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

by James C. Scott

4.18 · Rating details · 1,842 Ratings · 174 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

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Paperback, 445 pages

Published 1998 by Yale University Press

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Apr 28, 2013 Hadrian rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, society-culture-anthropology-etc, economics-finance-business, nonfiction

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 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 the output in lumber value. This narrow focus on one trait ignores the complex ecosystem of the forests, and the alternate means of value which the local peasants could otherwise obtain from the forest - not just from other plants, but even from spare twigs and local wildlife. Although it was widely praised in its time, the forestry experiment turned into an ecological disaster, with unsustainable lumber usage and poorer peasants.

This story, writ large, is repeated throughout history in Scott's book. Forming policy and reducing it to a statistic which does not accurately represent the whole. States have had an interest in making society 'legible' - that is, making complex patterns easily understood. The results of these plans are chaotic, even with the best of intentions. Some are merely confusing, but with merit, as seen with the standardization of weights and measures in Revolutionary France (and done by the Chinese 2100 years earlier), the creation of maps, and the imposition of surnames instead of patronymics.

Scott finds many other examples in the 19th and 20th century urban planning schemes. He looks at Baron Haussmann's plan to build broad bouvelards across Paris, but they led to mass evictions and the construction of new slums. A new railroad built in France completely ignored populated areas because the designer wanted a nice straight line on a map. Here are also the examples of the planned Brasilia, Chandrigarh, and the schemes of Le Corbusier.

The one exception Scott notes for this sort of organized plan is the square grid system of homesteads and the construction of cities in the American Midwest, but this is because the cities were built as something entirely new. The natives were already driven off.

This sort of planning, Scott says, is risky and comes with enough unforeseen effects. It becomes dangerous to human society as a whole when combined with an authoritarian state and weak civil society.

Take, for example, Lenin's idea of a revolutionary vanguard. He hoped for a single unified party apparatus to control all aspects of a revolution. This was done not without protest - he was rebuked by Kollontai and Luxemburg, who opposed the idea on principle, and saw that any group which attempted to control the forces of the revolution would lead to a cliquish dictatorship. They were right. Stalin continued these programs - and he succeeded, but in molding Russian society to submit completely under his control, not in many senses of human welfare.

Another example is the 'ujamaa' project of Julius Nyerere's Tanzania. Citizens were forced into collective villages. This also led to disaster, leading to declines in food production, and the ruling power using increasingly militarist means to keep the population in line.

Now all of these schemes have a broad philosophical outlook in common, which Scott calls 'High modernism' - the belief that technology and bureaucratic planning could solve problems, and that desk planners know how to best organize human society. A design which looks simple and pleasing on paper leads to unforeseen side effects. It's like what happens when you play Civilization - you want to have a nice easily-run empire, so you treat it as a whole, find ways to ignore micromanagement, focus on the values you want to increase, and neglect the welfare of the citizen. Scott warns that this still goes on today, and he cites the dangers of industrial agriculture, among many unsaid others.

Now how do we best address all this? Scott lists some alternative principles and caveats. Some of these plans did take the place of worse alternatives, and some were sorely needed. But most of his advice is grouped under the term metis, taken from Aristotle. Scott emphasizes the fact that some form of genuine representation must take place in the ordering of society, so that those with practical experience will have a say in how the way society is ordered. A theory can be very pretty, but it must be challenged by questions, facts, and practice. ...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it it was amazing

Shelves: academic, 2011

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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Mar 07, 2012 Ed rated it it was amazing

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 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.
...more

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Jan 15, 2017 Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-of-2017

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

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Feb 05, 2012 Jill rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Apr 02, 2017 Jayesh rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, favorites, history

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

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Jul 16, 2013 David Schaafsma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: economics, politics, eng-557-spring-2016, books-loved-2016

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 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. And Scott, Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, makes his case against mindless bureaucracy by drawing on fields as widely different as agriculture and urban planning. This book is by his own admission too long for its own good—which is to say it makes a great point, but will lose readers along the way for its sheer length--but you don’t have to read all of it to get the basic point.

