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

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Yale University Press, Mar 17, 2020 - Political Science - 464 pages

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."--John Gray, New York Times Book Review


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.


"Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit."--New Yorker


"A tour de force."-- Charles Tilly, Columbia University

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Part 1 State Projects of Legibility and Simplification
9
Part 2 Transforming Visions
85
Part 3 The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production
181
Part 4 The Missing Link
307
Notes
359
Sources for Illustrations
433
Index
435
Copyright

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About the author (2020)

James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and codirector of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.

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