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| | Seeing Like a State:
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
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| | by James C. Scott
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ZIN Product Number: 10057910
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300070160
Release Date: Jan 1, 1994
| |  | | | From The Publisher
In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail 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 on 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. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impose administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.
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| | | | | | The Reader's Catalog
From the Great Leap Forward to Brasilia, why do theoretically motivated top-down schemes for social improvement run afoul? Scott meditates on the tragic consequences of a commitment to the general instead of the particular that is characteristic both to capitalism and communism"To be ruled is to be kept an eye on," said the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon--"inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about...To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, corrected." In Seeing Like a State, the Yale anthropologist and historian of peasant movements James Scott provides an extensive gloss on Proudhon's aphorism and considers the tragic consequences that have ensued time and again in the 20th century when rulers with the capacity to monitor human populations in such ways have embarked on grandiose projects to reshape social and economic arrangements.
| |  | | | | Acknowledgments | | | Introduction | 1 | | Pt. 1 | State Projects of Legibility and Simplification | 9 | | Ch. 1 | Nature and Space | 11 | | Ch. 2 | Cities, People, and Language | 53 | | Pt. 2 | Transforming Visions | 85 | | Ch. 3 | Authoritarian High Modernism | 87 | | Ch. 4 | The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique | 103 | | Ch. 5 | The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis | 147 | | Pt. 3 | The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production | 181 | | Ch. 6 | Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams | 193 | | Ch. 7 | Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization | 223 | | Ch. 8 | Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity | 262 | | Pt. 4 | The Missing Link | 307 | | Ch. 9 | Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Metis | 309 | | Ch. 10 | Conclusion | 342 | | Notes | 359 | | Sources for Illustrations | 433 | | Index | 435 |
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| | | | | | Keywords
Social aspects, Authoritarianism, Central planning, Social engineering
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