The basic point is that top-down, standardized approaches to ANYTHING are destructive to the planet and to human needs. Scott is basically a kind of anarchist in principle, an anti-systems guy, who wants us to solve problems (usually) locally, from the ground up, together. He romanticizes nomads, serfs, gypsies for a kind of passive resistance to The State, but he also calls for folk knowledge and ad hoc approaches to the world. He hates administrative ordering, he hates high modernist (or neo-liberal) ideology that is shrilly optimistic and naïve about scientific progress. He illustrates the failure of great utopian social engineering schemes of the last 150 years. Urban planning of all kinds. Soviet collectivization. Tanzanian forced villagization. Disasters of epic proportion with dire and lasting human consequences. And it continues, this approach to problem-solving. Too much order on the basis of some academic theory is counter-productive, leads to chaos and destruction and unhappiness. Fixity leads to disaster.

Scott prefers metis, which is a kind of practical knowledge, drawing on social and natural diversity. Plastic, and divergent. Drawing on biodiversity, something now largely ignored by those trying to make big bucks shortsightedly, creating the sixth great species die-off. “The science of muddling through,” Scott likes, or what Jane Addams called “the doing of that which we don’t know how to do.” Figuring things out as you go, pragmatically. Think Local. Organic. Ecology of mind (Gregory Bateson). Interaction. Dialogue. Narrative instead of simplistic measurements. Films vs. snapshots. Language in all its fluidity and diversity as a model for growth, growth seen as fulfilling a range of human needs and not “progress” as rampant economic worldwide devastation. So nothing new, you say, but the proof is in the highly detailed examples of these problems.

The only problem with the book—besides the length--is that it focuses on illustrations of disaster as a way of developing principles for doing the opposite, as opposed to using stories of good things that have happened as a way of accomplishing the same thing. What's depressing is that there may be more stories to tell of widespread groupthink catastrophes than amazing human successes. Is this true? I am afraid it may be depressingly so, though I invite you to write your own hopeful tome in response to Scott.

My interest in science fiction and dystopian visions in comics and other novels is grounded in a kind of organic (and hopeful, progressive) vision that is grounded in ideals similar to Scott’s, which are familiar to me as a kind of sixties grounded activist, drawing as I have done on thinkers as diverse as Freire, Addams. Saul Allinsky’s radical pragmatism. Paul Feyerabends’s Against Methods. Orwell’s 1984. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That kind of thing. Hopeful stories for developing planet-saving principles for social action.

David Coleman, the President of the College Board and chief architect of the Common Core Standards sweeping the public schools, (something that Scott characterizes as just as disastrous as any standardized approach to anything), says, as a way of understanding why it is we all must do the same things at the same time:

“As you grow up in this world, you start to realize that people don’t give a shit about what you feel, or what you think.”

Coleman uses this “insight” to essentially claim that we must all do the same thing in schools. We must all learn K-college how to argue all the time. We have to read much more non-fiction and read far less literature. Stop writing poetry. We must standardize the curriculum rather than diversify it.

Coleman’s view is seeing like a state in its essence. But I, with Scott, think we have to start giving a shit about what ordinary people feel and think. Does it sometimes lead to Trump’s America? Maybe, sometimes. Local knowledge isn’t always perfect. You can’t romanticize it too much. But it is probably less likely to end in disaster than fascism. We must give a shit about what local communities with a thirst for economic and social justice might look like before it is too late.
...more

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Jun 09, 2012 Kars rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, ribbonfarm

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 ...more

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Aug 24, 2009 David rated it liked it

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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Apr 12, 2014 William Leight rated it it was amazing

"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 "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 demonstrates that not only is supposedly neutral and technical knowledge often ideologically weighted, in many cases it lacks universal applicability. While the scientifically-trained expert can provide help and advice, he cannot dictate to those in the field (in "Seeing Like a State", which focuses largely on agriculture, often literally so), because his training, while useful, does not allow him to solve the problems they face. Indeed, Scott's claim is that there is no training for the solution of many real-world problems other than the process of trying to solve said problems.

