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67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Structural Dysfunctionalism, November 18, 2001
James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of 'structural dysfunctionalism.' The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate-but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.The dysfunction, Scott argues, derived from three modern conditions. One was the ambition to remake society (and ecology) to conform to a rational plan. It is the conviction-expressed by such varied characters as Robert Owen, Le Corbusier, and Mao (pp. 117, 341)-that the present is a blank sheet, to be inscribed at will. Putting this into effect required a second condition: comprehensive information about individuals and property, gathered by a centralized bureaucracy. The third condition, what made the combination lethal, was a state sufficiently powerful to force its radically rational schemes on their 'beneficiaries.' This was characteristic of post-revolutionary and post-colonial regimes, and so the book devotes chapters to collectivization in the Soviet Union and ujamaa 'villagization' in Tanzania. But the basic vision, Scott emphasizes, was common to experts everywhere. Three Americans planned a Soviet sovkhoz in their Chicago hotel room; a democratic populist built Brasília, which is also accorded a chapter. In probing the pathology of planning, Scott brilliantly exposes how experts conflated aesthetics with efficiency. They believed that social and ecological organization was rational only insofar as it conformed to their visual aesthetic (here called 'high modernism'). This meant the repetition of identical units, preferably in the form of a geometrical grid. It also entailed spatial segregation: each activity or entity must be allocated its own place. Polycropping was thus anathema to agricultural scientists, as mixed-use was to urban planners. What experts envisaged, of course, was how the thing appeared-from above-on a map or in a model. Along with aesthetics went gigantism, as scale too was confused with efficiency. The space of the plan existed outside geographical locality and historical contingency-obstacles to be eradicated. An ideal city, for example, could be sited anywhere in the world; once built, it would never change. Planners created new spaces in order to create new people, the productive and contented automatons imagined by (say) Frederick Taylor or Lenin. In analyzing their failure, Scott is most valuable for drawing parallels between society and ecology. Collectivized agriculture was doubly deficient, in its use of natural resources and of human beings. Forests as well as cities created on geometrical lines inevitably degenerated. In both realms, radical 'simplifications' destroyed the adaptability and stability that had evolved organically. Scott introduces the Greek word 'metis' (crafty intelligence) to describe the local, unwritten knowledge gained through practice or accumulated over generations. It was adequate to the diversity of natural environments, and was distributed throughout society. This kind of knowledge was disregarded or dismissed by experts. And yet, ironically, their plans would have been still more disastrous without the metis of people subjected to them. Collectivized peasants farmed private plots for the black market; workers in Brasília built shantytowns outside the city. From an anarchist understanding, Scott has come close to Edmund Burke (never cited directly, though see p. 424). Two centuries ago, he witnessed the eruption of utopian schemes in France and their imposition on India, and realized that the combination of abstract reason and untrammeled power is infinitely destructive. "I cannot conceive how any man can ... consider his country as nothing but carte blanche-upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases." His defense of 'prejudice' resembles Scott's appreciation of metis. The similarity is remarkable given their inimical ideals, aristocratic hierarchy versus democratic equality. If Scott does not fully appreciate his affinity with Burkean conservatism, he does not quite extricate himself from Hayekian liberalism (see p. 8). He succeeds in showing how the ideas behind collectivized agriculture came from plans for giant capitalist farms. Nevertheless, liberal economies are not so prone to pathological dysfunction, because firms are constrained by the need to attract free labor and to make profits. True, as Scott observes, the state often favors inefficient large enterprises (like plantations) because they are easily taxed; they also wield sufficient influence to obtain protection. The reader is left, however, wondering how he will resist being appropriated by opponents of (democratic) 'big government.' Other questions too remain. Scott asserts a continuity of aim between absolutism and totalitarianism; twentieth-century states simply fulfilled the dreams of their dynastic precursors. Do we really know that such vaunting ambition was common to rulers everywhere, or was it peculiar to Europe since the Renaissance? Scott's critique of pseudo-rational knowledge bears directly on our own disciplines. Many versions of social science proceed from the same assumptions that have been falsified in the ghastly experiments of our century. How can social scientists analyze the irreducible complexity of society, generalize without effacing the particularity of history and geography? In raising such difficult-and fruitful-questions, Seeing like a State is a book of immense importance. It must be read by anyone seeking to understand the modern world.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important Anthropology for Cross-Disciplinary Application, April 10, 2003
By A Customer
The above reviewer, Stirling S Newberry, writes, "The book is part of a useful discussion, but the context and knowledge to engage in it does not seem to be present at this time. Unfortunate." Actually, what is most unfotunate is that Newberry failed to that Scott allows his assertions regarding social engineering at the behest of an individual state apply just as well to, for example, international aid regimes and foreign hegemons who strive to "remake" the world and its societies after a single vision (8). Scott's concern in Seeing Like a State is to make a case against an "imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how. Scott goes on to argue, "The most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements." The first is a simplification and aggregation of facts. Scott argues that states manipulate otherwise complex, dynamic, discrete and often unique circumstances into simplified, static, aggregated, and standardized data, and that these form unrealistic "snapshots" which often miss the most vital aspects of the