cadastral maps and population registers, the invention of freehold land tenure, the standardization of language and the widespread use of family names, it would be selling this book very short. All of these things and more made the population and its natural and built environments more legible, rational and standard than it had been before the rise of the centralized state. The needs of the state: conscription, taxation and prevention of rebellion, could only be served if there were central planning and control over what had been the anarchy of rural and village life.

Taken to extremes—a not unusual occurrence, the failures of which never lead to appropriate lessons learned by those in power—the drive for centralization has led to famine, mass death, the collapse of formerly great civilizations and widespread destruction of culture and the ability of the population to reproduce itself. “Seeing like a State” examines the ideology and practice behind some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.

Scott sees four elements that must be present for state power to be unleashed in such destructive ways:

1) The centralized, transformative organizing of nature and society and subjecting it to administrative rules;

2) A high-modernist ideology that is overly confident about scientific and technological progress, expansion of production, mastery of nature and rational design of the social order;

3) An authoritarian state willing and able to use the full weight of its power to bring designs into being; and

4) Crippled civil society with no capacity to resist. War, revolution, economic collapse and national liberation struggles make populations more receptive and weaken traditional power centers. Examples are the collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the resettlement of millions of Tanzanian peasant farmers into Ujamaa villages in the 1960s and the imposition of European/American monoculture, quasi-industrial agriculture on farmers in West Africa and Central America. The war by the new Soviet Russia against the invading western armies, the decades long struggle for independence in Africa and the undermining and overthrow of elected (or at least popular) Third World governments preceded these ecological and human catastrophes.

Scott has no shortage of villains. Among them are Vladimir Lenin, Julius Nyerere, the architect Le Corbusier and, most likely, anyone who has drawn a mid-six figure salary from the International Monetary Fund. Good guys (actually good gals) are not quite as abundant. They include Rosa Luxemburg, urban planner Jane Jacobs and agricultural theorist Albert Howard.

Scott writes elegant prose—he makes several closely reasoned chapters concerning agriculture interesting for their content and fascinating for their style.
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Jan 06, 2013 Dan Allosso rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

“Nomads and pastoralists…hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states,” says Scott. (1998, 1) Premodern states, Scott continues, had great difficulty “seeing” their people, and this interfered with “the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” (2) Efforts to render populations more “legible” included “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names,...more “Nomads and pastoralists…hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states,” says Scott. (1998, 1) Premodern states, Scott continues, had great difficulty “seeing” their people, and this interfered with “the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” (2) Efforts to render populations more “legible” included “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the invention of freehold tenure…language and legal discourse.” These “simplification” practices of early modern states, Scott says, paved the way for “huge development fiascoes” of the modern era like China’s Great Leap Forward. (which killed at least 45 million people, 3)

These modern-day state disasters, Scott says, rest on four elements: the administrative ordering of nature and society, a high-modernist ideology that puts undue confidence in technicians’ ability to reorganize the world through top-down planning, an authoritarian state that can enforce the technicians’ plans, and a prostrate population that cannot resist these plans. (4,5)

“Designed or planned social order,” Scott reminds us, “is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production.” (6) This is such a rich analogy—I can think of a dozen ways to use it in domestic history. And of course, for my purposes, this is the point.

To support his point, Scott describes early modern forests, modern city-builders, Bolsheviks, African villages, and modern agriculture. Comparing modern monoculture to shifting and polycultural farming styles, Scott calls attention to the difference between experimental results and real-world results. He describes the “Blind Spots,” “Weak Peripheral Vision,” and “Shortsightedness” of industrial agriculture, as well as the fact that “Some Yields are More Equal than Others.” (290-306)

The missing link, Scott says, is local, practical knowledge, which he calls “Mētis.” (309) Interestingly, Scott says that many early technocrats, including Frederick Taylor, were aware that “under scientific management…the managers assume…the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen…” (Taylor, quoted in Marglin, Dominating Knowledge, 336) The objective, from the manager’s perspective, is to eliminate the possibility of a work-to-rule strike by owning all the knowledge. Interesting implications for contemporary intellectual property theory.
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Sep 24, 2011 Michael Burnam-fink rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, academic

This is the kind of book that restores my faith in academic theory. It should be required reading for anybody interested in the exercise of power, economic development, or large scale systems.