Scott is not, of course, the first to tackle the ideological underpinnings of what is often presented as entirely ideology-free knowledge. David Noble's "America by Design" examined the way that the needs of some of America's largest corporations determined the growth of the engineering profession in the early 20th century (including university presidents quoted as describing the job of engineering training as being to produce the right type of human raw material for factory use). John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" similarly challenged the neutrality of the modern administrative-bureaucratic elites usually referred to as technocrats. Scott's main example of seemingly neutral but actually ideological expertise is the field of scientific agriculture, which he examines together with case studies of forced collectivization in the USSR and the ujaama villages in Tanzania. In all three books, the key is to understand the assumptions that go into generating knowledge. After all, one cannot make logical deductions from nowhere: some axioms are needed to start with. In relatively abstract sciences like mathematics or physics, where the goal is to generate basic knowledge, the necessary axioms are parsimonious and widely-agreed upon (though mathematicians can still spend time disputing the relative merits of, say, the axiom of choice vs. Zorn's lemma); in more concrete fields like engineering or economics, such is not necessarily the case; and when the goal moves from simply increasing knowledge to causing real-world effects, things can get very dicey indeed. For scientific agriculture, of course, real-world effects are very much the goal: the direction of research is determined by which effect is desired, and the underlying assumptions that determine the relative desirability of effects. For the most part, the most desired effect of scientific agriculture is a maximal yield of a single species (usually a grain) in a single field in a single season. Short-term yield maximization is certainly one possible measure of agricultural success, but one could easily imagine others. Maximization of nutrition, for instance, or taste. Or one could prefer to maximize the quality of the soil over a much longer time-frame. Or one might be more worried about minimizing the year-to-year variation in harvests. Furthermore, the focus on the yield of grain is somewhat misleading, especially for small farmers in developing countries, who may be counting on their crop to also provide building material, fodder for livestock, raw material for crafts, compost for subsequent crops, etc., etc. So why did the short-term yield of a monoculture grain field become the centerpiece of scientific agriculture? To a significant extent because it was what large American agricultural companies were most concerned with.

But for Scott, the ideological freight of modern scientific agriculture goes beyond its utility to large agriculture corporations. Its recommendations -- invariably for large, heavily mechanized farms, with identical crop strains and the profuse application of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides to overcome non-uniformity of soil or location -- fundamentally reflect not just a desire to boost profits, but rather a strong belief in the necessity of the centralization and control of the farming process. In the U.S., this centralization and control was accomplished via large agribusiness corporations, but the central ideological goal of transferring control of agriculture from small farmers to centralized bureaucracies transcended what we usually think of as ideological systems. Polices that made it possible for a centralized corporate bureaucracy to control the countryside for the purpose of extracting profits were just as useful for centralized state bureaucracies that wished to control the countryside to extract taxes or bolster their power. This is most vividly demonstrated by examining forced collectivization in the USSR and forced (though to be fair, vastly less force was used) villagization in Tanzania under Nyerere. Both involved taking populations that were largely outside of state control and moving them into it. Following the Russian Revolution, Russian peasants had carried out their own program of land reform, without Bolshevik help, and hence much of the countryside consisted of semi-autonomous villages where the state had little idea of how much was being produced, much less the power to tax that production. Much of the motivation of collectivization, then, stemmed from Stalin's desire gain control over the countryside -- both to enhance state power and make it possible to more effectively tax agricultural production -- by moving the people from villages where the state had no idea what was going on to collectives controlled by the state. Similarly, the scattered and semi-nomadic Tanzanian peasant population was difficult for the Tanzanian state to reach: though Nyerere hoped to reach the people with clinics and schools as well as police and taxes, the underlying impetus towards control was much the same. Stalin and Nyerere both justified their polices by appeals to socialism, of course, but in this case "socialism" meant the adoption of modern, large-scale, mechanized farming methods that would be far more productive than primitive peasants with their small plots and backwards, unscientific methods: which is to say, scientific agriculture. As such, both Nyerere's and Stalin's policies were embraced by decidedly non-socialist Western experts. American agricultural experts were envious of vast collectivized Soviet farms that were being designed and run by technical specialists on the basis of the most up-to-date principles, and wished that agriculture in the U.S. could be reconstructed in the same scientific fashion. Similarly, there was a striking continuity between Nyerere's ujaama villages and previous attempts by the British colonial government to concentrate the population, and Nyerere's plans were met with favor in Western capitalist bastions like the World Bank. All entities, on both sides of the ideological split, believed that the central control of agricultural production by technical experts was essential.

