Ezra's Bookshelf

Seeing Like a State

by James C. Scott · 462 pages · ~8.5 hrs

Politics & GovernmentSociety & CultureUrban Planning & Architecture

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An analysis of why ambitious schemes to improve the human condition so often end in catastrophe. James C. Scott, a political scientist and anthropologist, identifies a recurring recipe rather than a series of unrelated failures. Its first ingredient is legibility: the state's need to make a complex society countable and controllable, which historically required inventions like permanent surnames, standardized measures, cadastral surveys, and the grid-planned city, each of which simplified reality in order to administer it. Scott's foundational example is scientific forestry in eighteenth-century Prussia, where officials replaced diverse woodland with orderly rows of a single species, achieved a magnificent first harvest, and then watched the soil die. Add to legibility a high-modernist ideology confident that scientific design can remake society, an authoritarian state willing to impose it, and a civil society too weak to resist, and the outcome is Soviet collectivization, Tanzania's forced villagization, Le Corbusier's Brasilia. Scott's counterweight is metis, the practical, local, unwritten knowledge that comes from long experience of a particular place, which planners systematically discount because it cannot be aggregated or transmitted from a capital. The book is not a libertarian tract, and Scott is explicit that markets generate their own destructive simplifications. Its argument, that the knowledge required to run a society cannot be centralized without being destroyed, has proven durable across ecology, development economics, urbanism, and software.

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