Jonathan Vincent’s Reviews > Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed > Status Update

The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, access, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, and constantly changing social reality to match the administrative grid of its observatio