Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: A very important book
Review: How do states and empires control people and landscapes, and why do their attempts so often tragically fail? Agrarian theorist James Scott answers this question boldly and provocatively in Seeing like a State. States (and all of us) simplify a complicated world in order first to understand and then ultimately to change and control the world around us. Indeed, at the root of much of our modern daily activity and thinking is a great deal of simplification-we invent categories, we exclude variables, we limit diversity, we simplify.

For states, the problem with the world is that it is impossibly messy. It is, to use Scott's most brilliant metaphor, illegible. Within every state's territory-especially huge modern imperial states-there exist diverse ecologies, diverse peoples with myriad customs and linguistic dialects, and a variety of local customs. In order to control these areas (i.e. to prevent rebellion, social unrest, starvation) and in order to exploit them (i.e. to use natural resources, to make money, to raise armies) states first must be able to read them. They must make them legible. And herein begins the process of simplification that so profoundly shapes modern bureaucracy. States standardize landholdings, blotting out old inheritance and geographical patterns. States work to simplify ecologies, turning complex ecosystems into streamlined, productive, and micro-managed forests or monocrop fields. States standardize languages, substituting myriad local dialects with a uniform King's English. And they create huge lists, cadastral maps, registers, etc., which they use to describe their holdings and the people who live in them. With these documents, they reshape the world according to their own simplified categories, and according to their own top-down priorities.

The problem here, Scott shows, is that state efforts at making the world legible result not only in a simplified worldview, but in an unrealistically OVERsimplified approach to statecraft, with tragic consequences. State efforts to control ecology, for example, often take no account of local conditions, local ecosystems, and the subsistence patterns that local inhabitants have developed for centures on the landscape. In the effort to scientifically manage forests, Scott shows, states often ignore the ways in which biodiversity is needed to protect soil fertility. After ten years as a state-managed forest, the landscape is barren. Likewise, in an effort to chop the landscape up into easily taxable units, the state will often destroy local landholding patterns developed to provide each inhabitant with a slice of land in each different local micro-climate. While the local solution was carefully planned to give each inhabitant access to a pond, let's say, the top-down state solution puts the pond on one single person's land, in the interest of simplified cadastral mapping. The result is disorder when a drought comes and everybody wants access to that pond.

The main theme of this book concerns the tension between local solutions, often brilliantly adapted to climate and ecosystem, and top-down state solutions, which are simplified and made with an eye towards state goals like taxation and social control. Scott shows that when the civil society is weak, the top-down approach of high-modernist state planners will usually win out over local adaptations and destroy them. The catastrophic results, as illustrated in several well-told chapters in this book, make the reader understand the limits of state planning, and the virtues of local control.

Rating:
Summary: Important Anthropology for Cross-Disciplinary Application
Review: James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of 'structural dysfunctionalism.' The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate-but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.

The dysfunction, Scott argues, derived from three modern conditions. One was the ambition to remake society (and ecology) to conform to a rational plan. It is the conviction-expressed by such varied characters as Robert Owen, Le Corbusier, and Mao (pp. 117, 341)-that the present is a blank sheet, to be inscribed at will. Putting this into effect required a second condition: comprehensive information about individuals and property, gathered by a centralized bureaucracy. The third condition, what made the combination lethal, was a state sufficiently powerful to force its radically rational schemes on their 'beneficiaries.' This was characteristic of post-revolutionary and post-colonial regimes, and so the book devotes chapters to collectivization in the Soviet Union and ujamaa 'villagization' in Tanzania. But the basic vision, Scott emphasizes, was common to experts everywhere. Three Americans planned a Soviet sovkhoz in their Chicago hotel room; a democratic populist built Brasília, which is also accorded a chapter.

In probing the pathology of planning, Scott brilliantly exposes how experts conflated aesthetics with efficiency. They believed that social and ecological organization was rational only insofar as it conformed to their visual aesthetic (here called 'high modernism'). This meant the repetition of identical units, preferably in the form of a geometrical grid. It also entailed spatial segregation: each activity or entity must be allocated its own place. Polycropping was thus anathema to agricultural scientists, as mixed-use was to urban planners. What experts envisaged, of course, was how the thing appeared-from above-on a map or in a model. Along with aesthetics went gigantism, as scale too was confused with efficiency. The space of the plan existed outside geographical locality and historical contingency-obstacles to be eradicated. An ideal city, for example, could be sited anywhere in the world; once built, it would never change. Planners created new spaces in order to create new people, the productive and contented automatons imagined by (say) Frederick Taylor or Lenin.

In analyzing their failure, Scott is most valuable for drawing parallels between society and ecology. Collectivized agriculture was doubly deficient, in its use of natural resources and of human beings. Forests as well as cities created on geometrical lines inevitably degenerated. In both realms, radical 'simplifications' destroyed the adaptability and stability that had evolved organically. Scott introduces the Greek word 'metis' (crafty intelligence) to describe the local, unwritten knowledge gained through practice or accumulated over generations. It was adequate to the diversity of natural environments, and was distributed throughout society. This kind of knowledge was disregarded or dismissed by experts. And yet, ironically, their plans would have been still more disastrous without the metis of people subjected to them. Collectivized peasants farmed private plots for the black market; workers in Brasília built shantytowns outside the city.

