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]
[go] 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.