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The Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Why have large-scale schemes to improve the human condition in the twentieth century so often gone awry? James C. Scott analyzes diverse failures in high-modernist, authoritarian state planning-collectivization in Russia, the building of Brasilia, compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, and others-and uncovers conditions common to all such planning disasters. What these failures teach us, he argues, is that any centrally managed social plan must recognize the importance of local customs and practical knowledge if it hopes to succeed.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
James C. Scott
26 books904 followersJames C. Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 794 reviews
September 25, 2011
This is the kind of book that restores my faith in academic theory. It should be required reading for anybody interested in the exercise of power, economic development, or large scale systems.
In Seeing Like a State, Scott explores how attempts to radically transform and improve the human condition have failed. He identifies the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and orchestrate any plan for the general welfare. The problem comes when this necessary evil is tied to an ideology of High Modernism, an authoritarian central government, and a prostrate civil society.
High Modernism is a belief in a technocratic and scientific rationality; that there is one correct answer for every situation. But there is no such thing as a universal generalization, every village, field, and person is a unique individual. The state's attempts at improvement rapidly become an effort to standardize society, and make every unit of interest behave identically. This process of reducing reality to schematic agents and cadastral maps is inherently one of violence, discarding generations of carefully accumulated local >metis (craft) in favor of the interests of the center. Local people are inevitably coerced into conforming with the modern grid, since it is easier to make people fit the categories than categories fit the situation.
This is not a hopeful book, but it does provide a valuable glimpse at the functioning of the most dangerous ideology of the 20th century--that of the centrally directed transformation.
In Seeing Like a State, Scott explores how attempts to radically transform and improve the human condition have failed. He identifies the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and orchestrate any plan for the general welfare. The problem comes when this necessary evil is tied to an ideology of High Modernism, an authoritarian central government, and a prostrate civil society.
High Modernism is a belief in a technocratic and scientific rationality; that there is one correct answer for every situation. But there is no such thing as a universal generalization, every village, field, and person is a unique individual. The state's attempts at improvement rapidly become an effort to standardize society, and make every unit of interest behave identically. This process of reducing reality to schematic agents and cadastral maps is inherently one of violence, discarding generations of carefully accumulated local >metis (craft) in favor of the interests of the center. Local people are inevitably coerced into conforming with the modern grid, since it is easier to make people fit the categories than categories fit the situation.
This is not a hopeful book, but it does provide a valuable glimpse at the functioning of the most dangerous ideology of the 20th century--that of the centrally directed transformation.
March 15, 2021
The author of this book has said, in another context, that he sees the world “with an anarchist squint”. This book is a polemic, but within that context it’s well worth reading. One other general comment – the book was first published in 1998 and I did think it was slightly dated. I haven’t changed my rating because of that, but it’s something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of reading it.
In a well-written opening section, the author suggests that the move from pre-modern to modern states can be seen in terms of the “legibility” of society to the central authority. Many aspects of pre-modern societies might be said to have privileged local knowledge over state knowledge. The move to a modern society involved a reversal of that privilege, primarily to ensure the state had better information for the purposes of taxation and conscription.
There were also good reasons for some of these changes, such as increasing the food supply and preventing disease. Initially these might be seen as benefiting the state, since they increased the population and thereby the tax base and the state’s armed forces, but as time moved on a better society began to be seen as desirable in itself. From this laudable aim was born the main target of the author’s criticism, what he calls, “High Modernism”. Broadly speaking this is the belief that an intellectual and technocratic elite can devise the correct answers to social problems via the application of science and technology. High modernists have a disregard for the views of ordinary people, whom they see as uneducated and backward-looking.
The author discusses the cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh as examples of high modernism applied to architecture and urban planning. The visual form of the city, architectural uniformity, vehicular traffic, and separation of function were prioritised over the needs of the population. He points to Le Corbusier as the high priest of this movement and compares him unfavourably with the campaigner Jane Jacobs.
Le Corbusier may have wanted to redesign the city, but the author’s next target is Lenin, who wanted to redesign the whole of society. He was a High Modernist who thought that he could create a new Utopia, but only through the exercise of “iron discipline” upon “the masses”, who required direction from the Party hierarchy. As with the previous chapter, the author contrasts Lenin with another figure, this time Rosa Luxemburg. Although she shared Lenin’s aim of revolution, she was critical of Lenin’s suppression of free speech, free assembly etc, and accurately predicted how the Soviet Union would turn out.
Soviet collectivisation and the programme of ujamaa in Tanzania are given as examples of High Modernist thinking that went disastrously wrong. Both were economically catastrophic and of course came with huge human costs, especially in the Soviet case.
The agricultural reforms described above were so inefficient that much of the food supply had to come via illegal black markets. Although the USSR and Tanzania were extreme examples, the author contends that all centrally imposed rules and processes operate as subsystems of, and are parasitic to, informal systems. In large companies and organisations, workers invariably adopt informal practices that circumvent the rules, thereby allowing the organisation to operate with at least a degree of efficiency. The author continues by citing the example of factory workers engaging in industrial action via a “work to rule”. By strictly following the procedures set down by the company, employees can reduce production to a snail’s pace.
The author does concede that there are some circumstances where central planning works best, such as space exploration, or a mass vaccination campaign.
The book concludes with an appeal for society to give more weight to “metis”, an Ancient Greek word which roughly equates to “skill” or “craft”, and which my dictionary says is the origin of the French word métier. Metis (which it seems is pronounced “meetis”) is the knowledge and ability that comes to an individual from years of practice, and which the author argues is superior to formal training.
I think that people with differing political views might each take something from this book. Those on the left would enjoy it, provided their own beliefs were rooted in community activism rather than top-down state socialism. Meanwhile libertarians might enjoy the takedowns of “big government”. If you’re an admirer of big government, and you are thinking of reading the book, prepare to have your beliefs challenged.
In a well-written opening section, the author suggests that the move from pre-modern to modern states can be seen in terms of the “legibility” of society to the central authority. Many aspects of pre-modern societies might be said to have privileged local knowledge over state knowledge. The move to a modern society involved a reversal of that privilege, primarily to ensure the state had better information for the purposes of taxation and conscription.
There were also good reasons for some of these changes, such as increasing the food supply and preventing disease. Initially these might be seen as benefiting the state, since they increased the population and thereby the tax base and the state’s armed forces, but as time moved on a better society began to be seen as desirable in itself. From this laudable aim was born the main target of the author’s criticism, what he calls, “High Modernism”. Broadly speaking this is the belief that an intellectual and technocratic elite can devise the correct answers to social problems via the application of science and technology. High modernists have a disregard for the views of ordinary people, whom they see as uneducated and backward-looking.
The author discusses the cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh as examples of high modernism applied to architecture and urban planning. The visual form of the city, architectural uniformity, vehicular traffic, and separation of function were prioritised over the needs of the population. He points to Le Corbusier as the high priest of this movement and compares him unfavourably with the campaigner Jane Jacobs.
Le Corbusier may have wanted to redesign the city, but the author’s next target is Lenin, who wanted to redesign the whole of society. He was a High Modernist who thought that he could create a new Utopia, but only through the exercise of “iron discipline” upon “the masses”, who required direction from the Party hierarchy. As with the previous chapter, the author contrasts Lenin with another figure, this time Rosa Luxemburg. Although she shared Lenin’s aim of revolution, she was critical of Lenin’s suppression of free speech, free assembly etc, and accurately predicted how the Soviet Union would turn out.
Soviet collectivisation and the programme of ujamaa in Tanzania are given as examples of High Modernist thinking that went disastrously wrong. Both were economically catastrophic and of course came with huge human costs, especially in the Soviet case.
The agricultural reforms described above were so inefficient that much of the food supply had to come via illegal black markets. Although the USSR and Tanzania were extreme examples, the author contends that all centrally imposed rules and processes operate as subsystems of, and are parasitic to, informal systems. In large companies and organisations, workers invariably adopt informal practices that circumvent the rules, thereby allowing the organisation to operate with at least a degree of efficiency. The author continues by citing the example of factory workers engaging in industrial action via a “work to rule”. By strictly following the procedures set down by the company, employees can reduce production to a snail’s pace.
The author does concede that there are some circumstances where central planning works best, such as space exploration, or a mass vaccination campaign.
The book concludes with an appeal for society to give more weight to “metis”, an Ancient Greek word which roughly equates to “skill” or “craft”, and which my dictionary says is the origin of the French word métier. Metis (which it seems is pronounced “meetis”) is the knowledge and ability that comes to an individual from years of practice, and which the author argues is superior to formal training.
I think that people with differing political views might each take something from this book. Those on the left would enjoy it, provided their own beliefs were rooted in community activism rather than top-down state socialism. Meanwhile libertarians might enjoy the takedowns of “big government”. If you’re an admirer of big government, and you are thinking of reading the book, prepare to have your beliefs challenged.
February 3, 2024
I first read the more accessible and much shorter text from Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, and as one of my friends observed, that book makes the same basic point as Seeing like a State, though more conversationally. More pithily. (!). But I knew soon after I was into Two Cheers that I would read this book. I wanted more. Scott is one of the few contemporary theorists who is actually a great writer. He crafts sentences, he’s compelling. He makes you care about the way ideas may impact the world. And Scott, Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, makes his case against mindless bureaucracy by drawing on fields as widely different as agriculture and urban planning. This book is by his own admission too long for its own good—which is to say it makes a great point, but will lose readers along the way for its sheer length--but you don’t have to read all of it to get the basic point.
The basic point is that top-down, standardized approaches to ANYTHING are destructive to the planet and to human needs. Scott is basically a kind of anarchist in principle, an anti-systems guy, who wants us to solve problems (usually) locally, from the ground up, together. He romanticizes nomads, serfs, gypsies for a kind of passive resistance to The State, but he also calls for folk knowledge and ad hoc approaches to the world. He hates administrative ordering, he hates high modernist (or neo-liberal) ideology that is shrilly optimistic and naïve about scientific progress. He illustrates the failure of great utopian social engineering schemes of the last 150 years. Urban planning of all kinds. Soviet collectivization. Tanzanian forced villagization. Disasters of epic proportion with dire and lasting human consequences. And it continues, this approach to problem-solving. Too much order on the basis of some academic theory is counter-productive, leads to chaos and destruction and unhappiness. Fixity leads to disaster.
Scott prefers metis, which is a kind of practical knowledge, drawing on social and natural diversity. Plastic, and divergent. Drawing on biodiversity, something now largely ignored by those trying to make big bucks shortsightedly, creating the sixth great species die-off. “The science of muddling through,” Scott likes, or what Jane Addams called “the doing of that which we don’t know how to do.” Figuring things out as you go, pragmatically. Think Local. Organic. Ecology of mind (Gregory Bateson). Interaction. Dialogue. Narrative instead of simplistic measurements. Films vs. snapshots. Language in all its fluidity and diversity as a model for growth, growth seen as fulfilling a range of human needs and not “progress” as rampant economic worldwide devastation. So nothing new, you say, but the proof is in the highly detailed examples of these problems.
The only problem with the book—besides the length--is that it focuses on illustrations of disaster as a way of developing principles for doing the opposite, as opposed to using stories of good things that have happened as a way of accomplishing the same thing. What's depressing is that there may be more stories to tell of widespread groupthink catastrophes than amazing human successes. Is this true? I am afraid it may be depressingly so, though I invite you to write your own hopeful tome in response to Scott.
My interest in science fiction and dystopian visions in comics and other novels is grounded in a kind of organic (and hopeful, progressive) vision often similar to Scott’s, which are familiar to me as a kind of sixties grounded activist, drawing as I have done on thinkers as diverse as Freire, Addams. Saul Allinsky’s radical pragmatism. Paul Feyerabend’s Against Methods. Orwell’s 1984. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That kind of thing. Hopeful stories for developing planet-saving principles for social action.
