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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
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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 improvin
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Paperback, 445 pages
Published
1998
by Yale University Press
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The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley. (Go often awry.)
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
-Robert Burns
Seeing Like a State is a deeply impressive book.
It begins, in all places, with the study of 'scientific forestry' in 18th century German Prussia. The Prussian state was interested in more accurately quantifying tax revenue, and one possibility was the measurement of forests. This involved cutting down the trees and planting them in neat rows, and measuring ...more
Gang aft agley. (Go often awry.)
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
-Robert Burns
Seeing Like a State is a deeply impressive book.
It begins, in all places, with the study of 'scientific forestry' in 18th century German Prussia. The Prussian state was interested in more accurately quantifying tax revenue, and one possibility was the measurement of forests. This involved cutting down the trees and planting them in neat rows, and measuring ...more

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
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

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
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

Definitely one of the best non-fiction books I have read lately. So much food for thought - so much to rethink about how I look at the world.
I got interested in reading this book because of a series of tweets in response to https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-... about how both stats and stories have limits and can't help us comprehend the full complexity of the truth.
So the book starts of with a description of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia wherein some smart people realized tha ...more
I got interested in reading this book because of a series of tweets in response to https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-... about how both stats and stories have limits and can't help us comprehend the full complexity of the truth.
So the book starts of with a description of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia wherein some smart people realized tha ...more

This book is a fascinating look into the history of state-designed projects and their failures.
Scott’s thesis, as concisely as I can put it, is that state-designed plans often attempt to create highly legible spaces through planned simplifications. For a state, legibility is important because it makes governing and intervening in a population easier -- whether it be for tax collection or public health interventions. These plans often come in the form of modular, grid-like formation that can be ...more
Scott’s thesis, as concisely as I can put it, is that state-designed plans often attempt to create highly legible spaces through planned simplifications. For a state, legibility is important because it makes governing and intervening in a population easier -- whether it be for tax collection or public health interventions. These plans often come in the form of modular, grid-like formation that can be ...more

I think the book is a bit dated, but perhaps it was so influential that its ideas seeped into everything else. It's a solid and almost unassailable thesis--modernizing states overlooked the knowledge of local farmers and other people for central planning and caused all sorts of terrible outcomes. Agreed.
However, at times I think he over extends the thesis to disparage all forms of government planning where his facts and data only apply to land management, farming, and other issues of local cult ...more
However, at times I think he over extends the thesis to disparage all forms of government planning where his facts and data only apply to land management, farming, and other issues of local cult ...more

I first read the more accessible and much shorter text from Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, and as one of my friends observed, that book makes the same basic point as Seeing like a State, though more conversationally. More pithily. (!). But I knew soon after I was into Anarchism that I would read this book. I wanted more. Scott is one of the few contemporary theorists who is actually a great writer. He crafts sentences, he’s compelling. He makes you care about the way ideas may impact the world
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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
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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
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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
-- "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

Five stars for the ideas, two stars for the prose, rounded up because this is just too an important book to not celebrate. Authoritarian high modernism, legibility, and metis—the concepts Scott introduces have hugely affected the way I see the world and have given me a vocabulary for talking about what I find so important about the institutions societies build and the dignity that is to be found in what I will call craft. It took me much longer to finish this beast than expected, but the final c
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Good, but disappointing.
The message is clear, concise and initially highly thought provoking. The problem is Scott's repetitiveness as the same hypothesis and even the same examples sometimes are continually repeated or brought back in. By the end I had enough, and skimmed parts. Yes Professor Scott it's clear that human knowledge is limited, and we need to be careful about what we try to implement this is highly evident now. His's main examples are interesting, but in a way disappointing as hi ...more
The message is clear, concise and initially highly thought provoking. The problem is Scott's repetitiveness as the same hypothesis and even the same examples sometimes are continually repeated or brought back in. By the end I had enough, and skimmed parts. Yes Professor Scott it's clear that human knowledge is limited, and we need to be careful about what we try to implement this is highly evident now. His's main examples are interesting, but in a way disappointing as hi ...more

"Seeing Like a State" is about that most modern of phenomena -- indeed, Scott refers to it as "high modernism" -- rule by expert. Divine right having largely been discarded as a justification for authoritarian rule, science is now pressed into service instead: the ruler's decisions cannot be questioned because they are not political or debatable, being the product of the expert's neutral, technical knowledge. "Seeing Like a State" is essentially a refutation of this assertion: Scott instead demo
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I absolutely loved this book. It’s definitely academic, and the extensive case studies can be a lot to get through, but in my opinion the effort is always rewarded with profound insight. I would say this book comes as close as anything I’ve come across to articulating my personal outlook on politics and history.

