Seeing Like a State

• A [[book]]
• [[author]] [[james scott]]
• [[go]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
  • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a book by James C. Scott critical of a system of beliefs he calls high modernism, that centers around confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with scientific laws.
• [[tweet]]

• Introduction
  • p1 This book grew out of an intellectual detour that became so gripping that I decided to abandon my original itinerary altogether.
  • Originally set out to "understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of "people who move around", to put it crudely.
  • Gypsies, berbers, bedouins, vagrants, homeless, serfs "have always been a thorn in the side of states".
  • Efforts to permanently settle these mobile people are perennial and seldom succeed.
  • p2 on many of these schemes: "the state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion". Creation of grids.
  • Beekeeping as an analogy. Industrial hives are made regular, segregated.
  • p3 [[Chandigarth]]
• Chapter one
• On forestry as a model for the analysis of schemes that it proposes.