David Coleman, the President of the College Board and chief architect of the Common Core Standards sweeping the public schools, (something that Scott characterizes as just as disastrous as any standardized approach to anything), says, as a way of understanding why it is we all must do the same things at the same time:
“As you grow up in this world, you start to realize that people don’t give a shit about what you feel, or what you think.”
Coleman uses this “insight” to essentially claim that we must all do the same thing in schools. We must all learn K-college only how to argue all the time. He says we have to read much more non-fiction and read far less literature. Stop writing poetry. We must standardize the curriculum rather than diversify it.
Coleman’s view is seeing like a state in its essence. But I, with Scott, think we have to start giving a shit about what ordinary people feel and think. Local solutions. Local knowledge isn’t always perfect. You can’t romanticize it too much. Humans are, after all, fallible, and in some communities chaos may prevail. But taking a pragmatic approach is probably less likely to end in disaster than fascism.
The basic point is that top-down, standardized approaches to ANYTHING are destructive to the planet and to human needs. Scott is basically a kind of anarchist in principle, an anti-systems guy, who wants us to solve problems (usually) locally, from the ground up, together. He romanticizes nomads, serfs, gypsies for a kind of passive resistance to The State, but he also calls for folk knowledge and ad hoc approaches to the world. He hates administrative ordering, he hates high modernist (or neo-liberal) ideology that is shrilly optimistic and naïve about scientific progress. He illustrates the failure of great utopian social engineering schemes of the last 150 years. Urban planning of all kinds. Soviet collectivization. Tanzanian forced villagization. Disasters of epic proportion with dire and lasting human consequences. And it continues, this approach to problem-solving. Too much order on the basis of some academic theory is counter-productive, leads to chaos and destruction and unhappiness. Fixity leads to disaster.
Scott prefers metis, which is a kind of practical knowledge, drawing on social and natural diversity. Plastic, and divergent. Drawing on biodiversity, something now largely ignored by those trying to make big bucks shortsightedly, creating the sixth great species die-off. “The science of muddling through,” Scott likes, or what Jane Addams called “the doing of that which we don’t know how to do.” Figuring things out as you go, pragmatically. Think Local. Organic. Ecology of mind (Gregory Bateson). Interaction. Dialogue. Narrative instead of simplistic measurements. Films vs. snapshots. Language in all its fluidity and diversity as a model for growth, growth seen as fulfilling a range of human needs and not “progress” as rampant economic worldwide devastation. So nothing new, you say, but the proof is in the highly detailed examples of these problems.
The only problem with the book—besides the length--is that it focuses on illustrations of disaster as a way of developing principles for doing the opposite, as opposed to using stories of good things that have happened as a way of accomplishing the same thing. What's depressing is that there may be more stories to tell of widespread groupthink catastrophes than amazing human successes. Is this true? I am afraid it may be depressingly so, though I invite you to write your own hopeful tome in response to Scott.
My interest in science fiction and dystopian visions in comics and other novels is grounded in a kind of organic (and hopeful, progressive) vision often similar to Scott’s, which are familiar to me as a kind of sixties grounded activist, drawing as I have done on thinkers as diverse as Freire, Addams. Saul Allinsky’s radical pragmatism. Paul Feyerabend’s Against Methods. Orwell’s 1984. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That kind of thing. Hopeful stories for developing planet-saving principles for social action.
David Coleman, the President of the College Board and chief architect of the Common Core Standards sweeping the public schools, (something that Scott characterizes as just as disastrous as any standardized approach to anything), says, as a way of understanding why it is we all must do the same things at the same time:
“As you grow up in this world, you start to realize that people don’t give a shit about what you feel, or what you think.”
Coleman uses this “insight” to essentially claim that we must all do the same thing in schools. We must all learn K-college only how to argue all the time. He says we have to read much more non-fiction and read far less literature. Stop writing poetry. We must standardize the curriculum rather than diversify it.
Coleman’s view is seeing like a state in its essence. But I, with Scott, think we have to start giving a shit about what ordinary people feel and think. Local solutions. Local knowledge isn’t always perfect. You can’t romanticize it too much. Humans are, after all, fallible, and in some communities chaos may prevail. But taking a pragmatic approach is probably less likely to end in disaster than fascism.
March 21, 2012
This is an amazing book--I haven't been this enthused about a social science text since I read Braudel's "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" about one zillion years ago.
The first chapter of “Seeing like a State” is a brilliant tour de force of how James C. Scott approaches his thesis and his method for analyzing it. Looking at the “acknowledgements” page of the book gives one indication why this chapter is so good: it has been worked and reworked a number of times, appearing as an article in a learned journal, an essay in a book edited by the author, a public lecture sponsored by the Centre for Asian Studies, a chapter in a textbook and a paper delivered at a conference. While it might be possible to say that Scott has dined out on state simplification, the establishment of cadastral maps and population registers, the invention of freehold land tenure, the standardization of language and the widespread use of family names, it would be selling this book very short. All of these things and more made the population and its natural and built environments more legible, rational and standard than it had been before the rise of the centralized state. The needs of the state: conscription, taxation and prevention of rebellion, could only be served if there were central planning and control over what had been the anarchy of rural and village life.
Taken to extremes—a not unusual occurrence, the failures of which never lead to appropriate lessons learned by those in power—the drive for centralization has led to famine, mass death, the collapse of formerly great civilizations and widespread destruction of culture and the ability of the population to reproduce itself. “Seeing like a State” examines the ideology and practice behind some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.
Scott sees four elements that must be present for state power to be unleashed in such destructive ways:
1) The centralized, transformative organizing of nature and society and subjecting it to administrative rules;
2) A high-modernist ideology that is overly confident about scientific and technological progress, expansion of production, mastery of nature and rational design of the social order;
3) An authoritarian state willing and able to use the full weight of its power to bring designs into being; and
4) Crippled civil society with no capacity to resist. War, revolution, economic collapse and national liberation struggles make populations more receptive and weaken traditional power centers. Examples are the collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the resettlement of millions of Tanzanian peasant farmers into Ujamaa villages in the 1960s and the imposition of European/American monoculture, quasi-industrial agriculture on farmers in West Africa and Central America. The war by the new Soviet Russia against the invading western armies, the decades long struggle for independence in Africa and the undermining and overthrow of elected (or at least popular) Third World governments preceded these ecological and human catastrophes.
Scott has no shortage of villains. Among them are Vladimir Lenin, Julius Nyerere, the architect Le Corbusier and, most likely, anyone who has drawn a mid-six figure salary from the International Monetary Fund. Good guys (actually good gals) are not quite as abundant. They include Rosa Luxemburg, urban planner Jane Jacobs and agricultural theorist Albert Howard.
Scott writes elegant prose—he makes several closely reasoned chapters concerning agriculture interesting for their content and fascinating for their style.
The first chapter of “Seeing like a State” is a brilliant tour de force of how James C. Scott approaches his thesis and his method for analyzing it. Looking at the “acknowledgements” page of the book gives one indication why this chapter is so good: it has been worked and reworked a number of times, appearing as an article in a learned journal, an essay in a book edited by the author, a public lecture sponsored by the Centre for Asian Studies, a chapter in a textbook and a paper delivered at a conference. While it might be possible to say that Scott has dined out on state simplification, the establishment of cadastral maps and population registers, the invention of freehold land tenure, the standardization of language and the widespread use of family names, it would be selling this book very short. All of these things and more made the population and its natural and built environments more legible, rational and standard than it had been before the rise of the centralized state. The needs of the state: conscription, taxation and prevention of rebellion, could only be served if there were central planning and control over what had been the anarchy of rural and village life.
Taken to extremes—a not unusual occurrence, the failures of which never lead to appropriate lessons learned by those in power—the drive for centralization has led to famine, mass death, the collapse of formerly great civilizations and widespread destruction of culture and the ability of the population to reproduce itself. “Seeing like a State” examines the ideology and practice behind some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.
Scott sees four elements that must be present for state power to be unleashed in such destructive ways:
1) The centralized, transformative organizing of nature and society and subjecting it to administrative rules;
2) A high-modernist ideology that is overly confident about scientific and technological progress, expansion of production, mastery of nature and rational design of the social order;
3) An authoritarian state willing and able to use the full weight of its power to bring designs into being; and
4) Crippled civil society with no capacity to resist. War, revolution, economic collapse and national liberation struggles make populations more receptive and weaken traditional power centers. Examples are the collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the resettlement of millions of Tanzanian peasant farmers into Ujamaa villages in the 1960s and the imposition of European/American monoculture, quasi-industrial agriculture on farmers in West Africa and Central America. The war by the new Soviet Russia against the invading western armies, the decades long struggle for independence in Africa and the undermining and overthrow of elected (or at least popular) Third World governments preceded these ecological and human catastrophes.
Scott has no shortage of villains. Among them are Vladimir Lenin, Julius Nyerere, the architect Le Corbusier and, most likely, anyone who has drawn a mid-six figure salary from the International Monetary Fund. Good guys (actually good gals) are not quite as abundant. They include Rosa Luxemburg, urban planner Jane Jacobs and agricultural theorist Albert Howard.
Scott writes elegant prose—he makes several closely reasoned chapters concerning agriculture interesting for their content and fascinating for their style.
July 9, 2007
This book finds Scott resting on his laurels a bit too much, writing a book which falls awkwardly between pop-academia a la Guns, Germs and Steel, and full-on academia. Too much simplifying to hold a lot of water in the academy, but still too opaque for the masses. The first few chapters of this book are pretty good, but by the end, you start to catch on that his argument is pretty simplistic, and sort of flawed. I read this at the same time,. chapter by chapter, as Timothy Mitchell's Rule of Experts and I found them to both be making similar points, though Mitchell's book is far superior in every way.
Scott uses an extremely diverse set of evidence, pulling his examples from agronomy, foresting, urban planning, Soviet propaganda, Tanzanian state-making, Socratic philosophy... it goes on and on and becomes tiring to jump all over the globe and time spectrum.
The basic idea is interesting: large-scale social planning efforts undertaken with simplistic understandings of the people and places they are meant to serve are bound to fail, largely and spectacularly. Read the introduction. Read chapter three on urban planning. They're both five-star material-- compelling, in-depth and fascinating. Skim the rest and skip the last two chapters.
Scott uses an extremely diverse set of evidence, pulling his examples from agronomy, foresting, urban planning, Soviet propaganda, Tanzanian state-making, Socratic philosophy... it goes on and on and becomes tiring to jump all over the globe and time spectrum.
The basic idea is interesting: large-scale social planning efforts undertaken with simplistic understandings of the people and places they are meant to serve are bound to fail, largely and spectacularly. Read the introduction. Read chapter three on urban planning. They're both five-star material-- compelling, in-depth and fascinating. Skim the rest and skip the last two chapters.
April 7, 2017
Definitely one of the best non-fiction books I have read lately. So much food for thought - so much to rethink about how I look at the world.
I got interested in reading this book because of a series of tweets in response to https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-... about how both stats and stories have limits and can't help us comprehend the full complexity of the truth.
So the book starts of with a description of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia wherein some smart people realized that the timber yield from a forest could be maximized if they replaced the chaotic forest ecosystem with a rectangular grid of Norway spruce. Everything seemed going spectacularly well until the next generation of spruce was planted and the impoverished ecosystem couldn't support them anymore. Yet this "forestry" was exported all across the globe especially by the colonial masters.
