| Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Revised Edition Contributor(s): Scott, James C. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0300078153 ISBN-13: 9780300078152 Publisher: Yale University Press OUR PRICE: $26.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 1999 * Not available - Not in print at this time *Annotation: Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In a wide-ranging and original study, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when schematic visions are imposed on long-established structures without taking into account preexisting interdependencies. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Sociology - General - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Political Science | History & Theory - General |
| Dewey: 338.92 |
| LCCN: 97026556 |
| Series: Institution for Social and Policy Studies |
| Physical Information: 1.22" H x 6.16" W x 9.22" (1.14 lbs) 464 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans. "A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners |