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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)

51 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0300070163
ISBN-10: 0300070160
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Product Details

  • Series: The Institution for Social and Policy St
  • Hardcover: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Yale University Press (March 30, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0300070160
  • ISBN-13: 978-0300070163
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,391,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Modernism: Ideology vs Reality
By Jessica Mosley on March 8, 2013
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
In this work, James C. Scott is attempting to evaluate high modernist ideology and how it has been implemented through various projects. He is interested in the logic of high modernism, as well as how that logic contributes to the failure of high modernist systems. Through a variety of case studies, including forestry, city planning, linguistic manipulation, collectivization and villagization, Scott evaluates how high modernism was developed, why it was so powerful as an ideology, how it was implemented and why those implementations failed.
Although Scott is focused specifically on high modernist ideology and its uses in the 20th century, there are several themes in this book that directly connect to our readings from previous weeks. Scott frequently talks about the belief in high modernism as if it were a faith. As with the Calvinists and the French Revolutionaries, these men and women believed that there was a problem (backwardness) that needed to be fixed and they held the solution to that problem (modernization). As with our discussion of French modernization, Scott highlights the importance of homogenization. However, Scott goes beyond cultural and linguistic homogenization as ways to exert political and financial control. He also emphasizes how the high modernist preoccupation with homogenization was manifest in agricultural practices, with polycropping being considered backwards and large monocropped farms being seen as the future of agriculture.
One of the strongest parts of Scott’s work is his emphasis on diversity. Scott takes great effort to explain the myopic view of high modernism and how such intense focus on certain aspects of any subject to the exclusion of other parts of the larger picture had such a detrimental impact on the success of high modernist projects.Read more ›
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Have ordered two others of his books
By M. Heiss on June 16, 2015
Format: Paperback
This book suggests implications I do not think the author intended. Looked at from the left, and explaining things in the vocabulary of Marxist socialist theory, the book laments the top-down nature of lefist policy making in the 20th century, advocating instead for ground-up leftist arrangements.

The first section of the book is a well-researched look at how it suits the purposes of centralized governments to make the citizenry more "legible" - speaking the same language, living sedentary lifestyles in villages, using the same currency and measurement systems. Legibility yields a population that is no longer independent.

The book then goes on to show how a citizenry that is wholly legible becomes dependent on the state and is quickly beggared by an insatiable government. Using the examples of Stalin's collectivization, African ujamaa socialist villagization, US Indian policy, and experimental farming, Scott makes his point again and again.

His comparison is with "high modernist" architecture and city planning, which yields depressing, failed, unlivable places relying on unplanned slums and black market operators for any economic activity. High modernism, with its faith in experts, fails. It "looks" modern, and for faith-based modernizers, looks are enough.

Reality is messy. Human relations in an econmy are messy. They are governed by individuality, local knowledge, and obscure customs that "look" primitive but are time-tested, experimentally-driven winning solutions. Individuals must rely on their initiative, wisdom, prudence, and responsiveness to make a living. "High modernist" solutions wipe that clean and try to substitute reliance on government plans constructed from afar, based on aesthetics, not reality.Read more ›
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
states gone wild
By Michael Lewyn VINE VOICE on June 16, 2015
Format: Paperback
This book tries to explain large-scale bureaucratic error. The concept “seeing like a state” refers to the desire by large-scale institutions (usually government) to make a situation “legible” – that is, easily understandable and controllable. For example, a government will wish to know who and where its citizens are in order to collect taxes from them and enforce other laws. As a result, post-medieval European governments conducted censuses, mapped cities, and forced citizens to take surnames.

As technological progress gave governments (and large private institutions such as corporations) the ability to do more, government grew more and more overconfident about its ability to shape society. One relatively innocuous but foolish example: the urban planner Le Corbusier favored a rigid separation of functions and land uses, because (in Scott’s words) “it is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose.” So in Brasilia, modernist urban planners kept official buildings not just from shops, but from pedestrians, creating a dull, unwalkable city.

More harmful were socialist and communist countries’ attempts to collectivize agriculture. These nations sought to standardize agriculture not only by eliminating private land ownership, but also by having every farming village look the same and use the same agricultural techniques. For example, the Ethiopian regime wanted each village to have the same area and population, with straight roads and flat sites. This setup made it easier for bureaucrats to monitor farmer behavior. But because relocating farmers meant depriving them of place-specific knowledge about environmental conditions, farmers were far less competent, a fact which contributed to crop failures and famine.Read more ›
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Published 10 months ago by Nicholas Acord
Detailed and Convincing.

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Five Stars

No, thank you.

Published 12 months ago by nome
The complexity of life is incomprehensible to the bureaucratic mind

Full of insightful observations, but I wish he had swapped out the lengthy middle section explaining why the Soviet collectives were a massive, hubristic failure (oh really! Read more

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