And this kind of agreement across ideological lines was not limited to scientific agriculture. Taylorist principles of scientific management, which attempted to reduce factory work to a series of well-defined motions which the worker would perform without any idea of why he was doing them -- only the manager would need to see the big picture, and hence he would have full control -- were enthusiastically embraced by capitalists, Communists, and fascists alike. Differences over who would be in control of the process paled in comparison to the agreement that the process must be controlled by a managerial elite. Scott takes another example from modernist urban theory by comparing Brasilia, designed by the Communist architect Oscar Niedermayer, and Chhattisgarh, designed by the anti-Communist architect Le Corbusier. Again, despite the fact that the two architects are poles apart ideologically, their cities are designed along very similar lines. Both emphasize a geometrical order, one that is only visible from a birds-eye view. Both favor entirely single-purpose neighborhoods: only residences, only shopping, only offices, etc. Both make use of roads that are only useful for getting from point A to point B by car. Both contain lots of empty space, but generally in large, sterile quantities, and far from where people actually live: smaller street-corner spaces where people might congregate informally are absent. In short, both cities provide no space for their inhabitants to do anything other than what the state wants them to do: they can work, they can sleep, they can shop, but they can't, say, get together and discuss politics. And should they go further and try to get together and set up barricades, they would be fatally hampered by a city of wide streets designed to make it easy for security forces to get anywhere. From an ideological standpoint, the fundamental hallmark of both cities is control.

Of course, much of this not entirely new. Both Brasilia and Chhattisgarh are clearly influenced to a certain extent by Baron Haussman's redesign of Paris in the 1850's, when, with the backing of Napoleon III, he cleared slums and replaced dirty warrens of narrow, winding, and easily barricaded streets with long, elegant, straight avenues, radiating with geometrical perfection, that also happened to provide easy access for troops in case of disturbances. And the state's goal of increasing centralization and control is hardly a new one: to take just one prominent example, if you have a last name, it's almost certainly because sometime in the last millennium or so the government gave an ancestor of yours one in order to make it easier to keep track of him. If your ancestor was Richard, known as Johnson because his father's name was John, he was written down as Richard Johnson, and his children were all given the last name Johnson as well, even though their father's name was, of course, Richard. The process is perhaps most visible in the Philippines, where the Spanish assigned surnames by decree in 1849: entire towns ended up with surnames that all began with same letter. But Scott's argument is that this push for control has been vastly strengthened by high modernism. By asserting that policies of centralization are scientifically determined, high modernism provides an ideological underpinning that can, in the right situations (ones where, usually due to revolution or de-colonization, the government acquires a tremendous amount of power), lead to criminal and tragic episodes like forced collectivization.

And what makes it even worse is that usually the attempt to assert centralized control over complex processes is doomed: even if carried out with the utmost concern for the people involved, and with the only motive being an improvement in the efficiency of whatever process is involved, failure is still almost certainly inevitable due to the natural limits of expert knowledge when faced with problems involving vast numbers of variables with little-understood correlations. The general approach of scientific studies is to vary a single variable while holding all others fixed: this is a powerful approach, but in many real-world situations it's difficult-to-impossible to accomplish. In order to come up with meaningful results, then, a number of simplifying assumptions are often made. However, despite what you may have heard from Milton Friedman, the ability of a theory to match the available data is not the only test of it's applicability: assumptions do matter (after all, it took years before the Copernican theory was able to out-perform the Ptolemaic one and its carefully calibrated system of epicycles). In the field, where the assumptions may not hold and careful control of the many variables is not possible, the experimentally derived results may well be of limited utility. Returning to agriculture, many of the seemingly antiquated and unscientific methods of small farmers in the developing world -- such as polycropping (growing multiple crops in a single field) or shifting cultivation -- have proved to be far more productive in the medium-to-long-term, not to mention more ecologically sound, than those suggested by Western agricultural experts. Which is not to say that science has nothing useful to say about agriculture, but instead that a certain amount of humility is probably important: the knowledge of farmers who have spent years (and whose ancestors also spent years) cultivating in a particular region is often quite useful, even if that knowledge doesn't count as science. (One thing that Scott does not address, probably because the books was published in 1998, is the impact of the ever-growing amounts of computing power scientists have at their command. But of course in this case the problem would be approached not by finding an analytical solution -- even such a simple problem as the three-body problem does not admit of an analytical solution -- but by producing increasingly detailed simulations. In other words, rather than spending years learning about the features of a problem by hand-on efforts at solution, the scientists would have the computer attempt to solve it a few million times and look at the results.)

