# 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott) critical of a system of beliefs he calls [high modernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_modernism), that centers around confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with [scientific laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_laws).
- [[tweet]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1279479233316827136
- 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.

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