From an anarchist understanding, Scott has come close to Edmund Burke (never cited directly, though see p. 424). Two centuries ago, he witnessed the eruption of utopian schemes in France and their imposition on India, and realized that the combination of abstract reason and untrammeled power is infinitely destructive. "I cannot conceive how any man can ... consider his country as nothing but carte blanche-upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases." His defense of 'prejudice' resembles Scott's appreciation of metis. The similarity is remarkable given their inimical ideals, aristocratic hierarchy versus democratic equality. If Scott does not fully appreciate his affinity with Burkean conservatism, he does not quite extricate himself from Hayekian liberalism (see p. 8). He succeeds in showing how the ideas behind collectivized agriculture came from plans for giant capitalist farms. Nevertheless, liberal economies are not so prone to pathological dysfunction, because firms are constrained by the need to attract free labor and to make profits. True, as Scott observes, the state often favors inefficient large enterprises (like plantations) because they are easily taxed; they also wield sufficient influence to obtain protection. The reader is left, however, wondering how he will resist being appropriated by opponents of (democratic) 'big government.'

Other questions too remain. Scott asserts a continuity of aim between absolutism and totalitarianism; twentieth-century states simply fulfilled the dreams of their dynastic precursors. Do we really know that such vaunting ambition was common to rulers everywhere, or was it peculiar to Europe since the Renaissance? Scott's critique of pseudo-rational knowledge bears directly on our own disciplines. Many versions of social science proceed from the same assumptions that have been falsified in the ghastly experiments of our century. How can social scientists analyze the irreducible complexity of society, generalize without effacing the particularity of history and geography? In raising such difficult-and fruitful-questions, Seeing like a State is a book of immense importance. It must be read by anyone seeking to understand the modern world.

Rating:
Summary: Got the gist, gets lost in the details.
Review: Scott's book gets off to a very good start, arguing that the roots of "high modernism" run deep in a particular world view that grew with scientific culture, but lacks its elements of ruthless self-criticism. What impressed me was his grasp of this ideology as a culture, albeit a culture of a few. Science too is a culture, and this phenomenon is the mentality of the technicians, the engineers, the planners...once they gain power. As one who works in this milieu, although not with the power elite, it rang very true.

He also does a wonderful job of skewering the cultural and aesthetic pretensions of people like Le Corbusier, although this has been done very well by others as well. But Scott does a very good job of showing how the aesthetic was the political, although nobody would admit it.

Unfortunately, after the first two chapters or so, Scott's writing loses its force and wonders about, making no very impressive points, and relating interesting annecdotes, providing intriguing descriptions of bad situations, but not advancing or deepening his argument.

Rating:
Summary: Overall a good book
Review: Scott's book gets off to a very good start, arguing that the roots of "high modernism" run deep in a particular world view that grew with scientific culture, but lacks its elements of ruthless self-criticism. What impressed me was his grasp of this ideology as a culture, albeit a culture of a few. Science too is a culture, and this phenomenon is the mentality of the technicians, the engineers, the planners...once they gain power. As one who works in this milieu, although not with the power elite, it rang very true.

He also does a wonderful job of skewering the cultural and aesthetic pretensions of people like Le Corbusier, although this has been done very well by others as well. But Scott does a very good job of showing how the aesthetic was the political, although nobody would admit it.

Unfortunately, after the first two chapters or so, Scott's writing loses its force and wonders about, making no very impressive points, and relating interesting annecdotes, providing intriguing descriptions of bad situations, but not advancing or deepening his argument.

Rating:
Summary: Important Anthropology for Cross-Disciplinary Application
Review: The above reviewer, Stirling S Newberry, writes, "The book is part of a useful discussion, but the context and knowledge to engage in it does not seem to be present at this time. Unfortunate."

Actually, what is most unfotunate is that Newberry failed to that Scott allows his assertions regarding social engineering at the behest of an individual state apply just as well to, for example, international aid regimes and foreign hegemons who strive to "remake" the world and its societies after a single vision (8).

Scott's concern in Seeing Like a State is to make a case against an "imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how. Scott goes on to argue, "The most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements." The first is a simplification and aggregation of facts. Scott argues that states manipulate otherwise complex, dynamic, discrete and often unique circumstances into simplified, static, aggregated, and standardized data, and that these form unrealistic "snapshots" which often miss the most vital aspects of the situation. The second is what Scott terms "high-modernist ideology." Scott defines this as "a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws." The combination of these two elements can be devastating when the third element, an authoritarian state, is "willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring the high-modernist designs into being" over the fourth element, "a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans."