In Seeing Like a State, Scott explores how attempts to radically transform and improve the human condition have failed. He identifies the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and...more

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Oct 01, 2010 Damien rated it 4 of 5 stars

This broadly comparative book attempts to hone in on some defining characteristics of modern statecraft, which are especially apparent in what he calls 20th century “authoritarian high modernism. Scott argues that modern states are defined by their tendency to take legibility – the ability of the state to count, measure, assess, and otherwise “read” their resources – as the central problem of governance. States therefore often attempt to organize both the social and natural world in accordance w...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Adamhburchard rated it 3 of 5 stars

Some of it is a good tool for showing how statehood in general operates in its quest for the legibility of its citizens. Teaches you how to see the way you're seen from the state's perspective.

-Legibility is a condition of manipulation....they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. In other words, one might s...more

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May 12, 2013 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: essential, history, reviewed

Having read Stephen Pinker's excellent, The Blank Slate, and devouring Nassim Nicholas Taleb's superb duology of, The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile, James C. Scott's, Seeing Like a State, fits quite snugly in this cloud of anti-authoritarian, anti-state, anti-liberal, but most importantly, anti-modernism sentiments that has been seething for the past few decades. While Pinker's focus is psychology/linguistics, and Taleb's is Finance/Philosophy, Scott's diatrabe against the state is manifested in h...more Having read Stephen Pinker's excellent, The Blank Slate, and devouring Nassim Nicholas Taleb's superb duology of, The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile, James C. Scott's, Seeing Like a State, fits quite snugly in this cloud of anti-authoritarian, anti-state, anti-liberal, but most importantly, anti-modernism sentiments that has been seething for the past few decades. While Pinker's focus is psychology/linguistics, and Taleb's is Finance/Philosophy, Scott's diatrabe against the state is manifested in his area of specialization which is agronomy/agriculture. It's a really wonderful breath of fresh air that clears out those musty cobwebs of delusional statist, utopian efforts that should have been put to the grave a long time ago.

Needless to say, the State is misuided and inneficient at best, and downright genocidal and fucking evil at worst. While arguemnts can be made, no doubt, these attempts to quote, "Improve the Human Condition," have been undertaken with the best intentions, their results have been nothing but atrocious assaults on voluntary human action leading to famines, state-sponsored coercion, force, and downright butchery. As Nietzche proclaimed the death of God, so the modern librul has instead of rejecting the omniscient/omnipresent diety's existence, he has merely supplanted one god with another - the state. The state becomes the Big Brother in the sky who is just as capricious, violent, and genocidal as the YHWH of the Old Testament, and the new sacred innerent text is not the Bible, but the holy writ of (Hi-) Modernism.

Unfortunately Plato, who ruined everything, was fucking wrong. There's isn't a realm of perfect ideals where everything that exists is derived from. Life is messy, bizzarre, strange, and downright chaotic. Life, especially human life, is not a mathematical function that can be simply altered with a few different variables here and there. Nope, it's impossibly more complex than any amount of human intelligence and erudition could ever provide. The ancients knew this, and they knew it well. Practical (metis) skills and ability trump knowledge. Which doesn't mean that knowledge is useless or that we should become epistemic nihilists. Knowledge should merely be derived from expirience; grand laws and theories being born our of expierience not the other way around. Bottom up not top down.

Anyways, really great book that has fit in really well with my current philosophical/political proclivities. Scott shows qite clearly how modernism has ruined farming and caused unfathomable harm and destruction to everyday people all with the best intentions.

If you enjoyed this book, I highly recoment Pinnker's, The Blank Slate, and Taleb's, The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile, which both take some pretty have potshots at this whole farce of Modernism and the awful destruction it has wreaked in, psychology, medecine, finance, and economics.

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Jan 25, 2013 Meredith Blank added it

Shelves: school-conflict

Why do catastrophes like famine and food shortages occur in some countries but not others? More importantly, why do some countries experience catastrophes at more severe and more frequent levels even when accounting for geographic and regional factors? Political anthropologist James C. Scott explores human tragedies as failures of the modern state in his work, Seeing Like a State. Adopting a structural approach, Scott investigates why the modern state’s preference for maintaining order and contr...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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Feb 20, 2012 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book sits oddly between popular and academic non-fiction. Not quite focused or rigorous enough to make a solid academic argument, and a bit too dry for Joe Schmoe to dig into. It's a shame, because the study of legibility and its dangers is fascinating. Especially the first 100 pages or so that introduces the concept and how it influenced various practices in history (agriculture, tax collection, names, city design). The book takes some rough intuitions (e.g. that feeling of being a number...more

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Oct 04, 2009 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is an excellent exploration of why the modern state behaves the way it does and why it has trouble undertaking large scale, well-intended projects, like city planning and especially agricultural reform.

