Customer Reviews
All the Proper Villains - But. . . . 
2008-04-23
Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."
Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.
Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants."
One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.
To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.
Such an enlightening book. 
2008-01-25
Scott asserts--that states have made concerted efforts to put in place systems that would improve the human condition. However, rather than improve the human condition, bureaucratic processes and procedures enhanced the legibility of citizen populations for purposes of control as control applies to productivity "taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion". Authoritarian, hierarchical schemes were designed to record, monitor, and control populations to advance and sustain economic growth for the state. These elite schemes "to improve the human condition" failed, because the schemes were not originally designed to improve the human condition.
Prior to reading the text, I had imagined what schemes might improve the human condition. I thought in terms of Max Weber's life chances--food, water, shelter, and health care. Bureaucracies, legibility, manipulation, force relocation, and revolution never occurred to me. In Scott's examples, people independently eking out a living without government interference or aid, are heaved up like trees out of their sustaining systems and planted in hostile microclimates. They are given an impossible objective without any notion of self-efficacy or personal benefit. Here the state anticipates an alienated, marginalized people will comply with a continuous, stagnate, emotionless organized notion of a productive utopia. High modernists did not scheme to improve the human condition. They did not think in terms of what the state could do for its people, but rather what the people could do for the state.
It's a great read.
Listen to your people 2007-12-22
This book is probably best summarized by its moral: The most successful systems are those that exploit the knowledge of all their people, rather than assuming that society can be changed from the top. All the knowledge of how the world actually works, and the actual complexity of getting things done, resides in the people who need to do it, rather than in the minds of planners far from the action. Beware of those who believe that the people's indigenous ways are backwards, pre-scientific and ignorant; in reality, though the people's methods may not have all the rigor of the latest scientific theories, they are likely to be precisely adapted to all the complexity of the world around them.
But Seeing Like A State is much more than that. It is a thoroughly documented attack on high-modernist thinking. This is the mindset of a Le Corbusier, who comes in for a thorough lashing at Scott's hands. Le Corbusier and his disciples decided that modern cities were all wrong: their "chaotic" layout must indicate that they were corrupt and unworkable within. Jane Jacobs most famously tore into that fundamental confusion in The Death and Life of Great American Cities : surface chaos actually conceals remarkable underlying purpose and form. Scott takes a lot from Jacobs. Along with the classical anarchists, she seems to be his biggest inspiration.
The high-modernist ideal is at its worst when it's combined with infinite state power. Combine these two and you get the evils of the former Soviet Union: shift peasants off their plots into "modern" industrial agriculture and force them to adhere to the latest theories of geometric crop planting -- theories like monoculture, identically spaced crops ... all very geometrical and orderly in the mind of someone who's not imaginative enough to see past the surface. And this mindset assumes throughout that the people must just be ignorant: they mustn't want to live in crowded cities; they mustn't know what they're doing when they farm their polycultured, "chaotic" crops. When combined with state power, the expert is the designated local god. That way lies ruin.
In a lot of respects, this is not an argument against experts, though it could be misconstrued that way. For one thing, scientific experts really do have a lot to contribute to, say, peasant agronomy, and they really can contribute a lot to improving (say) rural sanitation. The trouble is when a few threads come together:
1. Ignorance of local conditions.
2. Confusing the thing being modeled with the model itself.
3. The desire to make the world look like the laboratory
4. The power to turn items 1 through 3 into reality.
Item 4 is what makes Seeing Like A State into an argument for anarchism. States get most of Scott's ire, because they do bequeath this power onto dictators. But industry comes in for a spanking, too. In fact chapter 8 of Seeing Like A State is the next logical thing to read after The Omnivore's Dilemma: it explores at a slightly different level the problems with scientific farming as it's practiced in the United States. Rather than adapt farming to local conditions, American agriculture bends the natural world to its particular model of how farming should be done. This includes monoculture, whose predictable consequence is the rise of pests that are adapted to eat that monocultured crop. The next step in the game, if you're an American agricultural conglomerate, is to spray loads of pesticides on your fields. Evolution can play the game too, though, so it responds by building pests who are better adapted to those pesticides. And so the arms race continues. And so the soil erodes, the pesticide runoff blackens, and so forth.
The root of that whole war is the assumption that nature should play the game our way, rather than that we should bend to it. In turn, this monomania is a consequence of straight-ahead economic logic that asks what a profit-maximizing firm (farm) would do, then produces an unambiguous answer: maximize output. When cost and output are the only variables, the model is very clear. It's only clear, of course, if you ignore other things, such as long-term soil degradation. Including these other variables would complicate the model. And, again, if you confuse the model with the thing being modeled, you come to believe that maximizing output is unambiguously and objectively good, rather than being the result of a fixed set of assumptions.
