Seeing Like a State Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

    • 5.0 • 2 Ratings
    • $28.99
    • $28.99

Publisher Description

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 twentieth 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 and original 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 persuasive 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 science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

GENRE
Politics & Current Events
RELEASED
2008
October 1
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
464
Pages
PUBLISHER
Yale University Press
SELLER
Yale University
SIZE
12.1
MB

More Books by James C. Scott

Against the Grain Against the Grain
2017
Seeing Like a State Seeing Like a State
2020
The Art of Not Being Governed The Art of Not Being Governed
2009
Two Cheers for Anarchism Two Cheers for Anarchism
2012
The Moral Economy of the Peasant The Moral Economy of the Peasant
1977
Homo Domesticus Homo Domesticus
2021

Customers Also Bought

What's Our Problem? What's Our Problem?
2023
Exhalation Exhalation
2019