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

James C. Scott

ISBN 10: 0300078153 / ISBN 13: 9780300078152

Published by Yale University Press, 1999

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Seller Inventory # bk/975.978/f99

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300078153
• ISBN 13: 9780300078152
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

“Illuminating and beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker
 
“A magisterial critique of top-down social planning.”—Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
 
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review
 
Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory realized in Brasília, 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 improving the human condition go tragically awry?
 
In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against “development theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a “high-modernist ideology” that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

About the Author

James C. Scott (1936–2024) was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Yale University. His many books include The Art of Not Being Governed, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Against the Grain.