This is a relentlessly powerful and unbelievably sad book: it picks off, one by one, the forces that made the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries look grotesque. It suffers from some verbosity; like Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, though, it always manages to save itself within a few paragraphs of where your patience starts to wear thin. The sections on Russian collectivization, the Tanzanian Ujamaa, Le Corbusier, and the creation of Brasília, in particular, are worth the price of admission on their own. In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant -- quite consciously -- to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as "science" told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable: starvation in Tanzania and in Russia, and a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.
Rather than go theoretically very deep, Scott insists on painting the details vividly; I assume this was a stylistic choice, in keeping with the theme that all the intelligence in a system is at the "edge of the network." Don't write like someone positioned at the center, I imagine Scott saying to himself; write like you're at the edge. And so he does. This is where a lot of his verbosity comes from.
I have only two wishes for this book:
1. I wish it gave some more criteria by which to judge modern-day schemes organized by experts. As luck would have it, for instance, my roommate pointed me to a video of William McDonough describing his plans for new Chinese cities -- McDonough being one of the Cradle to Cradle guys. The Chinese government has asked McDonough to apply cradle-to-cradle principles to city design; it looks like he's building a number of 400,000-person cities for them. If you watch the video, and you have the "beware experts with unlimited power" principle in mind, you'll wonder whether McDonough's work is another Brasília. His model city surely has the geometric perfection and cleverness of a Brasília or an Ujamaa village. Should I be scared of it?
Probably the answer is simple, if we're listening to Scott. We need to ask McDonough, "Did you consult with residents to ask how they feel about this city? Or did you impose it from on high, using seemingly perfect principles of architecture and resource conservation?" Like all principles, Scott's are guidelines rather than rules, but it stands to reason that the people who know how to live are the people who'll be doing the living, not their overlords.
2. I'd like more examples of successful scientific interventions. Without them, Scott's book occasionally sounds anti-scientific. Surely it's not that, but the absence of positive examples makes that a sensible interpretation.
The $100-billion development question is: how do we combine expert scientific research with indigenous experimentation? How can the West bring its science to nations that could really use the help, without being scientific imperialists about it? What could Western science bring back from Africa and Asia? The Western model of industrial agriculture is really broken, or so it seems to a lot of knowledgeable folks; it would be really helpful to get a rigorous scientific understanding of sustainability from people who've sustained their agriculture for thousands of years. I would have liked Scott to provide examples of fruitful two-way collaboration.
This book will appeal to a lot of people. It'll appeal to those who have already taken Jane Jacobs's messages about cities to heart. For that matter, it'll remind a lot of people why they love cities. It goes into more depth on Soviet collectivization than many of us will have encountered. And it will make us think twice before we allow experts to reshape communities from on high.
A fascinating must read 2007-09-25
I've found this book useful, breathtakingly so, in so many ways these days; Scott raises a question at the heart of almost all our current civic debates, even in my own micro-field of schooling and education. I find myself saying, time and again, "she's thinking like a state", and it fits and helps me resort out the arguments. Thank you thank you, Prof. Scott.
Seeing Like a State 2007-03-29
I got this book because it was recommended as background reading for a local debate about CAFOs. I like the meticulous detail in this treatment of social engineering by governments. That is not a liberal/conservative issue, but one which is worth looking at wherever there is a risk of social control that can lead to inequality and injustice.
Hayek meets Heidegger 2006-11-28
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.
Got the gist, gets lost in the details 
2006-08-31
Scott's book gets off to a very good start, arguing that the roots of "high modernism" run deep in a particular world view that grew with scientific culture, but lacks its elements of ruthless self-criticism. What impressed me was his grasp of this ideology as a culture, albeit a culture of a few. Science too is a culture, and this phenomenon is the mentality of the technicians, the engineers, the planners...once they gain power. As one who works in this milieu, although not with the power elite, it rang very true.
He also does a wonderful job of skewering the cultural and aesthetic pretensions of people like Le Corbusier, although this has been done very well by others as well. But Scott does a very good job of showing how the aesthetic was the political, although nobody would admit it.
