Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed, by James. C. Scott

If you are familiar with the author’s work at all as I am or have read or engaged in anything that resembles anarchist thinking, then one can know that seeing like a state is not meant here as a compliment. Those who have a healthy skepticism or even cynicism about the possibility that contemporary governments have in changing the human condition will see in this book the sort of confirmation they would wish that even well-meaning attempts to control reality by governments generally fail in a spectacular way, and that states succeed when they are at their most modest, or when their efforts are frustrated by realists among them who are able to overcome the immense simplifications that result from statist thinking. This book explores the failures of a state in fields as diverse as scientific forestry, city design, and collective agriculture. Generally speaking, the author also identifies some of the major blind spots that get in the way of states and that may therefore inform readers as to how one may best improve the human condition through gradual means, modest ends, and a high degree of respect for the autonomy and local knowledge of the people that one wishes to help. These conditions, alas, are often far too little in evidence among utopian schemers of the type that the author discusses in this book.

This particular book is a bit more than 350 pages and it is divided into four parts and ten chapters. The book begins with acknowledgements and an introduction and then discusses state projects of legibility and simplification (I), both with regards to nature and space (1) as well as cities, people, and languages (2). This is followed by a discussion of states’ transforming visions (II), with chapters on authoritarian high modernism (3), the high-modernist city (like Brasilia) and a critique of its failings (4), and the revolutionary party and a diagnosis of its problems (5). This is followed by a look at schemes of social engineering of rural settlement and production (III), with chapters on soviet collectivization (6), forced villagization in Tanzania (7), and failed efforts to tame nature (8). The last part of the book shows the author talking about the missing link (IV) of practical wisdom, or Metis (9) before the author concludes (10). After this there are notes, sources for illustrations, and an index.

While in general the record of states is not particularly good when it comes to running anything, there are a couple of tendencies that the author notes as being especially dangerous to the well-being of those under a state’s rule. One of these, the state’s desire for legibility and simplicity, is a more general failing. States tend to be in favor of solutions that offer easy requisition and organization and this simplicity frequently destroys what is worthwhile in human, animal, and plant life by making it susceptible to disease and only focusing on narrow goals and neglecting the benefits that come from the deceptively orderly behavior of people, animals, and plants in their native environments, including emergent and vibrant cities, it should be stated. The thin simplifications that states tend to make in their planning effort do not serve their efforts of improvement well, for they are things that look good in miniature or on plans but fail in practice because they lack practical knowledge and the wisdom that can be applied to one’s circumstances as one finds them. The second problem is more specific to totalitarian states, and that is authoritarian high-modernism, with its power and ambitions to remake human nature as well as the world in the image of the ruler or the technocratic elite or the revolutionary party, with all of the horrors that brings to humanity. This book is certainly not light-hearted reading, but anything that encourages caution and modesty in one’s goals in using power is probably for the best.