And that is, in the end, the crux of Scott's argument: local knowledge (the term he uses is "metis", which was what Homer said that Ulysses had lots of), derived from a process of trial-and-error rather than scientific experimentation, and usually not amenable to being codified as a set of rules or a procedure to be followed, can still be useful and is often essential. It can be displaced by science, of course: much medical folk wisdom has bitten the dust in the last century or two, superseded by modern scientific medicine. Which doesn't necessarily mean that the folk wisdom was wrong: variolation (in which smallpox matter from mild cases of smallpox contracted in previous years was used to induce a (usually) mild case of smallpox in the patient) worked, it's just that vaccination works much better, and the principle behind it can be much more broadly applied. But it remains the case that the kind of local and unsystematic knowledge acquired through long practice is essential for many activities. For instance, it is this we can thank for the existence of the "work-to-rule" strike, in which rather than simply not working, the workers instead work by strictly following the rules laid down by managment, something which usually brings the process to a grinding halt. In most cases, a procedure cannot account for all the variables that can affect a give process, and control over all the variables is either impossible or ruinously expensive: becoming an expert involves developing rules of thumb that allow you to determine when a significant change in variables has occurred and modify the procedure accordingly. This, for Scott, is precisely why supposedly scientific plans drawn up by centralized bureaucracies (of whatever nature) are bound to fail: they don't take into account the metis of the actual workers on the ground. What is needed, rather than "imperial knowledge", are institutions that are decentralized, flexible, and diverse, that can use both science and metis when appropriate. ...more

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Jun 10, 2007 Anders rated it liked it

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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Jul 20, 2015 Ihor Hrubyak rated it liked it

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

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Oct 13, 2014 Sarah Inman rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite

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 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 freedoms and our unfreedoms” (7).

Throughout the four sections of the book, Scott makes a case against high modernism and social engineering, and suggests ways for planning for the unplanned; in alignment with other urban planners and thinkers such as Jane Jacobs and Friedrich Hayek who believe in the importance of bottom-up, locally generated solutions particular to location, Scott is “for practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability” (6). He makes the point that formal schemes of order are not sustainable without some on-the-ground practical knowledge of that which is being ordered.
In part 1, Scott discusses forest management and maps showing that for modern statecraft to function “state simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral lists, and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality” (77). A term Scott uses to refer to modern society is legibility (by which he means the making of complex systems simple), and to make a society legible one needs rationalization and standardization. In many ways, the role of the state is to decrease diversity. Institutions are a way of reducing uncertainty, and as the prime institution, the State strives to transform “the population, space, and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed systems that offer no surprises and that can best be observed and controlled” (82).

It is first through our ordering of nature and society that we see the crucial aspect of high modernism, which is the “belief that it was man’s destiny to tame nature to suit his interests and preserve his safety” (95). As was the case in forest management, “some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis” (13). Rendering the forest predictable, it could be read from “maps in the forester’s office” (15).
It isn’t until Part 2 that Scott provides us with his definition for high modernist ideology defining it as “a sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity” (90). This high modernist ideology makes a space for the desire for authoritarian rule; the modern state “provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias” (89). Scott concludes that diversity and complexity, not order and simplicity, is what is needed to foster social capital in particular regions. Quoting Jane Jacobs, he alerts us to the flaws in high-modernist planning: that we cannot make predictions about the future. The problem is that the map is never the territory, and what the state “sees” is only a very small slice of reality (87).

In part 3, Scott takes up a deeper investigation of social engineering. We witness a paradox: that to contend with the complexity of real societies in efforts to increase production, often production suffers due to a lack of diversity. Scott notes some of the disastrous state projects such as Brasilia in which the influence of visionaries such as Le Corbusier on the work of architects in Brazil gave rise to an austere, legible landscape that, compared with the colorful life in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, was deeply disorienting. He castigates Le Corbusier for seeing “the house is a machine for living,” and that the “people are irrelevant to the process of city planning, although the result is designed with their well-being and productivity in mind” (178). His fundamental argument is that the few cannot rule the many.

In part 4, Scott uses the Greek term ‘metis’ to represent “a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment” (313). He concludes that it is practical, local knowledge that is supreme in everyday decisions. He shows that it was often through trial and error that communities found answers.

