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

by James C. Scott

• ISBN13: 9780300078152
• ISBN10: 0300078153
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-02-08
• Publisher: Yale University Press

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
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