It starts with a look at early state attempts to make commerce 'legible,' with the example of efforts to standardize weights and measures in France, which was much more complicated and involved a lot of push back by the aristocracy. Then he looks at the invention of last names and the de...more

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Apr 27, 2013 RA rated it 3 of 5 stars

Scott is fantastically thorough. The depths to which he ventures in his historical analyses of the failings of scientific forestry, urban planning and collectivized farming initiatives, are at once illuminating and overwhelming. I approached Seeing Like A State looking for broader philosophical schema and themes regarding social planning efforts and I was certainly not disappointed in my search. Throughout Scott's work he addresses the philosophical/cultural underpinnings of the times, projects,...more Scott is fantastically thorough. The depths to which he ventures in his historical analyses of the failings of scientific forestry, urban planning and collectivized farming initiatives, are at once illuminating and overwhelming. I approached Seeing Like A State looking for broader philosophical schema and themes regarding social planning efforts and I was certainly not disappointed in my search. Throughout Scott's work he addresses the philosophical/cultural underpinnings of the times, projects, decisions and decision makers, however the reading was often weighted down by the detailed discussions of very technical issues such as poly-cropping versus mono-cropping or the structures of the Russian kolkhoz, etc. I do not wish to say that these discussions were not enlightening, they were indeed so, but the piece's true worth for me came in the form of Scott's overall analysis, the final chapter's discussion of metis and the summary conclusion.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in how states construct control and how they work upon both nature and society to facilitate/consolidate that control, in ways that might seem beneficial, but repeatedly fall far from the initial intent.

My only criticisms/caveats are that:
1) it is definitively targeted at a more focused audience with extensive social planning/anthropology backgrounds, so it can be almost physically painful for the unfamiliar to slog through certain sections, but it is - for the most part - written clearly and succinctly enough that given time and persistence one can process the information.

2) though very open in its treatment of various political and social motivations and their failures, Scott has a mildly annoying habit of going out of his way to ensure the reader realizes that he is not in any way making a case for classical liberalism or free market capitalism. I use the term annoying simply because while some of the analyses and perspectives may seem to support such ideas and philosophical leanings, Scott is sure to abruptly defend his points against the veracity of such claims, only to then provide very weak arguments in that defense, sometimes amounting to nothing more than a simple declaration of "this does not support [insert classically liberal idea]." While in truth detracting very little from the overall worth, it ultimately results in a perception that Scott is constantly paying lip service to statists and those of similar ideology, which is unnecessary and only adds to the already tedious experience of reading through certain sections of the work. (less)

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Mar 20, 2013 Elizabeth Theiss rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my favorite political science books of all time, Seeing Like a State underscores the importance of a vibrant civil society and the foolhardiness of state central planning. Scott provides a series of instructive and fascinating case studies from disasters associated with the shift to mono cropping in poor nations to the folly of city planning in Brasilia.

This is a book full of insights into administrative hubris and its consequences. I remember when it first came out, John Grey's review i...more

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Apr 10, 2011 Kelsey Fitzpatrick rated it 3 of 5 stars

James Scott's "Seeing Like a State" offers a plethora of valuable information on city-state topics. A few of these topics include monoculture, planned cities and the beginning of last names. I found the last names portion particularly interesting, Scott informed readers that last names were given by the government as a way to tax and keep track of the population. One example from the book is the Spanish government passing out spanish last names to the people of the Philippines, which made then v...more

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Apr 21, 2011 Ariel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookshelf

I loved this book. Academic but completely engaging and readable.
Basically the general idea is a critic of high modernist state planning that abstracts reality to the point that the reality is changed to its likeness despite consequences. Scott notes that across political divides, the belief in the technology of high modernism, from Brasilia, to Soviet collectives to African villagization, has lead to a top down approach that ignores reality on the ground.

The examples given have had devastating...more

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Feb 17, 2012 Sergei Moska rated it 3 of 5 stars

The central thesis of the book is very interesting and valuable. Yet after a very good theoretical beginning, the book disappoints a bit in several ways. Some of the authors' peripheral claims remain unsupported, which makes the argument weaker. The book shines as a think-piece and as an interesting history of certain large-scale initiatives, but social scientists who put a big emphasis on deductive validity (or even rigorous argumentation) won't like it.

Then again, given Scott's central argumen...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Margaret Sankey rated it 4 of 5 stars

So, you're the state, and you've devised a brilliant modernization plan--people must choose last names (Mindanao), accept new standardized measurement (France's colonies), live on redivided farmland carefully surveyed to give each person equal sections (Stolypin's Russia), move to a beautiful new capital designed by Le Corbusier (Brasilia), or grow a single, new crop (collective villages, Tanzania), but the ungrateful wretches don't like it! Scott examines why, with the best intentions, planned...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Jill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: policymaking-and-management

There are times when you read a book and it's as if someone's opened a window to let the light in. I had one of those moments just 20 minutes or so after cracking open Scott's Seeing Like A State. In his book, Scott tries to unpack the various failures in high-modernist, authoritarian state planning, from the building of Brazil's new capital in Brasilia, Soviet collectivization and ujamaa villages in Tanzania. These case studies form the heart of the book and while interesting, were not what spa...more There are times when you read a book and it's as if someone's opened a window to let the light in. I had one of those moments just 20 minutes or so after cracking open Scott's Seeing Like A State. In his book, Scott tries to unpack the various failures in high-modernist, authoritarian state planning, from the building of Brazil's new capital in Brasilia, Soviet collectivization and ujamaa villages in Tanzania. These case studies form the heart of the book and while interesting, were not what sparked the Aha! moment for me (hence the four stars, rather than five).

For me, that flash of illumination came when Scott articulated the state's need for legibility and simplification to facilitate its exercise of control and power. From the physical design of cities and the layout of road networks, to the creation of surnames and the standardization of language, Scott argues that all these are initiatives driven by the impulse to simplify and create legibility. Legibility may not necessarily lead to the most efficient or productive outcomes - industrial food production with its heavy dependence on fertilizers, antibiotics and attendant problems of pollution etc is a case in point. But seen from the context of legibility and simplification to enhance centralized control it makes perfect sense. A legible population makes it easier for the government to collect taxes, draft people for military service, etc. But Scott isn't making a blanket argument against governments, or against their quest for legibility and simplification. He acknowledges that this impulse can help bring about important outcomes, such as when used for vaccination drives.

I don't know if previously, on some level, I'd had a vague awareness of this impulse for simplification and legibility. But Scott's cogent analysis certainly put things in sharp perspective for me, made me think about policy initiatives from another angle and consider some of the underlying motivations/impulses that are not immediately apparent. And that's what I love about this book. It's given me a new lens through which to view the world.(less)

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Aug 04, 2011 Adam Wiggins rated it 3 of 5 stars

Dense and academic, but some truly poignant insights buried among all those big words.

Starting a few hundred years ago, states (that is, national governments) found many new informational tools at their disposal: population censuses, for example. Top-down management of national populations became possible like never before, offering governments greater ability to extract taxation and conscription from their populations, thereby increasing the power of the state.

"Administrative legibility" is a t...more
Dense and academic, but some truly poignant insights buried among all those big words.

Starting a few hundred years ago, states (that is, national governments) found many new informational tools at their disposal: population censuses, for example. Top-down management of national populations became possible like never before, offering governments greater ability to extract taxation and conscription from their populations, thereby increasing the power of the state.

"Administrative legibility" is a term used throughout the book. This is the (very natural) desire of an administrator of any resource to make it uniform and measurable. For example, an apple farmer would rather his orchards consist of neat rows of monoculture trees, rather than the sprawling, chaotic, illegible mess of a natural forest. A government administrator sees their population the same way an apple farmer sees his orchard.

The author describes the rise of high modernism. A century ago, the spectacular changes wrought on human life by the advances of science and industry led many to believe that we lived in an Age of Reason where absolutely no area of human existence could not be improved by the application of scientific and industrial methods. While in some senses we live in a world built by high modernists, at the same time many of these individuals extended these ideas to the point of absurdity.

