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

This is a magisterial book. Scott’s metaphorical mastery of parallel historical trends allows him to show how fiscal forests, planned cities, imposed surnames, official languages, and collective farms are all of a piece. As outgrowths of a “high modernist” ideology, they collectively foretell social disaster when combined with authoritarian politics and a weak society.

Twentieth-century high-modernist ideologues—Charles-Edouard Jeanneret Le Corbusier, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Nyerere, and Walther Rathenau—are the villains of this book. Technocratic hubris is reflected in their belief that societies can be made “legible,” or easily read; to accomplish this goal, humans must be reduced to automatons working within simplified systems designed to enhance state command and control. In consequence, high modernists ignore the local knowledge inherent in society and block local initiative. In Scott’s view, this is the source of great tragedy. Only when the practical wisdom (“métis”) of ordinary people is allowed to flourish—those creative subversions of planned schemes that form the “dark twin” of high-modernist aesthetics—can high-modernist tragedies be ameliorated.

The majesty, historical scope, and elegant writing of this book have been recognized in such places as The New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times book section. But to serve the interests of a JIH audience, I shall take a different tack. Seeing Like a State is not an example of the interdisciplinary history that readers of this journal most admire; rather, it is a product of undisciplined history. For one, Scott’s evidence is selective and eclectic, with only minimal attempts to weigh disconfirming evidence. For example, Scott mentions the Irish potato famine of 1850 in his diatribe against the high-modernist affinity for mono-cropping (268). Yet, he ignores the fact that agricultural practices in Ireland were not the result of central planners’ designs, but the product of the local population’s métis. Inconsistent with Scott’s picture of who has métis and who has modernist hubris, it was a United States federal agency that exposed the problem with such local practices and advocated crop diversity (268). In another case, Scott uses evidence from Punjab to show a high-modernist failure in city planning (131), but he ignores the stunning successes of high modernism in facilitating the green revolution there. It is all too easy to select confirming evidence if the author can choose from the entire historical record and use material from all countries of the world.

Second, the causal argument about the conditions under which high-modernist plans will fail is ignored when convenient, and highlighted when supported. In his introduction, Scott outlines the four necessary conditions for tragedy in social engineering: state simplifications of nature and society; a high-modernist ideology; an authoritarian state; and a prostrate civil society (4–5). Yet, in his expositions of failures, certain of those conditions are not met. Even though Brazil had neither an authoritarian state nor a prostrate civil society, its social engineering to create Brasília is presented as a stunning failure. Nyerere’s “ujamaa” villages, another disaster, occurred in a state that had simplified an extremely nonprostrate society only minimally. Scott cleverly saves himself by suggesting that both of those experiments would have been greater disasters had all four of his conditions been met, but they are presented as disaster enough without all the necessary conditions. His only real case of unmitigated disaster is that of Soviet collectivization, but it defies scientific logic to infer four conditions as necessary with only a single case as support.

Finally, Scott often offers devastating delimitations to his own argument, only to proceed as if admission of defeat is license to claim victory. Scott acknowledges that state “simplifications” are often sets of complex and subtle rules (81, 375); that modern agronomic science has a sophisticated understanding of soils and plants that it happily disseminates to “traditional cultivators” (264...