As the book progresses, we see this pattern repeated often. It's there in Le Corbusier's city design and Soviet collective farms. And these schemes always seem to fail. The book gives a two part answer: 1) Centralized powers are always trying to make the world "legible" since they are easier to monitor and control 2) Aesthetics and pseudo-science of "high-modernism" pretending to be actual science - instead of empiricism and looking at the data, the most rational and efficient way of doing things is assumed to be putting things in a grid. Whether it actually leads to any functional improvement is unquestioned. Instead of a thoughtful consideration of trade-offs, we are left with a singular view imposed as "best for all". Due to this hubris of naive "best for all" paternalism and the belief that one is dealing with scientific truths it leads to lack of tolerance for any dissent.
This was the book that actually helped me understand the Gandhian argument for local self sufficiency - the "metis" that people develop over time living in a local space.
Yet, Scott is very aware of how cities of yore - the organic livable cities - unlike those of Le Corbusier's, had a life-expectancy in the forties because everyone was so packed together and dying of cholera. He himself says how Green Revolution, which took ideas from scientific farming methods, helped to provide food for millions of people who otherwise would have starved. Even modern timber farms seem fairly successful. So what's the point? I think Scott is trying to raise a more subtle point - understanding that all science is model building and improving the human condition calls for coordination between the centralized state modernism and the local "metis" of all kinds. Another point is that incremental changes are much better than the revolutionary ones that claim to fix all problems.
I see similar issues in the world of software. For example, the recent back and forth about rewriting curl in a safer language. Or the trouble with metrics in ad-networks. Same thing in surface level discussions about interpretability in AI or human medicine missing the "long tail" of complexities and interactions.
I think we as scientists tend to forget that humans are always solving a multi-objective problem and simple optimization schemes for a single metric are bound to fail.
Other interesting reviews:
1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcod...
Author's own summary:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/09/...
I got interested in reading this book because of a series of tweets in response to https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-... about how both stats and stories have limits and can't help us comprehend the full complexity of the truth.
So the book starts of with a description of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia wherein some smart people realized that the timber yield from a forest could be maximized if they replaced the chaotic forest ecosystem with a rectangular grid of Norway spruce. Everything seemed going spectacularly well until the next generation of spruce was planted and the impoverished ecosystem couldn't support them anymore. Yet this "forestry" was exported all across the globe especially by the colonial masters.
As the book progresses, we see this pattern repeated often. It's there in Le Corbusier's city design and Soviet collective farms. And these schemes always seem to fail. The book gives a two part answer: 1) Centralized powers are always trying to make the world "legible" since they are easier to monitor and control 2) Aesthetics and pseudo-science of "high-modernism" pretending to be actual science - instead of empiricism and looking at the data, the most rational and efficient way of doing things is assumed to be putting things in a grid. Whether it actually leads to any functional improvement is unquestioned. Instead of a thoughtful consideration of trade-offs, we are left with a singular view imposed as "best for all". Due to this hubris of naive "best for all" paternalism and the belief that one is dealing with scientific truths it leads to lack of tolerance for any dissent.
This was the book that actually helped me understand the Gandhian argument for local self sufficiency - the "metis" that people develop over time living in a local space.
Yet, Scott is very aware of how cities of yore - the organic livable cities - unlike those of Le Corbusier's, had a life-expectancy in the forties because everyone was so packed together and dying of cholera. He himself says how Green Revolution, which took ideas from scientific farming methods, helped to provide food for millions of people who otherwise would have starved. Even modern timber farms seem fairly successful. So what's the point? I think Scott is trying to raise a more subtle point - understanding that all science is model building and improving the human condition calls for coordination between the centralized state modernism and the local "metis" of all kinds. Another point is that incremental changes are much better than the revolutionary ones that claim to fix all problems.
I see similar issues in the world of software. For example, the recent back and forth about rewriting curl in a safer language. Or the trouble with metrics in ad-networks. Same thing in surface level discussions about interpretability in AI or human medicine missing the "long tail" of complexities and interactions.
I think we as scientists tend to forget that humans are always solving a multi-objective problem and simple optimization schemes for a single metric are bound to fail.
Other interesting reviews:
1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcod...
Author's own summary:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/09/...
August 23, 2018
I think the book is a bit dated, but perhaps it was so influential that its ideas seeped into everything else. It's a solid and almost unassailable thesis--modernizing states overlooked the knowledge of local farmers and other people for central planning and caused all sorts of terrible outcomes. Agreed.
However, at times I think he over extends the thesis to disparage all forms of government planning where his facts and data only apply to land management, farming, and other issues of local culture. Moreover, he doesn't quite address the what now? Now that we've lived with hundreds of years of central planning, besides lament the lost traditions, how do we undo the damage? Still, this is a worthwhile history and perspective--especially for all government bureaocrats and policymakers
However, at times I think he over extends the thesis to disparage all forms of government planning where his facts and data only apply to land management, farming, and other issues of local culture. Moreover, he doesn't quite address the what now? Now that we've lived with hundreds of years of central planning, besides lament the lost traditions, how do we undo the damage? Still, this is a worthwhile history and perspective--especially for all government bureaocrats and policymakers
August 8, 2022
Superb, permanently changed the way I understand the world.
My takeaway - not quite Scott's story, but close:
+ bureaucracies and elites often think that they know better, that they can use technocratic means to make things much better for the population;
+ sometimes this works spectacularly well;
+ sometimes it obliterates local knowledge (metis) that is actually the basis for the functioning of a society
+ those technocrats - the High Modernists - want to measure (and impose) legible order on the governed. This may mean cadastral land maps; it may mean a census; it may mean universal time & weight measures; and so on.
It's not clear what to do in response. High Modernists gonna High Modern. I say this as someone who is, in many respects, a technocratic High Modernist. But what would be a healthier relationship between planners, visionaries, bureaucracts, elites, and the rest of humanity? Scott teaches us some humility about this question, without answering it.
My takeaway - not quite Scott's story, but close:
+ bureaucracies and elites often think that they know better, that they can use technocratic means to make things much better for the population;
+ sometimes this works spectacularly well;
+ sometimes it obliterates local knowledge (metis) that is actually the basis for the functioning of a society
+ those technocrats - the High Modernists - want to measure (and impose) legible order on the governed. This may mean cadastral land maps; it may mean a census; it may mean universal time & weight measures; and so on.
It's not clear what to do in response. High Modernists gonna High Modern. I say this as someone who is, in many respects, a technocratic High Modernist. But what would be a healthier relationship between planners, visionaries, bureaucracts, elites, and the rest of humanity? Scott teaches us some humility about this question, without answering it.
March 7, 2022
An excellent collection of case studies exploring how the state-desire for order and control often suppresses the embedded relations that enables societies and communities to function and live. The state is, by necessity, removed from the people it governs, and this is the core problem explored in the book.
Much like David Graeber illustrated the intimate relationship between the creation of money and the state, Scott’s studies illustrate a similar relationship between the state and the creation of science as a method and language. Quantification is here central, both for instrumental and discursive ends. This process seeks to convert a complex (social or natural) system into a set of variables that can ultimately be manipulated in the service of efficiency. This language is today embedded in our common sense, which, to me, represents a form of enclosure of not just the resources being governed, but the very language we use to structure our thinking and orient our social imagination.
The rise of statecraft is characterised by imposed and enforced standardisation (not uncommonly through forms of violence). One peculiar example of this is surnames. These used to be much more fluent and less important (which is hard to imagine today). With the advent of taxes, the authorities also needed some way to keep track of their subjects; surnames here came to serve that role. With this imposed standardisation, local complexity is uprooted in favour of integrating a uniform system.
This rationality is captured by what Scott terms ‘high modernism’. High modernism (much like neoliberalism, seemingly) is an order backed by the state lending its legitimacy from the assumption that there is a scientific solution to everything. It casts away old ways of organisation and practices to instead idolise an imagined great future. The present here merely serves as a platform from which ambitious schemes are launched.
In the book, the architect, planner, and visionary Le Corbusier serves as the embodiment of high modernism (although high modernism started in the 1800s, according to Scott), with Brasília taken as an example of a realised high modernist scheme. Built from scratch and according to the scheme, what in the end made the formal city function was the informal structures and arrangements organically appearing in and around the city by the ordinary people. Its failure (like the other cases outlined in the book) lies in the modernist schemes’ tendency to replace ‘deep’ (i.e. historically built and culturally grounded) complexity with simplified and quantified order.
In the last part of the book, Scott discusses the term Aristotelean term ‘Metis’, which is used to discuss a type of local knowledge that cannot be learnt by text, only by practice. Metis is highly bound to place and often refined through generations. Due to its hyper-local embeddedness, it cannot be universalised and thus not applied to contexts outside its origins. The book’s closing is a call to consider and respect the value of local knowledge.
Much like David Graeber illustrated the intimate relationship between the creation of money and the state, Scott’s studies illustrate a similar relationship between the state and the creation of science as a method and language. Quantification is here central, both for instrumental and discursive ends. This process seeks to convert a complex (social or natural) system into a set of variables that can ultimately be manipulated in the service of efficiency. This language is today embedded in our common sense, which, to me, represents a form of enclosure of not just the resources being governed, but the very language we use to structure our thinking and orient our social imagination.
The rise of statecraft is characterised by imposed and enforced standardisation (not uncommonly through forms of violence). One peculiar example of this is surnames. These used to be much more fluent and less important (which is hard to imagine today). With the advent of taxes, the authorities also needed some way to keep track of their subjects; surnames here came to serve that role. With this imposed standardisation, local complexity is uprooted in favour of integrating a uniform system.
This rationality is captured by what Scott terms ‘high modernism’. High modernism (much like neoliberalism, seemingly) is an order backed by the state lending its legitimacy from the assumption that there is a scientific solution to everything. It casts away old ways of organisation and practices to instead idolise an imagined great future. The present here merely serves as a platform from which ambitious schemes are launched.
In the book, the architect, planner, and visionary Le Corbusier serves as the embodiment of high modernism (although high modernism started in the 1800s, according to Scott), with Brasília taken as an example of a realised high modernist scheme. Built from scratch and according to the scheme, what in the end made the formal city function was the informal structures and arrangements organically appearing in and around the city by the ordinary people. Its failure (like the other cases outlined in the book) lies in the modernist schemes’ tendency to replace ‘deep’ (i.e. historically built and culturally grounded) complexity with simplified and quantified order.
In the last part of the book, Scott discusses the term Aristotelean term ‘Metis’, which is used to discuss a type of local knowledge that cannot be learnt by text, only by practice. Metis is highly bound to place and often refined through generations. Due to its hyper-local embeddedness, it cannot be universalised and thus not applied to contexts outside its origins. The book’s closing is a call to consider and respect the value of local knowledge.
May 23, 2020
As a work of academic theory this is mostly terrific. Scott does a great job articulating his central thesis, and the entire project is underpinned by a curiosity of mind that's readily apparent in the breadth of the books case-study work (I particularly loved his tangent regarding city planning). The argument at the centre of this is a relative simply one: human ecology is unfathomably complex, and the simplifications inherent in large-scale, utopian visions of statehood will inevitably wash away this complexity, generally causing a great deal of pain in the process. It's a call for political humility, I think, and is among the most well-argued and humane criticisms of the command economy I've read.
Sometimes Scott's anarchist tendencies (which I do in many ways find myself agreeing with!) can lead him to some rather bizarre, or a least seemingly contradictory stances. He continually articulates what is lost with regard to the state's blunt-force simplification of its population (a lot of these tangents are particularly insightful), but merely glosses over what can be gained from such large-scale methods of organisation. Public healthcare, housing and the redistribution of land and resources are merely footnotes to Scott's main points of state overreach (it can sometimes feel borderline comedic when, after an entire 20-30 pages extrapolating the pitfalls of this overreach, Scott then dedicates one page to the minor, barely worth mentioning benefit of universal healthcare). This is in some ways to be expected, as Scott's book is explicitly about the limits of statehood rather than it's potential benefits, but I think the work would certainly read stronger if he was more willing to explore these contradictions.
