Seeing Like a State

James C. Scott
Paperback, 464 pages
9780300246759

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“A powerful, and in many [ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning.”—Robert Heilbroner

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.

Contents
Part 1. State Projects of Legibility and Simplification
Part 2. Transforming Visions
Part 3. The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production
Part 4. The Missing Link