Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

• Author: Rosenberg, Mica
• Position: Book Review

SEEING LIKE A STATE: How CERTAIN SCHEMES TO IMPROVE THE HUMAN CONDITION HAVE FAILED James Scott (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 445 pages

It is easy to understand how human lives are destroyed and communities decimated when states resort to mobilized violence and war. More puzzling is the question of why state-led utopian schemes to improve the human condition so often go tragically wrong. Just think of the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural collectivization in Russia, or compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia. This is the question lames Scott addresses in this ambitious and provocative book.

Scott suggests that there are four critical factors that led to the massive failures of many large-scale social engineering plans of the 20th century. First, modern states are often compelled to create schema to describe and order their population and environment. Through tools such as mapping and census taking a state can understand, and potentially control, fluid and amorphous human communities. The next element is adherence to what Scott calls "high modernist ideology," a myopic belief in the supreme importance of scientific and technological progress. He points to the French architect...