Ideas I'd like to expand on/research:
-How to reconcile Scott's convincing critique of the command economy with the inevitable failings of any kind of 'free market'.
-Whether the book's Chomsky-esque call for something resembling cautious, 'radical reform' is particularly relevant given current material conditions.
Sometimes Scott's anarchist tendencies (which I do in many ways find myself agreeing with!) can lead him to some rather bizarre, or a least seemingly contradictory stances. He continually articulates what is lost with regard to the state's blunt-force simplification of its population (a lot of these tangents are particularly insightful), but merely glosses over what can be gained from such large-scale methods of organisation. Public healthcare, housing and the redistribution of land and resources are merely footnotes to Scott's main points of state overreach (it can sometimes feel borderline comedic when, after an entire 20-30 pages extrapolating the pitfalls of this overreach, Scott then dedicates one page to the minor, barely worth mentioning benefit of universal healthcare). This is in some ways to be expected, as Scott's book is explicitly about the limits of statehood rather than it's potential benefits, but I think the work would certainly read stronger if he was more willing to explore these contradictions.
Ideas I'd like to expand on/research:
-How to reconcile Scott's convincing critique of the command economy with the inevitable failings of any kind of 'free market'.
-Whether the book's Chomsky-esque call for something resembling cautious, 'radical reform' is particularly relevant given current material conditions.
February 21, 2020
‘Seeing like a State’ piles on example after example of where state intervention has proved disastrous from places as far apart as the Soviet Union and Tanzania, and yet while mirroring Hayek’s horror at Government large scale economic and social intervention, which is tightly conjoined with a total belief in market forces, Scott takes a more anarchistic stance looking more to local knowledge, involvement, and decision making. The book as a whole works well at battering supporters of large scale state intervention, but really goes no further than that. One might ask the question of whether we might be able to cite other interventions that have proved successful, or, at least, consider what might have been the consequences of non-intervention in certain cases. There are important questions to pose about State intervention, how it can restrict individual freedom of choice, but equally how it can lead to the eradication of killer diseases and even the promotion of transportation and communication systems that lead to better living standards. Having said all that, it’s a fascinating and important addition to the whole question of how we should organize our world.
June 11, 2019
This book is a great reference and it did intrigue me to learn more about Luxembourg's criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as well as to read Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities. " However, I didn't like Scott's writing style as much as I had expected. I wish he focused more on different perspectives rather than going into details jumping from one topic to another and repeating his conclusions through the book. Perhaps I should read it again.
March 7, 2021
5/5 for the book's thesis.
1/5 for the book's length.
Why is this allowed?? Why do thesis-driven books have to be so long??
1/5 for the book's length.
Why is this allowed?? Why do thesis-driven books have to be so long??
March 30, 2022
Amazing overview of the rise of States and the mechanism that underpins it.
I am conflicted for the rating I should give this book.
It weaves a coherent thread throughout history, and concentrates itself on the rise of modern States. It admonishes srtuctures of control, categorisation, measurement, as a driving force that fragilize systems, which thrive on diversity and the unplanned chaos of life.
But, though the point is made beautifully, and with great wealth of examples, the solution is not expanded much. The recommendations to counter the High-Modernist outlook of control is to plan mostly for the short-term, to allow flexibility in design, to understand that the future bring unplanned changes to your design, to move in incremental steps.
... Ok, but in a world breaking at the seams, where drastic change is required everywhere, it's important to see that it's in the spirit of returning to a higher level of connections and natural diversity that we need to implement drastic changes to our monocultured, centralized world.
However, the Anarchist outlook of the author was very prevalent in his prescriptions and comments. I would have loved more specific prescriptions from him, as it seemed he simply disliked simplifying schemes that ignore nature's complexity, and though it points to small family farms, flexible city designs, there was little else to be implemented in the book, so it sounded more like he wants us to be aware of the hubris of planning...
But I do want the working class to plan production. As James C. Scott mentions, the Capitalist Market itself has a crushing logic that forces people to play within it, so if we are ever to transition to Socialism, I assume we'll need to plan lots of things. I take it then that it's important to plan incrementally, with lots of liberties, allowing the peculiarities of specific conditions to dictate the approach to take, and not focus on individual metrics at the expense of others.
As such, this book is still important to me, but it's easy to take it's message as a critique of technology and science itself, which are principles that absolutely need to be leveraged in the world I want. He keeps saying science brings good stuff, but also shows how it ignores the local knowledge of the multiple conditions and misses a ton of stuff in the process. That's understandable, so I hope the change we hope to bring will take this warning in consideration.
I am conflicted for the rating I should give this book.
It weaves a coherent thread throughout history, and concentrates itself on the rise of modern States. It admonishes srtuctures of control, categorisation, measurement, as a driving force that fragilize systems, which thrive on diversity and the unplanned chaos of life.
But, though the point is made beautifully, and with great wealth of examples, the solution is not expanded much. The recommendations to counter the High-Modernist outlook of control is to plan mostly for the short-term, to allow flexibility in design, to understand that the future bring unplanned changes to your design, to move in incremental steps.
... Ok, but in a world breaking at the seams, where drastic change is required everywhere, it's important to see that it's in the spirit of returning to a higher level of connections and natural diversity that we need to implement drastic changes to our monocultured, centralized world.
However, the Anarchist outlook of the author was very prevalent in his prescriptions and comments. I would have loved more specific prescriptions from him, as it seemed he simply disliked simplifying schemes that ignore nature's complexity, and though it points to small family farms, flexible city designs, there was little else to be implemented in the book, so it sounded more like he wants us to be aware of the hubris of planning...
But I do want the working class to plan production. As James C. Scott mentions, the Capitalist Market itself has a crushing logic that forces people to play within it, so if we are ever to transition to Socialism, I assume we'll need to plan lots of things. I take it then that it's important to plan incrementally, with lots of liberties, allowing the peculiarities of specific conditions to dictate the approach to take, and not focus on individual metrics at the expense of others.
As such, this book is still important to me, but it's easy to take it's message as a critique of technology and science itself, which are principles that absolutely need to be leveraged in the world I want. He keeps saying science brings good stuff, but also shows how it ignores the local knowledge of the multiple conditions and misses a ton of stuff in the process. That's understandable, so I hope the change we hope to bring will take this warning in consideration.
November 5, 2025
This book drives home the message that states are a bureaucracies that seek to standardize and quantify everything they see.
They cut down old growth forests and replace them with orderly, single species lumber farms that come with myriad unforeseen problems because a natural forest is sustained by its entire ecosystem. The state’s attempts to organize and outsmart nature are doomed to failure from the outset because of the hubris of their designers.
The state has attempted to quantify and commoditize its citizens the same way. Standardizing plots of land, measurements, languages and trying to recast society in its high modernist style. This would include things like Stalin’s collective farming initiatives and other similar projects.
The bureaucrats at the top see everyone under them as stupid and backwardly clinging to archaic ideas. In reality, even when these projects have any success or at minimum are survived by its people, it’s in spite of the system, not because of it.
The author describes the concept of metis, the knowledge and experience of certain skilled individuals.
He describes it as a factory with machines operated by workers who are considered unskilled and interchangeable by the company. On the surface it seems to be the case , but in reality, the machines are often finicky and require experienced people to operate them correctly.
If those workers followed company procedures to the letter, work would grind to a halt. Confronted with that fact, some bureaucrats would turn a blind eye and claim success, others would rather see their project fail done their way than succeed by other means.
The author says that state bureaucracies are parasitic on natural societies and cannot exist without them.
There’s a bit of an anarchic bent to this which is easy to agree with on the surface but I wonder what our alternatives are at this point, we can’t go back to an idealized, egalitarian society that may never have truly existed. Is it even possible to move forward from where we are in a balanced way?
Books like this make me think about pessimistic philosophy, the idea that there’s no free will, our brain just rationalizes our biological drives to us so we feel that we’ve made a decision.
Could this happens on a civilizational scale?
If we are a product of nature and we repeatedly create bureaucratic hierarchies, maybe it’s just our collective natural function, which sounds terrible but here we are.
They cut down old growth forests and replace them with orderly, single species lumber farms that come with myriad unforeseen problems because a natural forest is sustained by its entire ecosystem. The state’s attempts to organize and outsmart nature are doomed to failure from the outset because of the hubris of their designers.
The state has attempted to quantify and commoditize its citizens the same way. Standardizing plots of land, measurements, languages and trying to recast society in its high modernist style. This would include things like Stalin’s collective farming initiatives and other similar projects.
The bureaucrats at the top see everyone under them as stupid and backwardly clinging to archaic ideas. In reality, even when these projects have any success or at minimum are survived by its people, it’s in spite of the system, not because of it.
The author describes the concept of metis, the knowledge and experience of certain skilled individuals.
He describes it as a factory with machines operated by workers who are considered unskilled and interchangeable by the company. On the surface it seems to be the case , but in reality, the machines are often finicky and require experienced people to operate them correctly.
If those workers followed company procedures to the letter, work would grind to a halt. Confronted with that fact, some bureaucrats would turn a blind eye and claim success, others would rather see their project fail done their way than succeed by other means.
The author says that state bureaucracies are parasitic on natural societies and cannot exist without them.
There’s a bit of an anarchic bent to this which is easy to agree with on the surface but I wonder what our alternatives are at this point, we can’t go back to an idealized, egalitarian society that may never have truly existed. Is it even possible to move forward from where we are in a balanced way?
Books like this make me think about pessimistic philosophy, the idea that there’s no free will, our brain just rationalizes our biological drives to us so we feel that we’ve made a decision.
Could this happens on a civilizational scale?
If we are a product of nature and we repeatedly create bureaucratic hierarchies, maybe it’s just our collective natural function, which sounds terrible but here we are.
April 29, 2012
There are times when you read a book and it's as if someone's opened a window to let the light in. I had one of those moments just 20 minutes or so after cracking open Scott's Seeing Like A State. In his book, Scott tries to unpack the various failures in high-modernist, authoritarian state planning, from the building of Brazil's new capital in Brasilia, Soviet collectivization and ujamaa villages in Tanzania. These case studies form the heart of the book and while interesting, were not what sparked the Aha! moment for me (hence the four stars, rather than five).
For me, that flash of illumination came when Scott articulated the state's need for legibility and simplification to facilitate its exercise of control and power. From the physical design of cities and the layout of road networks, to the creation of surnames and the standardization of language, Scott argues that all these are initiatives driven by the impulse to simplify and create legibility. Legibility may not necessarily lead to the most efficient or productive outcomes - industrial food production with its heavy dependence on fertilizers, antibiotics and attendant problems of pollution etc is a case in point. But seen from the context of legibility and simplification to enhance centralized control it makes perfect sense. A legible population makes it easier for the government to collect taxes, draft people for military service, etc. But Scott isn't making a blanket argument against governments, or against their quest for legibility and simplification. He acknowledges that this impulse can help bring about important outcomes, such as when used for vaccination drives.
I don't know if previously, on some level, I'd had a vague awareness of this impulse for simplification and legibility. But Scott's cogent analysis certainly put things in sharp perspective for me, made me think about policy initiatives from another angle and consider some of the underlying motivations/impulses that are not immediately apparent. And that's what I love about this book. It's given me a new lens through which to view the world.
