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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks) by [James C. Scott]

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James C. Scott

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks) Kindle Edition

by James C. Scott (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Part of: Veritas Paperbacks (5 books)

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“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

Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.

“Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker

“A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

Print length

462 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

March 17, 2020
File size

9014 KB
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Top reviews from the United States

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Peter McCluskey

The beginning was good, the 2nd half was long and redundant

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2017

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Scott begins with a history of the tension between the desire for legibility versus the desire for local control. E.g. central governments wanted to know how much they could tax peasants without causing famine or revolt. Yet even in the optimistic case where they got an honest tax collector to report how many bushels of grain John produced, they had problems due to John's village having an idiosyncratic meaning of "bushel" that the tax collector couldn't easily translate to something the central government knew. And it was hard to keep track of whether John had paid the tax, since the central government didn't understand how the villagers distinguished that John from the John who lived a mile away.

So governments that wanted to grow imposed lots of standards on people. That sometimes helped peasants by making their taxes fairer and more predictable, but often trampled over local arrangements that had worked well (especially complex land use agreements).

I found that part of the book to be a fairly nice explanation of why an important set of conflicts was nearly inevitable. Scott gives a relatively balanced view of how increased legibility had both good and bad effects (more efficient taxation, diseases tracked better, Nazis found more Jews, etc.).

Then Scott becomes more repetitive and one-sided when describing high modernism, which carried the desire for legibility to a revolutionary, authoritarian extreme (especially between 1920 and 1960). I didn't want 250 pages of evidence that Soviet style central planning was often destructive. Maybe that conclusion wasn't obvious to enough people when Scott started writing the book, but it was painfully obvious by the time the book was published.

Scott's complaints resemble the Hayekian side of the socialist calculation debate, except that Scott frames in terms that minimize associations with socialism and capitalism. E.g. he manages to include Taylorist factory management in his cluster of bad ideas.

It's interesting to compare Fukuyama's description of Tanzania (in Political Order and Political Decay) with Scott's description. They both agree that villagization (Scott's focus) was a disaster. Scott leaves readers with the impression that villagization was the most important policy, whereas Fukuyama only devotes one paragraph to it, and gives the impression that the overall effects of Tanzania's legibility-increasing moves were beneficial (mainly via a common language causing more cooperation). Neither author provides a balanced view (but then they were both drawing attention to neglected aspects of history, not trying to provide a complete picture).

My advice: read the SlateStarCodex book review, don't read the whole book.

57 people found this helpful

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kaminsky

a good introduction to the anarchist point of view

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2019

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although the title does not mention anarchism - the book was connected to this category
by the amazon scrobbler app.
this book is not intended to be - but may be used as an introduction to anarchist philosophy.
the iconic anarchist thinkers - Proudhon - Bakunin - Kropotkin -
spent most of their lives in jail. they could not produce elaborate theory.
James C Scott does not try to trace the history of anarchist thought.
he does something much more important - he gives examples of how anarchist concepts can be fruitfully
applied to completely unrelated fields - urban planning - prehistoric civilizations.
I had to struggle with Michel Foucault tortured texts.
I had read James C Scott - I could skip Foucault.
this is the best introduction to anarchism I can think of.
it is not an easy summary to use for college.
it is a text that can convert you to a new point of view.
it did it for me.

I noticed many amazon reviews complain about the length of the book.
any good writer will concentrate his main points in the first 50 pages.
my advice to these readers - go over the first 50 pages - then put the book aside.
you will get more from these pages than from some superficial summary of the subject.

19 people found this helpful

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A. Barnett

Tremendously important ideas, but very scholarly

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2018

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To my mind, the central argument of this book is critical to understanding numerous aspects of how the world we live in today came into being, and why it functions the way that it does. I cannot overstate how impressed I was by Scott's ideas, arguments, and evidence. Scott focuses in this book on how these ideas relate to governments and policy, with a focus on agriculture, but are also worth considering for their impact in smaller arenas, such as business, trade, and even family relations.

With that said, it is very scholarly in tone. It is not particularly accessible, and fairly hard work to read. I would also argue that the second half of the book could have been shorter by half, and one could probably still get the vast majority of the value of the book by focusing on the first half or so, and skimming or perhaps even skipping the second half.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in government, policy, social policy, or even business, I would highly recommend investing the time to read and understand this book.

10 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Chris Ford

Seeing like software

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is somewhat a meandering book, which suits me just fine. My personal interest is that as a software developer I want to understand the effect of codifying informal processes into formal systems. This book has been enormously influential to my thinking about standardisation, variation, surveillance and service, and practically speaking it finds its way into my consulting work surprisingly often.

16 people found this helpful

stuart d pringle

Recommended for Ruskin college oxford History dissertation on my topic.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

Very interesting book with a very good first chapter on France and the state of play with statecraft before and after revolution. German designed forestry ....French weights and scales and the design of equality accross states and the slow process of state control and rules. Measurements and statistics and fiscal calculations becoming the normal way of life. Much description on the state and its slow control and implementation of rules and policies.
A good book to start to understand why we are where we are now with how the states and governments run things With sometimes disasterous results.
Recommended book for my history degree by a great Ruskin college oxford teacher.
Useful for my first year dissertation to understand why things are like they are. And to understand why govt do what they do.
Recommended.

9 people found this helpful

wzuk

Excellent book with interesting hints.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 29, 2020

Verified Purchase

Excellent book with interesting hints for all who still uncritically accept state and governmental authorities...

David Hugh-Jones

Serious work from a thoughtful scholar

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2019

Verified Purchase

Lots of good examples. I’m not sure the thesis is wholly new – there are shades of Foucault in there.

One person found this helpful