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

By James C. Scott

Book Overview

"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

"A powerful, and in many ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning."--Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca

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

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300246757
• ISBN13: 9780300246759
• Release Date: March 2020
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Hayek meets Heidegger

Brad DeLong's featured review is basically correct - Scott is treading ground remarkably similar to Hayek's. But I don't think that Scott is ignorant of Hayek. Rather, Scott is attempting to explore the same territory, but without coming to the same political conclusions. Early in this book, Scott makes clear that he is not advocating libertarianism (I am told that Scott calls himself an anarchist). He is aiming at a deeper critique of planning, one which is not merely about prices or information, but about metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology. Scott never makes it explicit, but throughout this book, I got the sense that he is doing continental philosophy. This is a Heideggerian critique of planning - one that just happens to cover some of the same ground as Hayek. Scott's focus is on "seeing" like a (high modernist) state; the question this book asks is: how does such a state see, and what does state-like perception systematically miss? Scott argues the state's vision is limited to the conscious, the rational, and the abstract - it cannot see beyond what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called "the Platonic fold." (See The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable) This vision is identical to what continental philosophers refer to as the "objective gaze." The unconscious, the organic, the ecological and the folk-wise are invisible to the modernist bureaucracy. To make these invisible elements rationally "legible," the state reaches out and actively reduces them to known quantities. This allows the state some limited control over them, but in the process any emergent systematic properties are destroyed. It is tempting to conclude that this book is a generalized critique of government. It is not. The mistakes Scott identifies are characteristic only of a certain type of regime, the high modernist state. High modernism, as Scott identifies it, is a sort of irrational confidence in objective rationality. It becomes possible on a large scale only after the Enlightenment, and especially after the advent of "scientific" management. It is epitomized not only by Stalin, but by Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, and the US Bureau of Reclamations. Nor is it limited to states. Systematic flaws exist in the perception of any large hierarchical organization that makes decisions on the basis of abstract calculative rationality. As such, this is ultimately a much more profound critique than Hayek's. DeLong is right that this book is not as well-written or organized as it could have been, but the synthesis of Hayek and Heidegger is absolute genius. It makes the book a classic in my view.

seeing like a state: starving like a person

How do states and empires control people and landscapes, and why do their attempts so often tragically fail? Agrarian theorist James Scott answers this question boldly and provocatively in Seeing like a State. States (and all of us) simplify a complicated world in order first to understand and then ultimately to change and control the world around us. Indeed, at the root of much of our modern daily activity and thinking is a great deal of simplification-we invent categories, we exclude variables, we limit diversity, we simplify.For states, the problem with the world is that it is impossibly messy. It is, to use Scott's most brilliant metaphor, illegible. Within every state's territory-especially huge modern imperial states-there exist diverse ecologies, diverse peoples with myriad customs and linguistic dialects, and a variety of local customs. In order to control these areas (i.e. to prevent rebellion, social unrest, starvation) and in order to exploit them (i.e. to use natural resources, to make money, to raise armies) states first must be able to read them. They must make them legible. And herein begins the process of simplification that so profoundly shapes modern bureaucracy. States standardize landholdings, blotting out old inheritance and geographical patterns. States work to simplify ecologies, turning complex ecosystems into streamlined, productive, and micro-managed forests or monocrop fields. States standardize languages, substituting myriad local dialects with a uniform King's English. And they create huge lists, cadastral maps, registers, etc., which they use to describe their holdings and the people who live in them. With these documents, they reshape the world according to their own simplified categories, and according to their own top-down priorities.The problem here, Scott shows, is that state efforts at making the world legible result not only in a simplified worldview, but in an unrealistically OVERsimplified approach to statecraft, with tragic consequences. State efforts to control ecology, for example, often take no account of local conditions, local ecosystems, and the subsistence patterns that local inhabitants have developed for centures on the landscape. In the effort to scientifically manage forests, Scott shows, states often ignore the ways in which biodiversity is needed to protect soil fertility. After ten years as a state-managed forest, the landscape is barren. Likewise, in an effort to chop the landscape up into easily taxable units, the state will often destroy local landholding patterns developed to provide each inhabitant with a slice of land in each different local micro-climate. While the local solution was carefully planned to give each inhabitant access to a pond, let's say, the top-down state solution puts the pond on one single person's land, in the interest of simplified cadastral mapping. The result is disorder when a drought comes and everybody wants access to that pond. The main the

Important Anthropology for Cross-Disciplinary Application

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 s

Structural Dysfunctionalism

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

An inspiring critique of 'high-modernist' ideology

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.