This is the kind of book that restores my faith in academic theory. It should be required reading for anybody interested in the exercise of power, economic development, or large scale systems.

In Seeing Like a State, Scott explores how attempts to radically transform and improve the human condition have failed. He identifies the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and orchestrate any plan for the general welfare. The problem comes when this necessary evil is tied to an ideology of High Modernism, an authoritarian central government, and a prostrate civil society.

High Modernism is a belief in a technocratic and scientific rationality; that there is one correct answer for every situation. But there is no such thing as a universal generalization, every village, field, and person is a unique individual. The state's attempts at improvement rapidly become an effort to standardize society, and make every unit of interest behave identically. This process of reducing reality to schematic agents and cadastral maps is inherently one of violence, discarding generations of carefully accumulated local >metis (craft) in favor of the interests of the center. Local people are inevitably coerced into conforming with the modern grid, since it is easier to make people fit the categories than categories fit the situation.

This is not a hopeful book, but it does provide a valuable glimpse at the functioning of the most dangerous ideology of the 20th century--that of the centrally directed transformation.