For me, that flash of illumination came when Scott articulated the state's need for legibility and simplification to facilitate its exercise of control and power. From the physical design of cities and the layout of road networks, to the creation of surnames and the standardization of language, Scott argues that all these are initiatives driven by the impulse to simplify and create legibility. Legibility may not necessarily lead to the most efficient or productive outcomes - industrial food production with its heavy dependence on fertilizers, antibiotics and attendant problems of pollution etc is a case in point. But seen from the context of legibility and simplification to enhance centralized control it makes perfect sense. A legible population makes it easier for the government to collect taxes, draft people for military service, etc. But Scott isn't making a blanket argument against governments, or against their quest for legibility and simplification. He acknowledges that this impulse can help bring about important outcomes, such as when used for vaccination drives.
I don't know if previously, on some level, I'd had a vague awareness of this impulse for simplification and legibility. But Scott's cogent analysis certainly put things in sharp perspective for me, made me think about policy initiatives from another angle and consider some of the underlying motivations/impulses that are not immediately apparent. And that's what I love about this book. It's given me a new lens through which to view the world.
April 25, 2016
Five stars for the ideas, two stars for the prose, rounded up because this is just too an important book to not celebrate. Authoritarian high modernism, legibility, and metis—the concepts Scott introduces have hugely affected the way I see the world and have given me a vocabulary for talking about what I find so important about the institutions societies build and the dignity that is to be found in what I will call craft. It took me much longer to finish this beast than expected, but the final chapter on practical knowledge makes it all totally worth it. A deserved classic.
June 7, 2021
I wish someone had told me years ago that someone had decided to take everything Wendell Berry said and put some serious scholarship behind it.
April 26, 2012
Mistaken notions I previously held that this brainy tome corrected:
-- "Physiocrats" advocate government by massage therapy.
-- "Usufruct" is available in a fun variety of colorful flavors.
-- If someone tells you that something is "immanent", just hang around and wait for it to happen.
-- "Pari Passu" is what's for lunch at the ashram.
-- Upon reading (p. 19 of Kindle edition) that a particular type of tree was a “bread-and-butter tree”, it is appropriate to rush into the nearest park with a shaker of McCormick's finest cinnamon.
As you can see, the Kindle dictionary function got a workout on this one, as the cursor rushed around the screen to keep up with the avalanche of fancy words that only Yale professors can use without self-consciousness. This is my slightly lame way of saying that this book was made more inaccessible for the average reader by the use of obscure, foreign, or jargon words and phrases without explanation, often when perfectly adequate everyday English words were available.
That's too bad, because there were plenty of interesting ideas and research whizzing by, and the Yale-prof style obstructed their comprehension by those of us with merely adequate education.
This also book contains a handy four-step recipe (see other Goodreads reviews) for creating a fiasco on the scale of, for example, Stalin's collectivization of agriculture. This could be useful to have on hand if one is unexpectedly called upon to engage in fiasco-creation. While reading this book, I said to myself, “Self, conspicuous by their absence are step-by-step recipes for fiasco-remedy, or, even better, fiasco-prevention.” However, if you manage to maintain your sang-froid through repeated appearances in the text of “stochastic” and “episteme”, a general outline in fiasco-avoidance appears at the end.
This 1999 volume portrays mostly 20th-century, government-driven attempts at ordering society. Scott uses the word “legible” and grammatical variants to explain the motivation and subsequent activity of governments to more effectively order, map, census (is that a verb?), and tax the people living within their jurisdiction. Governments, Scott says, feel a compulsion to better “read” their populations, i.e., know roughly how many people, their professions, purchases, incomes, and such, so that they can (following verbs meant in both neutral and pejorative meanings) order, manipulate, and exploit them. It occurred to me that this process is currently happening on the Internet, led by the unholy (non-governmental) quartet of (in unholy alphabetic order) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, who have been joined by a host of lesser satanic beings in this enterprise. This idea may already have been bouncing around the blogosphere for years for all I know, but I felt dangerously clever and original when it occurred to me all on my onesies. (Don't burst my balloon by leaving comments linking to ten-year-old articles of the same opinion.)
If you search (using Google, of course) using the book's name, plus the names of the unholy quartet, you will find some ventilation about how the u.q. ganged up to reduce/lessen the threat posed to the free flow of intellectual property which resulted from the late unlamented SOPA/PIPA laws. What you don't find, as far as I can tell, are any predictions of the possible consequences of the u.q. and friends getting into the legibility racket, fencing off parts of the Internet like an electronic collective farm, from which our needs will be so expertly anticipated that we will feel no need to leave.
So far, the stumbling baby steps of the u.q. in this area appear both comic and creepy, like when Gmail ads for Ralston Purina appear because someone has asked “Who let the cat out of the bag?” in an email. It seems that private companies have a relatively modest scope for fiasco-creation in this regard, limited to the bankrupting of their investors. (This event which would surely make my black heart sing, but I digress.) Perhaps I underestimate: what if any or all of the u.q. become too big to fail, or defy? Note to future graduate students: it's time to start researching “Seeing Like a Search Engine”.
-- "Physiocrats" advocate government by massage therapy.
-- "Usufruct" is available in a fun variety of colorful flavors.
-- If someone tells you that something is "immanent", just hang around and wait for it to happen.
-- "Pari Passu" is what's for lunch at the ashram.
-- Upon reading (p. 19 of Kindle edition) that a particular type of tree was a “bread-and-butter tree”, it is appropriate to rush into the nearest park with a shaker of McCormick's finest cinnamon.
As you can see, the Kindle dictionary function got a workout on this one, as the cursor rushed around the screen to keep up with the avalanche of fancy words that only Yale professors can use without self-consciousness. This is my slightly lame way of saying that this book was made more inaccessible for the average reader by the use of obscure, foreign, or jargon words and phrases without explanation, often when perfectly adequate everyday English words were available.
That's too bad, because there were plenty of interesting ideas and research whizzing by, and the Yale-prof style obstructed their comprehension by those of us with merely adequate education.
This also book contains a handy four-step recipe (see other Goodreads reviews) for creating a fiasco on the scale of, for example, Stalin's collectivization of agriculture. This could be useful to have on hand if one is unexpectedly called upon to engage in fiasco-creation. While reading this book, I said to myself, “Self, conspicuous by their absence are step-by-step recipes for fiasco-remedy, or, even better, fiasco-prevention.” However, if you manage to maintain your sang-froid through repeated appearances in the text of “stochastic” and “episteme”, a general outline in fiasco-avoidance appears at the end.
This 1999 volume portrays mostly 20th-century, government-driven attempts at ordering society. Scott uses the word “legible” and grammatical variants to explain the motivation and subsequent activity of governments to more effectively order, map, census (is that a verb?), and tax the people living within their jurisdiction. Governments, Scott says, feel a compulsion to better “read” their populations, i.e., know roughly how many people, their professions, purchases, incomes, and such, so that they can (following verbs meant in both neutral and pejorative meanings) order, manipulate, and exploit them. It occurred to me that this process is currently happening on the Internet, led by the unholy (non-governmental) quartet of (in unholy alphabetic order) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, who have been joined by a host of lesser satanic beings in this enterprise. This idea may already have been bouncing around the blogosphere for years for all I know, but I felt dangerously clever and original when it occurred to me all on my onesies. (Don't burst my balloon by leaving comments linking to ten-year-old articles of the same opinion.)
If you search (using Google, of course) using the book's name, plus the names of the unholy quartet, you will find some ventilation about how the u.q. ganged up to reduce/lessen the threat posed to the free flow of intellectual property which resulted from the late unlamented SOPA/PIPA laws. What you don't find, as far as I can tell, are any predictions of the possible consequences of the u.q. and friends getting into the legibility racket, fencing off parts of the Internet like an electronic collective farm, from which our needs will be so expertly anticipated that we will feel no need to leave.
So far, the stumbling baby steps of the u.q. in this area appear both comic and creepy, like when Gmail ads for Ralston Purina appear because someone has asked “Who let the cat out of the bag?” in an email. It seems that private companies have a relatively modest scope for fiasco-creation in this regard, limited to the bankrupting of their investors. (This event which would surely make my black heart sing, but I digress.) Perhaps I underestimate: what if any or all of the u.q. become too big to fail, or defy? Note to future graduate students: it's time to start researching “Seeing Like a Search Engine”.
January 9, 2026
Actually this book is quite interesting, it made me think about some patterns around me. However, the book has a few flaws:
- It is very slow paced. It should have focused on more different edge cases instead of long overviews of similar samples.
- I would have preferred some anti-arguments to be discussed. The author does not mention any contradictory ideas.
- Although I understand where the author is leading to, it seems like there is no 'message' to be taken from this book.
Surprisingly, a great portion of the book was dedicated to urban planning, which I am quite interested in. I would recommend those chapters to people interested in urban theories and architecture.
All in all, when we look at the most successful states (whatever that means), they are mostly organised, generic, and hierarchical. One can't think if success or failure is dependent on other parameters too.
I WOULD recommend reading this book - it helped me some brainstorming, but the pace is slow, and the book does not lead to specific conclusions .
- It is very slow paced. It should have focused on more different edge cases instead of long overviews of similar samples.
- I would have preferred some anti-arguments to be discussed. The author does not mention any contradictory ideas.
- Although I understand where the author is leading to, it seems like there is no 'message' to be taken from this book.
Surprisingly, a great portion of the book was dedicated to urban planning, which I am quite interested in. I would recommend those chapters to people interested in urban theories and architecture.
All in all, when we look at the most successful states (whatever that means), they are mostly organised, generic, and hierarchical. One can't think if success or failure is dependent on other parameters too.
I WOULD recommend reading this book - it helped me some brainstorming, but the pace is slow, and the book does not lead to specific conclusions .
September 14, 2019
probably the best book i've read all year! made me seriously reconsider some of my stances on problem-solving and progress.
Scott leverages a well-evidenced critique of authoritarian technocracy, ultimately arguing for the elevation of local, adaptive knowledge in institutional reform. furthermore, he describes how ruling elites use simplification and legibility (often restructuring and mass data collection) to make complex systems more controllable.
he makes his case by illustrating the lofty goals and failures of various historical projects from scientific socialism in Tanzania to industrial agriculture in Germany to Le Corbusier's utopian city plans. I appreciated that his examples are not limited by field, sector, ideology, or geography.
he also avoids dismissing scientific approaches wholesale, instead arguing that they must be
1) combined with pragmatic knowledge (metis)
2) subject to input from the populace/workers/practitioners - a strong civil society
3) work best in closed systems rather than open and complex ones
4) implemented slowly and iteratively
I found this book a really good accompaniment to Antifragile and The Life and Death of Great American Cities (Jacobs is cited extensively), but broader and more rigorous than either (though the rigor bar is not that high).
finally, I'm most curious about how Scott's analysis applies to the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism - both major means of making complex systems more legible/manipulable, and consequently centralizing power in techno-elites as algorithmic decisionmaking becomes prevalent. tangentially, i think tech disruptions are especially prone to optimize one variable in a complex system at the cost of others.
Scott leverages a well-evidenced critique of authoritarian technocracy, ultimately arguing for the elevation of local, adaptive knowledge in institutional reform. furthermore, he describes how ruling elites use simplification and legibility (often restructuring and mass data collection) to make complex systems more controllable.
he makes his case by illustrating the lofty goals and failures of various historical projects from scientific socialism in Tanzania to industrial agriculture in Germany to Le Corbusier's utopian city plans. I appreciated that his examples are not limited by field, sector, ideology, or geography.
he also avoids dismissing scientific approaches wholesale, instead arguing that they must be
1) combined with pragmatic knowledge (metis)
2) subject to input from the populace/workers/practitioners - a strong civil society
3) work best in closed systems rather than open and complex ones
4) implemented slowly and iteratively
I found this book a really good accompaniment to Antifragile and The Life and Death of Great American Cities (Jacobs is cited extensively), but broader and more rigorous than either (though the rigor bar is not that high).
finally, I'm most curious about how Scott's analysis applies to the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism - both major means of making complex systems more legible/manipulable, and consequently centralizing power in techno-elites as algorithmic decisionmaking becomes prevalent. tangentially, i think tech disruptions are especially prone to optimize one variable in a complex system at the cost of others.
Read
May 23, 2024Oke stiekem heb ik maar een klein deel gelezen omdat dat relevant was voor mijn scriptie maar binnen korte tijd ga ik hier niet in verder dus hij is ´uit´.
Wel super interessant. over hoe (vroeg)moderne staten steeds meer grip kregen - en eisten - op hun onderdanen en hun territoria door middel van standaardisering en simplificering. denk aan: het invoeren van achternamen, het standaardiseren van taal, maar ook aan: het leesbaar maken van de natuur. Scott presenteert met kracht hoe het bos onder 19e-eeuws Pruisisch gezag steeds meer vanuit een mathematisch en vooral winstgericht perspectief werd bekeken. om grip te krijgen op bosgebieden - ter verhoging van de winst van houtwinning - werd een biodivers areaal aan bomen vervangen door naaldbomen en werden bossen in schaakbord-patronen ingedeeld. het eeuwenoude gebruik van het bos door de bevolking werd ingeperkt door meer boswachterijen, door nieuwe verboden en regels, en sowieso door het bekende landschap te veranderen naar iets abstracts, een monocultuur van winstgevende fijnsparren.
Niet zo gek dus dat Marx over dit conflict in 1842 meerdere essays publiceerde. of dat het recht op het gebruik van bos een centrale eis werd van boeren tijdens de revoluties van 1848/49.
heel interessant, een aanrader om te lezen!
Wel super interessant. over hoe (vroeg)moderne staten steeds meer grip kregen - en eisten - op hun onderdanen en hun territoria door middel van standaardisering en simplificering. denk aan: het invoeren van achternamen, het standaardiseren van taal, maar ook aan: het leesbaar maken van de natuur. Scott presenteert met kracht hoe het bos onder 19e-eeuws Pruisisch gezag steeds meer vanuit een mathematisch en vooral winstgericht perspectief werd bekeken. om grip te krijgen op bosgebieden - ter verhoging van de winst van houtwinning - werd een biodivers areaal aan bomen vervangen door naaldbomen en werden bossen in schaakbord-patronen ingedeeld. het eeuwenoude gebruik van het bos door de bevolking werd ingeperkt door meer boswachterijen, door nieuwe verboden en regels, en sowieso door het bekende landschap te veranderen naar iets abstracts, een monocultuur van winstgevende fijnsparren.
Niet zo gek dus dat Marx over dit conflict in 1842 meerdere essays publiceerde. of dat het recht op het gebruik van bos een centrale eis werd van boeren tijdens de revoluties van 1848/49.
heel interessant, een aanrader om te lezen!
December 27, 2019
The best non-fiction creates a language/system of thought to explain something that everyone intuitively knew but couldn't quite flesh out. Love this set of ideas. Good social science (and any science) is thinking clearly.
October 3, 2021
Always a pleasure to read James Scott.
February 20, 2019
I've heard about this book for years and for some reason never felt much desire to read it despite many clear overlaps with my areas of interest. Even after I read his new book Against the Grain, which is a great synopsis of all the niche construction, domestication, and the cultural evolution of government stuff I've been interested in lately, and enjoyed the writing quite a bit, I didn't immediately jump back to this. But now that I've been diving into epistemology and the history of science again, it seemed like the right time.
I certainly understand why it's generated so much buzz. It's a tremendously fecund book that does a lot of things all at once, and mostly does them well, if not very thoroughly. The most obvious is that it's a very postmodernist book--a book Foucault might have written if he were capable of such clear and compelling writing. It's a critique of the way state power and scientific modernism intersect to hurt people: like Foucault's work, postmodern both as a reaction against modernism and as a broadly relativist commentary on epistemology at the same time. But it's also a plea against hubris fueled by scientific arrogance, linked to an anarchist sensibility and the kind of invocation of complexity that don't trip any alarms on the scholarly side but which most definitely resonate with a lot of the woo-type modern hippies I used to hang out with in the sustainable ag community. But then it's also a prospectus for two new fields in epistemology (though how new or unique they actually are I'm not entirely sure): perception theory from the perspective of institutions (as opposed to individuals or complete groups), and a cultural evolutionary study of knowledge focused on unspoken or even inarticulable practice.
The problem is that a lot of those ideas weren't clearly distinguished, and the connections between them are poorly organized. The suggestive fecundity is so overflowing and messy that it gets in its own way. The main thesis is that the world is complex, so making ambitious policy based on simple lab experiments is dangerous and unscientific, but states have an incentive to do it anyway because the very damage inflicted enables control and extraction. And that's a pretty interesting idea--how do the fiscal and political needs of states affect the trajectory of intellectual history and vice versa? But in practice, that gets truncated down to the most obvious element, repeated again and again and with a preponderance of evidence dumped on the parts that needed it least. Agricultural ecosystems, rural societies, and urban societies are all too complex to be safely mapped into the confines of restrictive plans. If you try, bad things will happen, as these extensive examples each show.
But then when it's time to talk about the interesting stuff, Scott just kind of asserts it without further exploration. Like, the idea that states choose to impose high-modernist plans instead of choosing more scientifically valid approaches to complexity because it benefits them is a big, bold thesis. It might even be quantitatively testable. I mean, it seems plausible, but it's less obvious than the parts Scott spent much more time demonstrating, so it's not like it just goes without saying. Is it a matter of administrative transaction costs? Simply about destroying the support networks that resist authoritarianism? Was it even successful? Is it still around, or did it get selected out? Why, if it was so good for states?
One of the biggest gaps here is the lack of a comparative perspective. Lots of states applied similar epistemologies on successful projects. Scott gestures at the ability of civil society to resist authoritarian schemes, but I would have liked to see him get into more detail on how that actually modified the epistemology. Was it a quiet subversion that enabled bad on-paper ideas to be viable, as resilient social structures weren't able to do in the worst cases he documents? Or was it a more explicit compromise that integrated other kinds of knowledge?
The best parts are those when Scott is drawing conclusions about epistemology in general, and I did clip a lot of quotes. He's a careful thinker and good writer, and he makes a lot of insightful points, both new and familiar, in compelling terms. The second to last chapter, an extended development of his idea of "metis," is particularly compelling and probably the jewel of the whole work. It leaves behind the narrow, judgmental scope of the case studies and makes the case that all types of overt knowledge can be viewed as tips of an iceberg of unspoken practical corollaries. Scott doesn't make the case in these terms, but what intrigued me about it is that it identifies a split between the products of culturally inherited systematic "cognitive gadgets" like science, which can only be transferred in terms of the systems of abstraction that created them, and the complete body of human knowledge, also culturally inherited but only as unconscious, unexplainable elements. The difference is that one kind of knowledge is overlain on the environment by design, and lives primarily in objective abstractions, while the other is fitted to the environment by cumulative selection. This might not perfectly match the distinction Scott has in mind (he emphasizes hands-on experience more than transmission and selection), but it's interestingly close.
It gets to the heart of the issue Scott has been dancing around the entire book. There's nothing wrong with oversimplifying a complex world to perceive useful patterns. Myopia is a crucial premise of every form of perception. And science isn't uniquely bad about indulging such oversimplifications. Quite the opposite. The fact that scientists expend so much effort imposing uniformity makes them ideally positioned to appreciate the complexity of the real world. Aside from the arrogance and authoritarianism, the epistemological problem with the failed schemes Scott describes is that they decoupled systematic cognitive gadgets from the legacy of practical knowledge that facilitated their engagement with the real world. And while he frames this as a kind of cautionary tale for policy-makers, it's equally revealing as an illustration of the way systematic knowledge actually works.
I'm rambling and some of this is just repeating the obvious thesis of the book but all of these ideas deserve a deeper dive than Scott gave them. The book has 18000 citations so presumably the papers I'm imagining are out there somewhere. . .
I certainly understand why it's generated so much buzz. It's a tremendously fecund book that does a lot of things all at once, and mostly does them well, if not very thoroughly. The most obvious is that it's a very postmodernist book--a book Foucault might have written if he were capable of such clear and compelling writing. It's a critique of the way state power and scientific modernism intersect to hurt people: like Foucault's work, postmodern both as a reaction against modernism and as a broadly relativist commentary on epistemology at the same time. But it's also a plea against hubris fueled by scientific arrogance, linked to an anarchist sensibility and the kind of invocation of complexity that don't trip any alarms on the scholarly side but which most definitely resonate with a lot of the woo-type modern hippies I used to hang out with in the sustainable ag community. But then it's also a prospectus for two new fields in epistemology (though how new or unique they actually are I'm not entirely sure): perception theory from the perspective of institutions (as opposed to individuals or complete groups), and a cultural evolutionary study of knowledge focused on unspoken or even inarticulable practice.
The problem is that a lot of those ideas weren't clearly distinguished, and the connections between them are poorly organized. The suggestive fecundity is so overflowing and messy that it gets in its own way. The main thesis is that the world is complex, so making ambitious policy based on simple lab experiments is dangerous and unscientific, but states have an incentive to do it anyway because the very damage inflicted enables control and extraction. And that's a pretty interesting idea--how do the fiscal and political needs of states affect the trajectory of intellectual history and vice versa? But in practice, that gets truncated down to the most obvious element, repeated again and again and with a preponderance of evidence dumped on the parts that needed it least. Agricultural ecosystems, rural societies, and urban societies are all too complex to be safely mapped into the confines of restrictive plans. If you try, bad things will happen, as these extensive examples each show.
But then when it's time to talk about the interesting stuff, Scott just kind of asserts it without further exploration. Like, the idea that states choose to impose high-modernist plans instead of choosing more scientifically valid approaches to complexity because it benefits them is a big, bold thesis. It might even be quantitatively testable. I mean, it seems plausible, but it's less obvious than the parts Scott spent much more time demonstrating, so it's not like it just goes without saying. Is it a matter of administrative transaction costs? Simply about destroying the support networks that resist authoritarianism? Was it even successful? Is it still around, or did it get selected out? Why, if it was so good for states?
One of the biggest gaps here is the lack of a comparative perspective. Lots of states applied similar epistemologies on successful projects. Scott gestures at the ability of civil society to resist authoritarian schemes, but I would have liked to see him get into more detail on how that actually modified the epistemology. Was it a quiet subversion that enabled bad on-paper ideas to be viable, as resilient social structures weren't able to do in the worst cases he documents? Or was it a more explicit compromise that integrated other kinds of knowledge?
The best parts are those when Scott is drawing conclusions about epistemology in general, and I did clip a lot of quotes. He's a careful thinker and good writer, and he makes a lot of insightful points, both new and familiar, in compelling terms. The second to last chapter, an extended development of his idea of "metis," is particularly compelling and probably the jewel of the whole work. It leaves behind the narrow, judgmental scope of the case studies and makes the case that all types of overt knowledge can be viewed as tips of an iceberg of unspoken practical corollaries. Scott doesn't make the case in these terms, but what intrigued me about it is that it identifies a split between the products of culturally inherited systematic "cognitive gadgets" like science, which can only be transferred in terms of the systems of abstraction that created them, and the complete body of human knowledge, also culturally inherited but only as unconscious, unexplainable elements. The difference is that one kind of knowledge is overlain on the environment by design, and lives primarily in objective abstractions, while the other is fitted to the environment by cumulative selection. This might not perfectly match the distinction Scott has in mind (he emphasizes hands-on experience more than transmission and selection), but it's interestingly close.