situation. The second is what Scott terms "high-modernist ideology." Scott defines this as "a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws." The combination of these two elements can be devastating when the third element, an authoritarian state, is "willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring the high-modernist designs into being" over the fourth element, "a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans." Throughout his work, Scott provides evidence that centrally managed social plans inevitably go awry. The reason for this, he argues, is that state imposed development initiatives wreak havoc upon the complex social interdependencies of peoples who, in the first place, are not adequately understood. Scott argues that for development initiatives to be successful, they must have their starting point in, first, the recognition of, and then the incorporation of, local, practical knowledge. He states that such forms of knowledge are just as important as "formal, epistemic knowledge." He thus argues against the sorts of developmental theories and practices that disregard metis. In detailing the general methodology in which states have gone about solving the problem of underdevelopment, Scott argues that states-usually represented by aloof bureaucrats sitting in offices-approach development from the proverbial "bird's eye view" without adequately accounting for, and incorporating, the proverbial "worm's eye view." Such social engineering, Scott asserts, requires the simplification and standardization of complex facts, and in the process, essential knowledge of the facts are lost. At its worst, the result is tragedy, disaster, and human suffering. At its best, unplanned outcomes result, usually at great human and state expense. Scott contrasts state simplifications with metis, which he defines as, "a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural human environment." Examples of metis are farmers knowing when to plant by looking at when the leaves on certain local trees begin to sprout, or describing the size of a farm by the number of workers needed to tend it, rather than by acreage. One region may have highly labor-intensive land, while another may not be so intensive. Forcing land to be described in terms of acreage negates this useful information, which information is the key thing lost in return for the "standardization" of discourse and knowledge. As well, when states and development planners dictate that all collective farms must plant at the same time, local knowledge is again lost-along with, Scott shows with a multitude of case studies, productivity. Scott develops his argument to show that when citizens, events, cultural characteristics of peoples, and the natural environment are not easily standardized and quantifiable, there is an incentive for the state to alter the population to fit the desired "measurements" and proper "standards." For example, states privatize collectively owned lands to tax them more easily. In order to track more easily "consolidated" people into a larger development vision, the state forces villagers with deep historical roots to adopt surnames. Even if this means altering the very fabric of their society, the "larger" goals must give way to "smaller" visions. Scott states that, "the builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation." Scott is prolific in citing historical examples to support his claims. Many among the Haitian peasantry would sum up Scott's arguments with a Haitian proverb: "The big branch at the top of the tree thinks it has the best view, but it fails to see the sights enjoyed by the little bud tossed about by the wind." Damage therefore is the result.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An inspiring critique of 'high-modernist' ideology, December 15, 1998
This is one of the most brilliant and inspiring books that I've read in a long time. James C. Scott's thesis is that states, driven by both the need to make the societies they govern legible for tax and control purposes, and by an ideology and aesthetic that equates functional order and progress with real order, systematically transform social realities. Moreover, they often do this to the detriment of their peoples and bring about long-term damage to the environment. One important human loss in this process is the erosion of practical skills and local knowledge in the fact of a hegemony of scientific knowledge and educated technical expertise. It would be hard to do justice to Scott's work in a few lines. He illustrates his thesis with a variety of case studies: Enlightenment scientific forestry, modernist town planning inspired by Le Corbusier, the disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg on revolutionary agency, Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, compulsory villagisation in Tanzania and agriculture in the Third World. The whole amounts to a pretty devastating critique of a whole way of looking at the world, a top-down modernist perspective that ignores the lived experience and judgement of those whose interests are supposedly being furthered. Some might think that Scott's message is old news, a rehash of Hayekian critiques of central planning. Whilst there are many points in common, Scott is addressing a wider syndrome. The practical judgement, skill and local knowledge of peasants, educators, workers and those in many other walks of life , is at risk not only from state bureaucrats but also from the global capitalist market. Buyers for supermarkets, for instance, ride roughshod over the expertise of local farmers by perhaps requiring that they grow crops unsuited for their region. The only way of doing this successfully is to make extensive use of fertilisers and pesticides. Whilst bureaucrats and visionaries armed with scientific knowledge seek to construct and ordered and clean world, we can at least take some comfort in Scott's documenting of the fact that these plans never really work. The ceteris paribus conditions that hold in the lab, fail to hold in the world where ceteris is never paribus. The needs that city planners plan for are always far to simply understood by them - real city life being a far more complex order than planners comprehend (Scott draws on Jane Jacobs here). In reality these utopian schemes always foster a `dark twin' a parallel to the constitutional order in which cunning, barter, improvisation and compromise are reintroduced to compensate for the defects in the model. Read this book: the next time a manager with a clipboard talks to you about the need for `total quality assurance' (or some similar phrase) and dismisses your years of practical experience and judgement, you'll understand a little better where they're coming from and how to fight them.
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