Master Plans.

• Author: Rose, Gideon
• Position: Review

SEEKING LIKE A STATE:

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

by James C. Scott

Yale University Press $35

James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like A State is an important and powerful work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in large-scale public planning. The author, a political scientist and anthropologist at Yale, sets out to discover why so many well-intentioned efforts at social engineering in the twentieth century have misfired so dramatically. After surveying planning disasters around the world, he concludes that the answer lies not in case-specific accidents or faulty execution but rather in the planning project itself.

The thesis of the book is simple. "High modernist ideology," according to Scott, consists of the belief that planners can and should redesign the social order in accordance with supposedly scientific laws. The fatal flaw is always the same: the planners' devotion to broad general rules in preference to practical or local knowledge. For this latter kind of expertise Scott imports the ancient Greek term "metis," the ability to adapt successfully to changing situations that enabled Odysseus to triumph over adversity time and again. High modernist planners, in Scott's view, are so entranced by the aesthetic appeal of precise, universal, "rational" designs that they scorn metis and forget that flesh-and-blood societies are always messy and unique.

Among the book's virtues are its lucid style, deep learning, and wide range of fascinating cases. Scott traces the dire effects of high modernist ideology in realms as diverse as Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian ujamaa villages, scientific forestry, industrialized high-yield agriculture, political revolution, and Le Corbusier's city planning. These cases all support the author's basic argument: Disaster generally occurred where planners sacrificed local knowledge and concerns in the ruthless pursuit of some pristine vision of social or economic order.

For all this, however, Seeing Like A State is a flawed and frustrating book. It jumps back and forth between banality and exaggeration without zeroing in on a middle position. Sometimes, for example, Scott offers the reader a weak version of his argument: bad things happen when planners are utopian and brutal instead of sensible. If this is the only lesson he has to offer, it is pretty small beer: Is there really anybody out there who thinks forced collectivization was a good idea, or who generally...