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
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Ok, let's start with the good:
There are parts that are 5 star material. The overall concept is very interesting. James C Scott lays his argument very clearly on how we can umderestimate the complexity that is embedded in any attempt for social change. His applying of this concept to urban planning is absolutely facinating, which made me think about the cities I lived in and how various urban projects may have affected how we live and interact in the city. His metaphor of urban planning vs. langu ...more
There are parts that are 5 star material. The overall concept is very interesting. James C Scott lays his argument very clearly on how we can umderestimate the complexity that is embedded in any attempt for social change. His applying of this concept to urban planning is absolutely facinating, which made me think about the cities I lived in and how various urban projects may have affected how we live and interact in the city. His metaphor of urban planning vs. langu ...more

Scott's earlier work is a bit more reserved than his most recent book, but he still manages to explicate the corruption of state making as a process (I even sensed for the first time the linguistic connection between the word ledger and his concept of legibility as the reason for state making). Indeed, that process seems always to involve charts and grids and an authoritarian administrative ideology placing controls upon a prostrate civil society.
The synoptic view is always abstract and partial ...more
The synoptic view is always abstract and partial ...more

I loved this book. It proposes a concept called "high modernism", which can be seen in the architectural designs of Le Courbusier (look at Brasília's main plaza), the revolutionary theory of Lenin (all vanguard, no local organization), Soviet collective farms (top down, no accounting for local conditions), village-ification in Tanzania (the government moved 70% of the country in a few years), early German scientific forestry (ruined the forest), and in state-drawn property lines in France and Ru
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One of the best books I've read....
Why do human beings suffer under the weight of the State, particularly a State that is set up to protect? In the introduction of Seeing Like a State, James Scott introduces the problem of understanding why large-scale social engineering schemes intended for utopia have largely failed. Because the state of all institutions has the greatest ability of “treating people according to its schemata” (82), it is the “vexed institution that is the ground of both our fr ...more
Why do human beings suffer under the weight of the State, particularly a State that is set up to protect? In the introduction of Seeing Like a State, James Scott introduces the problem of understanding why large-scale social engineering schemes intended for utopia have largely failed. Because the state of all institutions has the greatest ability of “treating people according to its schemata” (82), it is the “vexed institution that is the ground of both our fr ...more

An eye-opening work. The middle 90%, comprising case studies of the interesting failures that support Scott’s case, is a bit of a dense academic read; but the bookending chapters, spelling out the criticism of large-scale, dogmatic, authoritarian social and agricultural plans, and praising local, small-folk know-how, are classic.

This book is a great reference and it did intrigue me to learn more about Luxembourg's criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as well as to read Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities. " However, I didn't like Scott's writing style as much as I had expected. I wish he focused more on critical theories and compared different perspectives rather than going into details jumping from one topic to another and repeating his conclusions through the book.

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
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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

james c. scott, devletin bizleri daha minnoş vatandaşlar -insanlar veya bireyler değil, vatandaşlar- haline getirmek için denediği sivil mühendislik projelerini dört ana bölümde incelemiş. kısacık bir girişi takiben; birinci, ikinci ve üçüncü bölüme gelişme, dördüncü bölüme ise sonuç diyebiliriz;
1.devletin okunaklılık ve basitleştirme projeleri
2.dönüştürücü vizyonlar
3.kırsal yerleşimin ve üretimin toplum mühendisliği
4.kayıp halka
ilk iki bölümü zevkle, kana kana, damarlarımda sıcacık anarşizm ile ...more
1.devletin okunaklılık ve basitleştirme projeleri
2.dönüştürücü vizyonlar
3.kırsal yerleşimin ve üretimin toplum mühendisliği
4.kayıp halka
ilk iki bölümü zevkle, kana kana, damarlarımda sıcacık anarşizm ile ...more

The book didn't quite live up to my expectations. The author claims that ambitious state planning efforts often go wrong in a similar way: The government opts for inefficient organizations or approaches that are easy to monitor bureaucratically, at the expense of efficiency, resilience, or popular desire. This is presented as a startling observation, but I think it's conventional wisdom.
To demonstrate the claim, the describes a number of ambitious state planning efforts that went badly, and the ...more
To demonstrate the claim, the describes a number of ambitious state planning efforts that went badly, and the ...more

If you liked Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, this book will most likely interest you. It is full of fascinating stories of grandiose plans going wrong (but still going) due to the same mistakes made by different people. Those mistakes can be summarized like this: You optimize what you measure, and you can only reliably measure simple things. Which leads to thinking along these lines:
* Predicting the future is difficult, so let's ignore it (or pretend i ...more
* Predicting the future is difficult, so let's ignore it (or pretend i ...more

As centuries passed, and the human herd swelled, the strains on society increased, often sparking friction. In an effort to discourage chaos, many societies became more structured — codes of rules, conflict resolution systems, hierarchies of control and coercion. Tribes formed alliances with others, and these confederations often merged into states. In a shark pool of ongoing growth and overshoot, weak states were vulnerable sitting ducks. The struggle for survival was a never-ending challenge.
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One of the big cultural clashes these days is an epistemological one. Between those who praise reason and science (think Silicon Valley types) and those who value local knowledge and feelings (think indigenous activists and certain kinds of postmodernists). There are different ideas, morals and world views, but at heart, how these groups think about what information matters and what ways of thinking are valuable defines how they approach the world and their clash.
Like most people, I lean towards ...more
Like most people, I lean towards ...more

Superb analysis of the dark reality of centralised, state-based rule. Whilst in the main disturbing to see how dispassionate the engine of the state is in any country, it is also quietly uplifting to see that in the end the power of the human spirit overcomes the hubris of the state in the search for a better life.
Too many excellent concepts arise out of this book to give it justice, so hear are a few quotes:
The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platfo ...more
Too many excellent concepts arise out of this book to give it justice, so hear are a few quotes:
The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platfo ...more

This was a long but great book. It clearly made the arguments for incorporating and relying on existing knowledge and societal and physical structures as an important part of any plan to improve an organization or aspect of society. I am aware of my own "quantify all the things!" impulses and this was a great counterargument to going overboard there. Is what you are quantifying the thing that really matters? How do you know? Same with centralization – the fact that we rely on humans to break rul
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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
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“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'.”
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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.”
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