Throughout his work, Scott provides evidence that centrally managed social plans inevitably go awry. The reason for this, he argues, is that state imposed development initiatives wreak havoc upon the complex social interdependencies of peoples who, in the first place, are not adequately understood. Scott argues that for development initiatives to be successful, they must have their starting point in, first, the recognition of, and then the incorporation of, local, practical knowledge. He states that such forms of knowledge are just as important as "formal, epistemic knowledge." He thus argues against the sorts of developmental theories and practices that disregard metis.

In detailing the general methodology in which states have gone about solving the problem of underdevelopment, Scott argues that states-usually represented by aloof bureaucrats sitting in offices-approach development from the proverbial "bird's eye view" without adequately accounting for, and incorporating, the proverbial "worm's eye view." Such social engineering, Scott asserts, requires the simplification and standardization of complex facts, and in the process, essential knowledge of the facts are lost. At its worst, the result is tragedy, disaster, and human suffering. At its best, unplanned outcomes result, usually at great human and state expense.

Scott contrasts state simplifications with metis, which he defines as, "a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural human environment." Examples of metis are farmers knowing when to plant by looking at when the leaves on certain local trees begin to sprout, or describing the size of a farm by the number of workers needed to tend it, rather than by acreage. One region may have highly labor-intensive land, while another may not be so intensive. Forcing land to be described in terms of acreage negates this useful information, which information is the key thing lost in return for the "standardization" of discourse and knowledge. As well, when states and development planners dictate that all collective farms must plant at the same time, local knowledge is again lost-along with, Scott shows with a multitude of case studies, productivity.

Scott develops his argument to show that when citizens, events, cultural characteristics of peoples, and the natural environment are not easily standardized and quantifiable, there is an incentive for the state to alter the population to fit the desired "measurements" and proper "standards." For example, states privatize collectively owned lands to tax them more easily. In order to track more easily "consolidated" people into a larger development vision, the state forces villagers with deep historical roots to adopt surnames. Even if this means altering the very fabric of their society, the "larger" goals must give way to "smaller" visions. Scott states that, "the builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation." Scott is prolific in citing historical examples to support his claims.

Many among the Haitian peasantry would sum up Scott's arguments with a Haitian proverb: "The big branch at the top of the tree thinks it has the best view, but it fails to see the sights enjoyed by the little bud tossed about by the wind." Damage therefore is the result.

Rating:
Summary: To a man with a hammer . . .
Review: The picture on the jacket cover is interesting. It is a road in the midwest that switchesback to avoid converging towards the horizon as it follows a line of longitude, which constitutes a county boundary. The switchback is the consequence of a conflict between geometrical, geographical, and political 'spaces.' It is a compromise devised by a bureaucrat with a map, not by the locals on the ground. It is a case of what Scott calls 'seeing like a state.'

Scott apparently has a background as an anthropologist studying migrating peasants as they cross state boundaries. The state has a prejudice in favor of stationary and sedentary forms of life, and for a very simple reason: transients are tough to tax. But there are other reasons, which are not so simple. The state attempts to expand and increase revenues, of course, but how does it know who to tax, when, and for how much? It needs maps, records, reports, surveys, etc. And that is where the perversities of 'seeing like a state' come in. The maps, reports, and surveys have an inertia of their own. They shape the world to their own form, which is not the form of the world as lived by the subjects.

Scott draws an interesting analogy, at the very beginning of the book, from forest managaement. The German forest managers had to figure out a way to track and measure the forest stock, also known as 'boardfeed' for tax purposes. But how to measure a forest? The solution is to legislate that the only legal forest is the measurable forest: in neatly planted rows made of one variety. This isn't the healthiest forest, for obvious reasons, but it is the easiest to 'manage.' And in that way the forest begins to conform to the catagories measured by the forest managers.

As a cautionary tale, "Seeing Like a State" is a little late. It's not news that Brasilia is unlivable and communism was a disaster for the environment. Even so, Scott's brief is a powerful brief on behalf of the conservative principles of local control and 'muddling through' versus centrally-sponsored improvement schemes. The theme is univeral and always timely.

Rating:
Summary: A very important book
Review: The power of this book does not come from the originality of the ideas - but in their application to policy. It is a discourse on the "gaze" of policy, in how it categorizes and boxes complex phenomena to make them fit the dominant discoure, and the implications of this for human well-being. It thus provides a valuable bridging role between the worlds of anthropology and sociology, and the world of public action. It has become of the most influential books of the 1990s and deserves to be required reading in courses on development policy.

Rating:
Summary: Understanding the Value of Flow and Flow Through
Review: The State, being little more than a fictitious entity itself, composed of an artificially assigned number of individuals to whom the administrative mechanics of government have been handed has a duty, or obligation, to view all its citizens as equal. When the state becomes bogged down with privileged souls who are less likely to keep that vision in full view as possible, the potential for change and the flow through of ideas and funds to make that possible is drastically limited, and in such a way as to make the cement from which State change is impossible without concerted efforts at changing the players in such a system of tunel digging to create the infrastructure that can best serve its citizens. While glue may well be the honey that prompts loyalty, it can also be the glue that makes cement.