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

Product Description

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review
 

“A powerful, and in many insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning.”—Robert Heilbroner,
Lingua Franca

Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the
New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.
 
“Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—
New Yorker
 
“A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

Review

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades. . . . A fascinating interpretation of the growth of the modern state. . . . Scott presents a formidable argument against using the power of the state in an attempt to reshape the whole of society.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review

“Illuminating and beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker

“James C. Scott has written a powerful, and in many insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy—the Soviet disaster being the textbook case. . . . He has produced an important critique of visionary state planning.”—Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca

“[An] important book. . . . The author’s choice of cases is fascinating and goes well beyond the familiar ones like Soviet collectivization.”―Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs

“In a treatment that can only be termed brilliant, [Scott] has produced a major contribution to developmental literature. . . . This is a book of seminal importance for comparative politics and, indeed, for the social sciences. Highly recommended.”—Choice

“Mr. Scott tells the story in witty, sparkling prose of these (Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, among others) relentless social engineers and how they tried to impose for all eternity a perfect social order or an urban blueprint, regardless of human cost and unremitting human refractoriness.”―Washington Times

“An important and powerful work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in large-scale public planning. . . . Among the book’s virtues are its lucid style, deep learning, and wide range of fascinating cases.”―Gideon Rose, Washington Monthly

“Where Seeing Like a State is original, and often startling so, is in its meticulous accumulation of empirical evidence that describes the failure of grandiose state projects to improve the human condition.”—Brian C. Anderson, Public Interest

“Seeing Like a State is a worldly, academic synthesis of the destructive hubris of large-scale rational planning. . . . What Scott does that is brilliant is talk about how states and large institutions acquire the knowledge that they ultimately use to govern.”—Michael Schrage, Across the Board

“Its global focus, its attention to issues of environment and economic development too often ignored by non profits scholars, and its impressive grasp of how organizations work, recommend it to anyone seriously interested in the future of public life.”—Peter Dobkin Hall, ARNOVA News

“Scott’s book is a paean to human liberty, a very complicated paean. . . . This book [owes] much of its value to the details of the particular case studies, and to Scott’s enthusiasm and ingenuity in seeing links among apparently different human projects. He has written a remarkably interesting book on social engineering.”—Cass R. Sunstein, New Republic

“In Seeing Like a State James Scott has given us powerful new paradigms of state ac