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

by James C. Scott

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Compulsory "ujamaa" villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics - the 20th century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, 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 upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires and objections of its subjects.
He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.
  • ISBN10 0300128789
  • ISBN13 9780300128789
  • Publish Date 1 February 1999 (first published 30 March 1998)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Yale University Press
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 463
  • Language English