Unfortunately, after the first two chapters or so, Scott's writing loses its force and wonders about, making no very impressive points, and relating interesting annecdotes, providing intriguing descriptions of bad situations, but not advancing or deepening his argument.
the negative nature of government 2006-07-29
James Scott argues that the formal rules of social-engineering design inevitably leave out elements essential to their actual function. He expounds cases both in America and abroad, current and historic, that reinforce this theme. Whether planning ecosystems, cities or societies, authoritative, Scott not only hypothesizes but demonstrates that centralized plans which fail to account for local idiosyncracies will themselves fail.
I find Scott so convincing that I finished the book with a sense of dismal foreboding. Neither major political party in the U.S. listens to this message. Even conservatives, traditional advocates for smaller, less centralized government, propose strategies that violate the principles Scott delineates.
This book should be required reading for anyone in public office or on a planning commission. Then it should be read by everyone who votes for those offices so we can see the dangers of voting for people who see like a state rather than like a human being.
good 2006-05-25
While most theory books have a hard time captivating me, this one is very well done. Scott focuses on why some of the utopian centrally-planned societies failed and why organic "home-spun" communities and societies generally are more adapt to deal with harsh times. Echoing Kroptkin's writing nearly a century later (though without all the romance) Scott states that local mutual aid works more systematically than systematic over-arching state plans. He goes through several historical examples, such as Soviet collectivization, the building of Brasilia as the new "modern" capital of Brazil away from the coastal "cultural" capital of Rio de Janeiro, Tanzania's "villagization", the designs of the modernist city planning versus unplanned cities, all the way to such things we today take for granted such as linguistics, measurement, and censuses which he argues all started as ways of social control by the bourgeois State.
One of the most compelling arguments he makes is near the beginning, when he goes through the story of German forest planters, who wanted to make their timber growth larger by planning out a forest, instead of getting it from a thicker natural forest. What they found was that after 1 or 2 generations of trees, the forest began to die, because it had no ecosystem to support it and the species of the trees were more or less the same. The soil became loosen as the trees were perfectly spaced, diseases spread easily since all the trees were the same species and equally susceptible, and there was no ecosystem or diversity to keep the trees health.
He takes that example as a metaphor for human planning, and quickly touches into the ways of measurement in the 1700s versus now. Because in, for example France, there were literally hundreds of different ways of measuring things depending on where you went, it was fairly difficult for the Monarchy to collect taxes on a regular basis. After the French Revolution, the newly ascended bourgeois wanted to empower the state to direct the nation, and thus needed ways to more regurally collect taxes. They made the metric system standard, replacing lots of local culture. Before, in places across the world, the local measurement system made sense to people, and not always involved distance. An example would be in New Guinea, people tell how far away something is by "ricepots". Everyone knows how long it takes to boil a pot of rice, and so 3 ricepots would be a two hour walk.
Another fascinating point was a comparison of a right-wing city planner with the collectivization program of Lenin and Stalin. It is amazing to note the similarities. Huge collective farms were eventually even used for a model of American factory farms, which have replaced most small farmers in the United States today. When Paris redesigned itself in the early 20th century, it destroyed many old neighborhoods, in part as an effort to prevent any more revolutions, since the city had more or less brought down the government four times in less than 100 years (1792, 1830, 1848, 1871). Thus, the perfect modernist designs were not an effort to build a utopia, but an effort of the state to control the population and prevent resistance.
Overall, the book, though a little thick, is a good read. The author is not an anarchist, but the argument he presents lends much credit to the anarchist argument against centralization of society, whether it be state or corporate. His arguments are centered on Europe since this is where much of the state control theories arose, and present good arguments against both the "well meaning socialist" who wants the government to run society for the people, and the "libertarian party" member who would like to see big business replace the state. Unlike many theory books, he also presents a clear alternative in each case cited, such as Rosa Luxemborg to Lenin, the organic mutual-aid driven neighborhoods versus the planned aesthetically perfect city, and the local measurement systems versus the modern metric system (though I can also see the benefits of using standardized metric and language, too.)
solutions found elsewhere...carrying on the conversation 2005-05-25
I quote another reviewer when I found myself thinking along the same lines about the book: "The book is part of a useful discussion, but the context and knowledge to engage in it does not seem to be present at this time. Unfortunate."
I think Scott has identified the issue, though fails to really have anything constructive to say about solutions? To continue this useful discussion of how to effectively put 'metis' into the state is the issue it seems to me. On these lines, I would recommend reading Scott's book followed by _Toward a Bioregional State_ (2005) as the latter may humbly provide some useful tools of constitutional engineering "to bring the metis back in," to coin a phrase, as a means of checking against the undue governmentality from a distance that is intentionally without local input--as Scott's examples so well describe are connected with forms of social and environmental degradation.