It gets to the heart of the issue Scott has been dancing around the entire book. There's nothing wrong with oversimplifying a complex world to perceive useful patterns. Myopia is a crucial premise of every form of perception. And science isn't uniquely bad about indulging such oversimplifications. Quite the opposite. The fact that scientists expend so much effort imposing uniformity makes them ideally positioned to appreciate the complexity of the real world. Aside from the arrogance and authoritarianism, the epistemological problem with the failed schemes Scott describes is that they decoupled systematic cognitive gadgets from the legacy of practical knowledge that facilitated their engagement with the real world. And while he frames this as a kind of cautionary tale for policy-makers, it's equally revealing as an illustration of the way systematic knowledge actually works.
I'm rambling and some of this is just repeating the obvious thesis of the book but all of these ideas deserve a deeper dive than Scott gave them. The book has 18000 citations so presumably the papers I'm imagining are out there somewhere. . .
April 2, 2021
I found this a stale, difficult, overly-academic book but packed with some very interesting ideas.
Scott lays out the four factors that when combined, create a really bad time for people:
1. The administrative ordering of nature and society: essentially, mistaking the map for the territory on a large scale.
2. A "high-modernist ideology": I would define this as scientism combined with a political ideology; Scott adds "uncritical, unskeptical, and this unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production".
3. An authoritarian state that's willing to double down on the first two items. We can have #1 and #2 in any society, but add authoritarianism and you're gonna suffer.
4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
In the first two chapters ("Nature and Space" and "Cities, People and Language") Scott provides some history and examples of more benign and sometimes net-positive instances of the "administrative ordering of nature and society":
- Scientific forestry in Germany; trying to better nature in its design of a forest to optimize for lumber production.
- Government standardization of weights and measurements. (easier to tax grain; but to me a net-positive for science and innovation)
- Cadrastal maps: codifying and organizing land ownership; assigning people to land (easier to tax).
- Surnames: Did you ever consider these are historically, totally unnatural, and are a state bureaucratic invention to make it easier to censure and tax?
- Planned development grids; most of America was settled this way; downtown Chicago and Manhattan were developed this way. Easier for administrators, arguably some challenges for the humans adapting to the grid.
In a short Chapter 3 Scott further unpacks the term "high modernism" My understanding is it's an infatuation with Taylorism or scientific management. In seeing the payoffs in industrial production (think: Ford assembly line), some people got the idea we can engineer/manage a better park, city, garden, natural system, society, market economy, etc. by breaking down these hugely complex and adaptive systems and rebuild them, but better.
Of course this is a recipe for failure when the four factors listed above collide, and the rest of the book are chapters that explore some of these huge failures:
- Ch 4: High-modernism applied to city planning, the early failures of Brasilia (the centrally planned capital of Brasil), some discussion of what works and what doesn't in city planning.
- Ch 5: High-modernism applied to political parties and societies, a case study of Lenin. I found this chapter difficult as it assumes the reader has more background knowledge than I did.
- Ch 6: The failure of Soviet collectivization and farming, resulting in huge famine.
- Ch 7: The failure of Tanzanian villigization. This was new to me. Wow. Tanzania tried to resettle its entire rural population in villages to run collective farms. This was a total disaster.
- Ch 8: A deep dive into "taming nature", the failure of monocropping, fertilizer challenges.
Scott makes a persuasive case about all of these failures: an infatuation with order, organization, and "science", combined with an ideology that incredibly complex natural systems can be completely organized and optimized by central planners/committees, and the terror of a regime that has enough power to blindly push these plans blindly forward. An interesting insight into the human incentive problem: in these schemes, low-level muscle gets incentivized to (for example) forcibly resettle people faster, because the numbers moving from "unsettled" to "resettled" is how progress is measured by top administrators. The low-level muscle resettle people faster, which is chaotic and creates horrible long-term results, but the muscle gets rewarded in the short term, and the yardstick by which the administration measures success shows a positive result.
The final chapter (9) on "practical knowledge" feels like weak pre-conclusion, but argues for the value of local and historical knowledge and learned experience. The author tries (and in my opinion fails) to coin a new word for this: "mētis" which he loosely defines as "cunning" or "cunning knowledge". He tries to define this for the better part of this chapter. This is confusing for Canadian readers as it has nothing to do with the Métis (the people) although Scott does reference "Native American" (using the book's American terminology) examples of this "mētis" "cunning knowledge".
Despite all the above, this is not alibertarian manifesto. In the conclusion Scott highlights qualities of good institutions and liberal democracies that have self-correcting features built in. A good example is Common Law, which is always evolving, versus hard-coding immutable rules and applying them blindly.
Impact on me: Some great history of politics and institutions which I am fascinated by (see: this book and its sequel). Some good lessons to reinforce and take to heart for my career: don't mistake the model or the scorecard for the process; head office may not know best (clearly situational/conditional); KPIs and reports can easily be misapplied, misinterpreted, and lead to the wrong conclusions because they do not tell the whole story; procedures almost always need to leave room for human judgement (see: work-to-rule strikes for the failures of institutional procedures).
Seeing Like A State was thought-provoking and writing this review has been fun as it's forced me to process and summarize the good bits from a dry, overly-academic, and challenging text. Powerful ideas but gawd dayum, it was hard to read. I would not recommend reading it unless you are truly convinced in your secret heart you'll enjoy it.
Discovered by from a Balaji Srinivasan tweet, filled by inter-library loan (U of S -> SPL).
Scott lays out the four factors that when combined, create a really bad time for people:
1. The administrative ordering of nature and society: essentially, mistaking the map for the territory on a large scale.
2. A "high-modernist ideology": I would define this as scientism combined with a political ideology; Scott adds "uncritical, unskeptical, and this unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production".
3. An authoritarian state that's willing to double down on the first two items. We can have #1 and #2 in any society, but add authoritarianism and you're gonna suffer.
4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
In the first two chapters ("Nature and Space" and "Cities, People and Language") Scott provides some history and examples of more benign and sometimes net-positive instances of the "administrative ordering of nature and society":
- Scientific forestry in Germany; trying to better nature in its design of a forest to optimize for lumber production.
- Government standardization of weights and measurements. (easier to tax grain; but to me a net-positive for science and innovation)
- Cadrastal maps: codifying and organizing land ownership; assigning people to land (easier to tax).
- Surnames: Did you ever consider these are historically, totally unnatural, and are a state bureaucratic invention to make it easier to censure and tax?
- Planned development grids; most of America was settled this way; downtown Chicago and Manhattan were developed this way. Easier for administrators, arguably some challenges for the humans adapting to the grid.
In a short Chapter 3 Scott further unpacks the term "high modernism" My understanding is it's an infatuation with Taylorism or scientific management. In seeing the payoffs in industrial production (think: Ford assembly line), some people got the idea we can engineer/manage a better park, city, garden, natural system, society, market economy, etc. by breaking down these hugely complex and adaptive systems and rebuild them, but better.
Of course this is a recipe for failure when the four factors listed above collide, and the rest of the book are chapters that explore some of these huge failures:
- Ch 4: High-modernism applied to city planning, the early failures of Brasilia (the centrally planned capital of Brasil), some discussion of what works and what doesn't in city planning.
- Ch 5: High-modernism applied to political parties and societies, a case study of Lenin. I found this chapter difficult as it assumes the reader has more background knowledge than I did.
- Ch 6: The failure of Soviet collectivization and farming, resulting in huge famine.
- Ch 7: The failure of Tanzanian villigization. This was new to me. Wow. Tanzania tried to resettle its entire rural population in villages to run collective farms. This was a total disaster.
- Ch 8: A deep dive into "taming nature", the failure of monocropping, fertilizer challenges.
Scott makes a persuasive case about all of these failures: an infatuation with order, organization, and "science", combined with an ideology that incredibly complex natural systems can be completely organized and optimized by central planners/committees, and the terror of a regime that has enough power to blindly push these plans blindly forward. An interesting insight into the human incentive problem: in these schemes, low-level muscle gets incentivized to (for example) forcibly resettle people faster, because the numbers moving from "unsettled" to "resettled" is how progress is measured by top administrators. The low-level muscle resettle people faster, which is chaotic and creates horrible long-term results, but the muscle gets rewarded in the short term, and the yardstick by which the administration measures success shows a positive result.
The final chapter (9) on "practical knowledge" feels like weak pre-conclusion, but argues for the value of local and historical knowledge and learned experience. The author tries (and in my opinion fails) to coin a new word for this: "mētis" which he loosely defines as "cunning" or "cunning knowledge". He tries to define this for the better part of this chapter. This is confusing for Canadian readers as it has nothing to do with the Métis (the people) although Scott does reference "Native American" (using the book's American terminology) examples of this "mētis" "cunning knowledge".
Despite all the above, this is not alibertarian manifesto. In the conclusion Scott highlights qualities of good institutions and liberal democracies that have self-correcting features built in. A good example is Common Law, which is always evolving, versus hard-coding immutable rules and applying them blindly.
Impact on me: Some great history of politics and institutions which I am fascinated by (see: this book and its sequel). Some good lessons to reinforce and take to heart for my career: don't mistake the model or the scorecard for the process; head office may not know best (clearly situational/conditional); KPIs and reports can easily be misapplied, misinterpreted, and lead to the wrong conclusions because they do not tell the whole story; procedures almost always need to leave room for human judgement (see: work-to-rule strikes for the failures of institutional procedures).
Seeing Like A State was thought-provoking and writing this review has been fun as it's forced me to process and summarize the good bits from a dry, overly-academic, and challenging text. Powerful ideas but gawd dayum, it was hard to read. I would not recommend reading it unless you are truly convinced in your secret heart you'll enjoy it.
Discovered by from a Balaji Srinivasan tweet, filled by inter-library loan (U of S -> SPL).
March 26, 2019
This is a book that can change how you understand and interpret the world. At least, I think it did this for me.
I discern at least two insights from my reading of it. One relates to the concept of legibility, the other to metis.
Communities in the old world (Europe before enlightenment, the third world before colonisation, etc.) would often be organised around local ways of doing things, established via oral tradition, and, while tradition-bound, also constantly adjusting to changes in the environment. Even measurements, such as of length or volume, would vary by region. Land ownership would often be complicated and unformalised.
This makes taxation and conscription difficult, and to the degree that it's even possible, a strictly local affair. This explains the feudal nature of medieval Europe. A king can only indirectly levy taxes by imposing taxation on his vassals. It's then up to the vassals to tax their subordinates, and so on. Seen from a central authority, this is both inefficient and lacks control.
For any central authority wishing to cut the middlemen, a more legible land is necessary. An absolute king needs to be able to directly count the number of able-bodied men available for conscription, and the amount of grain etc. produced each year, in order to be able to tax his subjects. This leads to land reforms and censuses. It also forces a degree of uniformity over a society that may not fit local conditions, but it does introduce a (partially illusory) degree of legibility of society.
This way of understanding the modern state is illuminating, and, in my opinion, transfers well to large corporations. Particularly those corporations steeped in Taylorism suffer the same blind spots as modern states. Quantification and uniformity may work if one produces timber or model A Fords, but causes much friction in modern knowledge-based organisations.
Here, Scott's concept of metis emphasises practical know-how. This describes a kind of (often tacit) knowledge that can only be gained by practice, often via apprenticeships. This type of knowledge is contrasted to epistemic knowledge, decoupled from practical, local concerns.