For example, city planning. Many people put their faith in central planning as a way to eliminate the inefficiencies and ugliness of urban life. High modernists designed cities like Brasilia, which were designed to offer each person a home identical to every other, with the exact amount of living space, breathable air, storage space, and other necessities computed "scientifically." Naturally, this led to a completely unlivable city.

Nations like the USSR and Tanzania executed many top-down plans to bring administrative legibility to their populations. These plans were always horrible failures, causing great suffering in these nation's populations despite their very good intentions.

The overall message was: while top-down administration has its uses, too much of the uniformity desired by administrators stifles human life, ambition, and innovation.
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Apr 25, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-history

Mistaken notions I previously held that this brainy tome corrected:

-- "Physiocrats" advocate government by massage therapy.

-- "Usufruct" is available in a fun variety of colorful flavors.

-- If someone tells you that something is "immanent", just hang around and wait for it to happen.

-- "Pari Passu" is what's for lunch at the ashram.

-- Upon reading (p. 19 of Kindle edition) that a particular type of tree was a “bread-and-butter tree”, it is appropriate to rush into the nearest park with a shaker...more

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Oct 18, 2009 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

Scott's dissection of the hubris & folly of scientific agriculture, of monoculture and reckless disregard of local environments, of planned cities in which -- at urban scales -- the peas are not allowed to touch the carrots, adds up to sharp condemnation of reductionist simplification and abstraction applied to governance, agriculture, and industry. At an engineer's scale, such simplification is the very substance of technology, from simple plows to grid computing. But as Scott demonstrates,...more

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Jul 08, 2007 Anders rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book finds Scott resting on his laurels a bit too much, writing a book which falls awkwardly between pop-academia a la Guns, Germs and Steel, and full-on academia. Too much simplifying to hold a lot of water in the academy, but still too opaque for the masses. The first few chapters of this book are pretty good, but by the end, you start to catch on that his argument is pretty simplistic, and sort of flawed. I read this at the same time,. chapter by chapter, as Timothy Mitchell's Rule of ...more

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Jun 05, 2007 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

While most theory books have a hard time captivating me, this one is very well done. Scott focuses on why some of the utopian centrally-planned societies failed and why organic "home-spun" communities and societies generally are more adapt to deal with harsh times. Echoing Kroptkin's writing nearly a century later (though without all the romance) Scott states that local mutual aid works more systematically than systematic over-arching state plans. He goes through several historical examples, suc...more While most theory books have a hard time captivating me, this one is very well done. Scott focuses on why some of the utopian centrally-planned societies failed and why organic "home-spun" communities and societies generally are more adapt to deal with harsh times. Echoing Kroptkin's writing nearly a century later (though without all the romance) Scott states that local mutual aid works more systematically than systematic over-arching state plans. He goes through several historical examples, such as Soviet collectivization, the building of Brasilia as the new "modern" capital of Brazil away from the coastal "cultural" capital of Rio de Janeiro, Tanzania's "villagization", the designs of the modernist city planning versus unplanned cities, all the way to such things we today take for granted such as linguistics, measurement, and censuses which he argues all started as ways of social control by the bourgeois State.

One of the most compelling arguments he makes is near the beginning, when he goes through the story of German forest planters, who wanted to make their timber growth larger by planning out a forest, instead of getting it from a thicker natural forest. What they found was that after 1 or 2 generations of trees, the forest began to die, because it had no ecosystem to support it and the species of the trees were more or less the same. The soil became loosen as the trees were perfectly spaced, diseases spread easily since all the trees were the same species and equally susceptible, and there was no ecosystem or diversity to keep the trees health.

He takes that example as a metaphor for human planning, and quickly touches into the ways of measurement in the 1700s versus now. Because in, for example France, there were literally hundreds of different ways of measuring things depending on where you went, it was fairly difficult for the Monarchy to collect taxes on a regular basis. After the French Revolution, the newly ascended bourgeois wanted to empower the state to direct the nation, and thus needed ways to more regurally collect taxes. They made the metric system standard, replacing lots of local culture. Before, in places across the world, the local measurement system made sense to people, and not always involved distance. An example would be in New Guinea, people tell how far away something is by "ricepots". Everyone knows how long it takes to boil a pot of rice, and so 3 ricepots would be a two hour walk.

