Seeing like a state how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed James C. Scott

Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-434) and index

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1. State Projects of Legibility and Simplification 9
1. Nature and Space 11
2. Cities, People, and Language 53

Part 2. Transforming Visions 85
3. Authoritarian High Modernism 87
4. The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique 103
5. The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis 147

Part 3. The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production 181
6. Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 193
7. Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization 223
8. Taming Nature: An Agricultyure of Legibility and Simplicity 262

Part 4. The Missing Link 307

1998

Klebebindung