The idea of metis particularly rings true for me as a programmer. While there's a strong desire (particularly among management) to see software development as a legible, controllable process, the reality seems to me to better fit the concept of metis. A good programmer has, over many years, developed a set of heuristics that may or may not apply in a given situation. There seems to be few universal, Taylorist processes that make software development more predictable or controllable.
The analysis in the book is both compelling and enlightening. I definitely feel that it's going to change the way I think about certain things. I also, however, have problems with it.
First of all, I find it too long. It's possible that I missed a level of depth in it, but what I did get out of it, I could have gained in half the pages. The point about legibility was evident to me after, say, 150 pages, and the point about metis was made over a single 30-page chapter toward the end.
At times, the book veers off into territory that seems to me to be completely irrelevant, such as the advantages of polycropping and swidden agriculture over western monocropping. I get the point, and I don't even dispute it, but the book just goes on and on about this.
Another concern I have is with the text itself. It's always academic and dense, but while it's sometimes surprisingly easy to read, at other times it becomes 'illegible'. I found Part two quite readable, particularly the chapter on the high-modernist city, while the chapters on villagisation in Tanzania and on taming nature was far less readable.
Finally, the way the book's notes are organised is really annoying. Each chapter is equipped with about a hundred notes, and while many of them are references to literature, many others constitute additions and comments on the text itself. I'd have no problem with this if these were footnotes, but alas, they're end notes. This requires the reader to flip back and forth between the chapter and the end notes, often to find that the note was nothing but a literature reference. That's just not a good reading experience.
I discern at least two insights from my reading of it. One relates to the concept of legibility, the other to metis.
Communities in the old world (Europe before enlightenment, the third world before colonisation, etc.) would often be organised around local ways of doing things, established via oral tradition, and, while tradition-bound, also constantly adjusting to changes in the environment. Even measurements, such as of length or volume, would vary by region. Land ownership would often be complicated and unformalised.
This makes taxation and conscription difficult, and to the degree that it's even possible, a strictly local affair. This explains the feudal nature of medieval Europe. A king can only indirectly levy taxes by imposing taxation on his vassals. It's then up to the vassals to tax their subordinates, and so on. Seen from a central authority, this is both inefficient and lacks control.
For any central authority wishing to cut the middlemen, a more legible land is necessary. An absolute king needs to be able to directly count the number of able-bodied men available for conscription, and the amount of grain etc. produced each year, in order to be able to tax his subjects. This leads to land reforms and censuses. It also forces a degree of uniformity over a society that may not fit local conditions, but it does introduce a (partially illusory) degree of legibility of society.
This way of understanding the modern state is illuminating, and, in my opinion, transfers well to large corporations. Particularly those corporations steeped in Taylorism suffer the same blind spots as modern states. Quantification and uniformity may work if one produces timber or model A Fords, but causes much friction in modern knowledge-based organisations.
Here, Scott's concept of metis emphasises practical know-how. This describes a kind of (often tacit) knowledge that can only be gained by practice, often via apprenticeships. This type of knowledge is contrasted to epistemic knowledge, decoupled from practical, local concerns.
The idea of metis particularly rings true for me as a programmer. While there's a strong desire (particularly among management) to see software development as a legible, controllable process, the reality seems to me to better fit the concept of metis. A good programmer has, over many years, developed a set of heuristics that may or may not apply in a given situation. There seems to be few universal, Taylorist processes that make software development more predictable or controllable.
The analysis in the book is both compelling and enlightening. I definitely feel that it's going to change the way I think about certain things. I also, however, have problems with it.
First of all, I find it too long. It's possible that I missed a level of depth in it, but what I did get out of it, I could have gained in half the pages. The point about legibility was evident to me after, say, 150 pages, and the point about metis was made over a single 30-page chapter toward the end.
At times, the book veers off into territory that seems to me to be completely irrelevant, such as the advantages of polycropping and swidden agriculture over western monocropping. I get the point, and I don't even dispute it, but the book just goes on and on about this.
Another concern I have is with the text itself. It's always academic and dense, but while it's sometimes surprisingly easy to read, at other times it becomes 'illegible'. I found Part two quite readable, particularly the chapter on the high-modernist city, while the chapters on villagisation in Tanzania and on taming nature was far less readable.
Finally, the way the book's notes are organised is really annoying. Each chapter is equipped with about a hundred notes, and while many of them are references to literature, many others constitute additions and comments on the text itself. I'd have no problem with this if these were footnotes, but alas, they're end notes. This requires the reader to flip back and forth between the chapter and the end notes, often to find that the note was nothing but a literature reference. That's just not a good reading experience.
September 1, 2014
james c. scott, devletin bizleri daha minnoş vatandaşlar -insanlar veya bireyler değil, vatandaşlar- haline getirmek için denediği sivil mühendislik projelerini dört ana bölümde incelemiş. kısacık bir girişi takiben; birinci, ikinci ve üçüncü bölüme gelişme, dördüncü bölüme ise sonuç diyebiliriz;
1.devletin okunaklılık ve basitleştirme projeleri
2.dönüştürücü vizyonlar
3.kırsal yerleşimin ve üretimin toplum mühendisliği
4.kayıp halka
ilk iki bölümü zevkle, kana kana, damarlarımda sıcacık anarşizm ile okudum. üçüncü bölümde ise kitabın bütünlüğünü üzdüğünü düşündüğüm, tarım konusundaki derinlemesine bilgi yüklemesi ile tıkandım.
kitabın neredeyse kendisi uzunluğunda bir de sonnotlar bölümü var. sonnotlar kısmındaki muhteşem kaynakçada referans gösterilen kitaplardan, türkçe'ye çevrilmiş olanları -arada kaçanlar olmuş olabilir- listeledim;
Tarih Boyunca Kent - Kökenleri, Geçirdiği Dönüşümler ve Geleceği/Lewis Mumford
Mısır'ın Sömürgeleştirilmesi/Timothy Mitchell
Hayali Cemaatler: Milliyetçiliğin Kökenleri ve Yayılması/Benedict Anderson
Postmodernliğin Durumu: Kültürel Değişimin Kökenleri/David Harvey
Modernite ve Holocaust/Zygmunt Bauman
Hapishanenin Doğuşu/Michel Foucault
Şansın Terbiye Edilişi/Ian Hacking
İnsanın Ölçüsü Olarak Makina: Batılı Hakimiyet İdeolojileri/Michael Adas
Gözün Vicdanı: Kentin Tasarımı ve Toplumsal Yaşam/Richard Sennett
Kaos/James Gleick
Sovyet Rusya Tarihi/Edward Hallett Carr
Uygarlık Süreci/Norbert Elias
Görme Biçimleri/John Berger
Büyük Dönüşüm: Çağımızın Sosyal ve Ekonomik Kökenleri/Karl Polanyi
Eylemde Anarşi/Colin Ward
1.devletin okunaklılık ve basitleştirme projeleri
2.dönüştürücü vizyonlar
3.kırsal yerleşimin ve üretimin toplum mühendisliği
4.kayıp halka
ilk iki bölümü zevkle, kana kana, damarlarımda sıcacık anarşizm ile okudum. üçüncü bölümde ise kitabın bütünlüğünü üzdüğünü düşündüğüm, tarım konusundaki derinlemesine bilgi yüklemesi ile tıkandım.
kitabın neredeyse kendisi uzunluğunda bir de sonnotlar bölümü var. sonnotlar kısmındaki muhteşem kaynakçada referans gösterilen kitaplardan, türkçe'ye çevrilmiş olanları -arada kaçanlar olmuş olabilir- listeledim;
Tarih Boyunca Kent - Kökenleri, Geçirdiği Dönüşümler ve Geleceği/Lewis Mumford
Mısır'ın Sömürgeleştirilmesi/Timothy Mitchell
Hayali Cemaatler: Milliyetçiliğin Kökenleri ve Yayılması/Benedict Anderson
Postmodernliğin Durumu: Kültürel Değişimin Kökenleri/David Harvey
Modernite ve Holocaust/Zygmunt Bauman
Hapishanenin Doğuşu/Michel Foucault
Şansın Terbiye Edilişi/Ian Hacking
İnsanın Ölçüsü Olarak Makina: Batılı Hakimiyet İdeolojileri/Michael Adas
Gözün Vicdanı: Kentin Tasarımı ve Toplumsal Yaşam/Richard Sennett
Kaos/James Gleick
Sovyet Rusya Tarihi/Edward Hallett Carr
Uygarlık Süreci/Norbert Elias
Görme Biçimleri/John Berger
Büyük Dönüşüm: Çağımızın Sosyal ve Ekonomik Kökenleri/Karl Polanyi
Eylemde Anarşi/Colin Ward
February 14, 2014
The book didn't quite live up to my expectations. The author claims that ambitious state planning efforts often go wrong in a similar way: The government opts for inefficient organizations or approaches that are easy to monitor bureaucratically, at the expense of efficiency, resilience, or popular desire. This is presented as a startling observation, but I think it's conventional wisdom.
To demonstrate the claim, the describes a number of ambitious state planning efforts that went badly, and the ideological view of some of the planning boosters. But all of them were too high-level for me to fully be convinced. Yes, Le Corbusier talked in a totalitarian way about planning. Yes, Brasilia was an ambitious plan for a city that wasn't very livable. But what conclusion are we to draw? That planning sometimes fails? We knew that. The author doesn't claim and doesn't argue that overly regimented plans designed for top-down control are the only kind of government planning failure.
The author draws an analogy between Corbusier's view on urban planning, and monocrop agriculture or forestry. This is interesting, but it doesn't feel like a deep or important point.
To demonstrate the claim, the describes a number of ambitious state planning efforts that went badly, and the ideological view of some of the planning boosters. But all of them were too high-level for me to fully be convinced. Yes, Le Corbusier talked in a totalitarian way about planning. Yes, Brasilia was an ambitious plan for a city that wasn't very livable. But what conclusion are we to draw? That planning sometimes fails? We knew that. The author doesn't claim and doesn't argue that overly regimented plans designed for top-down control are the only kind of government planning failure.
The author draws an analogy between Corbusier's view on urban planning, and monocrop agriculture or forestry. This is interesting, but it doesn't feel like a deep or important point.
January 16, 2019
Scott's book is a monumental paean to anarchist and anti-hierarchical wisdom. Although it stretches and extends across multiple disciplines - agriculture, forestry, city planning, industrial organization, etc. - it manages to weave them into a surprisingly coherent and compelling narrative.
The key boogeymen are the predictable (and sometimes unpredictable) shortcomings of technocratic hubris. Scott amply documents, mostly from primary sources, how such hubris has been a defining feature of modernistic statecraft - from Le Corbusier to Lenin.
The takeaway message of the book is that the preservation of bottom-up experimentation, and the harnessing of local knowhow, should inform all sustainable central planning. You should let cities and communities evolve on their own, rather than imposing a system of conformity.
The end result is an eye-opening, powerful narrative about the excesses of human optimism. All utopian schemers should read this book. They should think twice about the consequences of their actions - lest they risk becoming the supervillains of tomorrow.
The key boogeymen are the predictable (and sometimes unpredictable) shortcomings of technocratic hubris. Scott amply documents, mostly from primary sources, how such hubris has been a defining feature of modernistic statecraft - from Le Corbusier to Lenin.
The takeaway message of the book is that the preservation of bottom-up experimentation, and the harnessing of local knowhow, should inform all sustainable central planning. You should let cities and communities evolve on their own, rather than imposing a system of conformity.
The end result is an eye-opening, powerful narrative about the excesses of human optimism. All utopian schemers should read this book. They should think twice about the consequences of their actions - lest they risk becoming the supervillains of tomorrow.
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