Another fascinating point was a comparison of a right-wing city planner with the collectivization program of Lenin and Stalin. It is amazing to note the similarities. Huge collective farms were eventually even used for a model of American factory farms, which have replaced most small farmers in the United States today. When Paris redesigned itself in the early 20th century, it destroyed many old neighborhoods, in part as an effort to prevent any more revolutions, since the city had more or less brought down the government four times in less than 100 years (1792, 1830, 1848, 1871). Thus, the perfect modernist designs were not an effort to build a utopia, but an effort of the state to control the population and prevent resistance.

Overall, the book, though a little thick, is a good read. The author is not an anarchist, but the argument he presents lends much credit to the anarchist argument against centralization of society, whether it be state or corporate. His arguments are centered on Europe since this is where much of the state control theories arose, and present good arguments against both the "well meaning socialist" who wants the government to run society for the people, and the "libertarian party" member who would like to see big business replace the state. (less)

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Feb 09, 2013 Phil rated it 5 of 5 stars

Path-breaking book that should be required for International Affairs and Political Science students in the same way that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and "Fooled by Randomness" should be required for Economics and Finance students. Everything from last names to ordered streets come under Scott's perceptive analysis. This book expands the problems of Utopia highlighted by John Gray's "False Dawn" into a wider study that covers the flaws of trying to plan everything from agriculture to zoology.

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May 30, 2012 Jay McNair rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of the best non-fiction books I've read in a while (though it took me a long time to read the first hundred pages or so). It attempts to explain why many utopian ambitions have failed to improve human life--things like Brazil's planned capital of Brasilia, Lenin's revolution, Stalin's collectivization, Tanzania's villagization, modern agriculture's industrial agriculture and monocropping. Each example was fascinating and illuminating, and insightful underline-worthy bits were frequent.

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Nov 14, 2010 Mirza Sultan-Galiev rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: political-economy-and-its-critique, culture, technology

Very illuminating history on a wide variaty of issues (last names as a means of tax collection, the similarity between Soviet and American "scientific" farming etc), however the failure (despite statements in the intro to the contrary) to integrate the critique of the modernizing state with a critique of the logic of generalized commodity production, leaves this book a little too close to the Austrian school.

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Jan 12, 2011 614(life) rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an amazing book but is overly academic in its discussion. Though geared at a lot of development projects, it also addresses mans desire to control nature--the manifestations of that as well as a sort of "step-by-step" guide for future "schemes to improve the human condition." At least the final chapter and conclusions should be required reading for anyone who wants to work in development.

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Aug 01, 2010 david rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: law-and-the-state

A fantastic book. the chapter of the Germanic forest is especially important. Scott argues that man of the 19th and 20th century atrocities of state development were orchestrated as a combination of:
1. aspirations for scientific/ rational rule (high modernist ideology)
2. power of the modern state to mobilize those aspirations and put them into practice.
3. a weakened civil society capable of pushing back against this vision.

his chapter on Lenin and Luxenburg is also particular;y interesting. he...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Taylor rated it 4 of 5 stars

this book is a big part of the reason i'm a social scientist and has profoundly influenced my thinking. when i read it five years ago, i would have given it 5 stars; now I give it 4 stars because I can see that Scott's argument against formal/state knowledge and in favor of "metis" or local knowledge is ultimately too simplistic and unqualified.

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Nov 14, 2011 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: political-theory, nonfiction

Consistently interesting discussion of the distorting & destructive side of centralizing, modernizing impulses at work in a variety of modern settings, from Soviet Russia to villages in Tanzania. Shows how the central authority's need to be able to read the terrain, the people, etc. involves an oversimplification, but also a transformation of the thing that gets "read" this way.

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Apr 27, 2009 Sam Grace marked it as to-read

Recommended to Sam by: Steve Lansing

Shelves: academic, anthropology-recs

Got to read the intro and first chapter for History of Anthro Theory class and thought it was very well written and super interesting. This is totally not my area of interest, but I may have to go read the whole thing anyway.

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About James C. Scott

received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD (1967) from Yale. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976, when he returned to Yale. Now Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the N...more

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Books by James C. Scott

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play

The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia

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“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order, The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain.” — 3 people liked it

“The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.” — 2 people liked it

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

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