Seeing like a State

The target of James C. Scott's critique is high modernism, the belief that governments can design and run society according to scientific laws. Scott argues that states force legibility on their subjects by reducing varied local arrangements to standard forms such as permanent surnames, censuses and uniform measures. These tools ease control but blind officials to local knowledge; in forestry and farming they produced fragile monocultures. His failed schemes include Soviet collective farms, the construction of Brasilia and the forced villagization of Tanzania in the 1970s. He finds four conditions common to such disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society, high-modernist ideology, authoritarian power used for large interventions, and a civil society too weak to resist.

It was on the list of books in progress that 500 Startups partner Marvin Liao shared in a Book-Talk interview.