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.[1][2]
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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.