The blurb for Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) closely matches the contents of the book

The blurb for Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) reads:

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.

This is an accurate blurb. I say this based on what I have read of the book. I’ve written previously about James C. Scott:

Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) began as a large undergraduate lecture course on anarchism

James C. Scott is himself not an archaist nor is he a follower of libertarian ideologies. He’s an academic whose ideas about topics such as legibility are of interest.

In speaking of what he perceives as a particular form of state-level simplification and legibility, the author takes care to underline that some of the people who read drafts of his Seeing Like a State manuscript didn’t agree with what he was saying. He adds (p. 6):

I am not making a blanket case against either bureaucratic planning or high-modernist ideology. I am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.

He also makes a point of underlining that he’s not making a case in favour of giving primacy solely to knowledge that is local, either, because sometimes events at the local level is no more savoury than at any other level of society. This is a careful writer. The blurb reflects this fact. I am pleased Scott is widely cited, in the kinds of authoritative studies that I like to read.

I have outlined Scott’s thesis at greater length at a recent post entitled:

Whereas cubist art varies from legible to illegible, the dominant model of critical interpretation of cubism has remained at all times legible

Because his work is cited by a number of historians whose studies I have been reading closely in recent years, I have bought my own copy of Seeing Like a State (1998).