Scott concludes by providing some suggestions for making development more resilient. Because we cannot plan for the unplanned, he suggests providing context to current maps of urban movement with a map that “consists of tracing, as in a time-lapse photograph, of all the unplanned movements…this second map, far more complex than the first, reveals very different patterns of circulation” (347).

Ah, the hubris! In Scott’s concluding remarks he sums up the failures of these social engineering schemes by blaming the high modernist ideology and the progenitors of the plans. He says that they “regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were” (343). Laying waste to centuries of work done by urban planners, renowned architects, and great thinkers, I wonder if he realizes the irony in his condemnation of the hubris of our city planners.

However, despite his ego (and probably partially persuaded by it), I am in agreement with Scott in his judgment that diversity leads to an increase in social capital contributing to a higher level of trust, a more efficient city and a greater investment in markets; however, I think he fails to mention some alternatives to rigid city planning. His contention that complexity requires simplicity to make sense of it holds true in terms of human interactions. And though he mentions the successes and benefits of a well-planned city such is the case of Chicago’s perfect grid-like city, he largely forgets to talk about why these large-scale schemes came into existence. Though some of the best-made plans may have been perverted into unjust usurpations of power from the people, they were mostly engineered for the citizen. This is precisely the puzzle he explores; however, I feel there is little by way of crediting the many actors that go into planning a city, designing a building or navigating the marketplace.
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Aug 09, 2017 Marija rated it liked it

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.

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Apr 28, 2013 Dan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essential, reviewed, history

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 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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Apr 18, 2011 Adam Wiggins rated it liked it

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
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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Feb 18, 2014 Zeynep K rated it liked it

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

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Feb 12, 2012 Margaret Sankey rated it really liked it

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 03, 2017 Valia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, kcls

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

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Aug 28, 2015 Mbarak rated it liked it

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

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Oct 10, 2016 Richard Reese rated it really liked it

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. ...more

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Jan 21, 2017 Jocelyn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

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 ...more

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Apr 14, 2017 James Giammona rated it it was amazing

This changed how I look at government interventions and highlighted the assumptions that underpin the supremacy of "scientific" knowledge and radical government intervention. All policy makers should read this book.

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May 29, 2017 Patrick Stuart rated it it was amazing

This is another very-good book from everyone's favourite lefty-Oakshott* (Oaknot?). The last book of his I read was ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’ and this is just as good.

'Seeing Like a State' re-tells the story of some of the 20th centuries biggest mass-fuckups and links them together as examples of 'high modernism', an aesthetic of hyper-rational centrally planned large-scale change driven by city-based bureaucracies and authoritarian powers which claims to be directed towards improving and ...more

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Feb 20, 2017 Dayton rated it it was amazing

I couldn't recommend this more highly--one of a small number of books to truly change the way I see the world. Scott's scope is hugely ambitious, a sweeping analysis of everything from urban planning to political revolution to scientific agriculture. His immediate project is to critique a specific mode of high-modernist, authoritarian statecraft whose utopian faith in science and rational planning blinds it to the lived experiences of the citizenry, and which led to some of the great social and ...more

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Jul 27, 2014 Cărăşălu rated it liked it

Although written by an anthropologist, this book has little to do with anthropology (in a classic understanding). Scott's goal here is to document and criticize the high-modernist ideology, which believes progress can be achieved solely through modern science and bureaucratic effort.

In fact the very idea of progress in this sense is flawed. Modernizers are driven by some kind of religious zeal and faith in the dogmas of modern, commercialized science, as well by an aesthetic ideal: big, square ...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Elizabeth Theiss rated it it was amazing

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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Jun 03, 2015 Zara Rahman rated it it was amazing

This was fascinating - a very long read, which took me quite a while to get through, but separated enough into distinct chapters and sections, to make taking my time over it okay. It was excellent background reading for me for the podcast I'm working on, as it explains a number of case studies around imperialistic science, colonialism, technology and power, and goes into a lot of detail. There is clearly a lot of background research that has gone into the book, and it's a really thorough read. H ...more

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May 08, 2015 Howie Lempel rated it it was amazing

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Nov 14, 2010 Mirza Sultan-Galiev rated it liked it

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

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

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

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.” — 6 likes

“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'.” — 4 likes

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