Seeing Like a State Quotes

“A comparable connection between state building and the invention of permanent patronyms exists for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. As in Tuscany, in England only wealthy aristocratic families tended to have fixed surnames.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“The geography of insurrection, however, was not evenly distributed across Paris. Resistance was concentrated in densely packed, working-class quartiers, which, like Bruges, had complex, illegible street plans.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military garrisons, to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually provoke a political crisis. Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets.50 No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“The illegibility of local measurement practices was more than an administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the Achilles heel of the early modern state; short of religious war, nothing so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting social upheavals. Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively.49”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Local measures were also relational or “commensurable.”39 Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving expressions as a “stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and a “cartload,” a “basketful,” or a “handful” for volume. Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place to place and that a stone’s throw might not be precisely uniform from person to person, these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally. Even measures that were apparently fixed might be deceptive. The pinte in eighteenth-century Paris, for example, was equivalent to .93 liters, whereas in Seine-en-Montagne it was 1.99 liters and in Precy-sous-Thil, an astounding 3.33 liters.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“In a work-to rule action (the French call it grève du zèle), employees begin doing their jobs by meticulously observing every one of the rules and regulations and performing only the duties stated in their job descriptions. The result, fully intended in this case, is that the work grinds to a halt, or at least to a snail’s pace. The workers achieve the practical effect of a walkout while remaining on the job and following their instructions to the letter. Their action also illustrates pointedly how actual work processes depend more heavily on informal understandings and improvisations than upon formal work rules. In the long work-to-rule action against Caterpillar, the large equipment manufacturer, for example, workers reverted to following the inefficient procedures specified by the engineers, knowing they would cost the company valuable time and quality, rather than continuing the more expeditious practices they had long ago devised on the job.2 They were relying on the tested assumption that working strictly by the book is necessarily less productive than working with initiative.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“The modern regime of pesticide use, which has arisen over the past fifty years, must be seen as an integral feature of this genetic vulnerability, not as an unrelated scientific breakthrough. It is precisely because hybrids are so uniform and hence disease prone that quasiheroic measures have to be taken to control the environment in which they are grown. Such hybrids are analogous to a human patient with a compromised immune system who must be kept in a sterile field lest an opportunistic infection take hold. The sterile field, in this case, has been established by the blanket use of pesticides”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Soviet collectivization represented, to these American viewers, an enormous demonstration project without the political inconveniences of American institutions; “that is, the Americans viewed the giant Soviet farms as huge experiment stations on which Americans could try out their most radical ideas for increasing agricultural production, and, in particular, wheat production. Many of the things they wished to learn more about simply could not be tried in America, partly because it would cost too much, partly because no suitable large farmsite was available, and partly because many farmers and farm laborers would be alarmed at the implications of this experimentation.”30 The hope was that the Soviet experiment would be to American industrial agronomy more or less what the Tennessee Valley Authority was to be to American regional planning: a proving ground and a possible model for adoption.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“In explaining why children often prefer to play on sidewalks rather than in playgrounds, Jacobs writes: “Most city architectural designers are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies” (Death and Life, p. 83).”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the “general truths” behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“State simplifications have at least five characteristics that deserve emphasis. Most obviously, state simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts. Second, they are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts. Third, they are typically static facts.79 Fourth, most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts. Aggregate facts may be impersonal (the density of transportation networks) or simply a collection of facts about individuals (employment rates, literacy rates, residence patterns). Finally, for most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions must therefore be standardized facts. However unique the actual circumstances of the various individuals who make up the aggregate, it is their sameness or, more precisely, their differences along a standardized scale or continuum that are of interest.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“For nearly three hundred years, the Spanish calendar for the Philippines had been one day ahead of the Spanish calendar, because Magellan’s expedition had not, of course, adjusted for their westward travel halfway around the globe.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Rainfall may be said to be abundant or inadequate if the context of the query implies an interest in a particular crop. And a reply in terms of inches of rainfall, however accurate, would also fail to convey the desired information; it ignores such vital matters as the timing of the rain. For many purposes, an apparently vague measurement may communicate more valuable information than a statistically exact figure. The cultivator who reports that his rice yield from a plot is anywhere between four and seven baskets is conveying more accurate information, when the focus of attention is on the variability of the yield, than if he reported a ten-year statistical average of 5.6 baskets.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Universal last names are a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Tracking property ownership and inheritance, collecting taxes, maintaining court records, performing police work, conscripting soldiers, and controlling epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as
Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert
McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius N~erer”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: A Conversation with James C. Scott

“As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.”3”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Holston asked a class of nine-year-old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of “home.” Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behavior. To the extent that this simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules can actually supply crucial guidance and instruction. This, at any rate, is what I take to be the inner logic of social, economic, and productive de-skilling. If the environment can be simplified down to the point where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules and techniques have also greatly expanded their power. They have, correspondingly, diminished the power of those who do not. To the degree that they do succeed, cultivators with a high degree of autonomy, skills, experience, self-confidence, and adaptability are replaced by cultivators following instructions. Such reduction in diversity, movement, and life, to recall Jacobs’s term, represents a kind of social “taxidermy.” The”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong,”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Slums were the first foothold of poor migrants to the city.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Planners frequently destroyed “unslumming slums” because these areas violated their doctrines”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed