Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- ISBN13:
9780300078152
- ISBN10:
0300078153
- Format: Trade Paper
- Copyright: 1999-02-08
- Publisher: Yale University Press
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Summary
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In a wide-ranging and original study, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when schematic visions are imposed on long-established structures without taking into account preexisting interdependencies.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| State Projects of Legibility and Simplification | p. 9 |
| Nature and Space | p. 11 |
| Cities, People, and Language | p. 53 |
| Transforming Visions | p. 85 |
| Authoritarian High Modernism | p. 87 |
| The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique | p. 103 |
| The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis | p. 147 |
| The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production | p. 181 |
| Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams | p. 193 |
| Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization | p. 223 |
| Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity | p. 262 |
| The Missing Link | p. 307 |
| Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Metis | p. 309 |
| Conclusion | p. 342 |
| Notes | p. 359 |
| Sources for Illustrations | p. 433 |
| Index | p. 435 |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |
