Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998)James C. Scott · 1998 · Book · Introduction; publisher's descriptionTheorySource attached · not independently reviewedCLM-0617 · as of 2026-10-27 · about: Seeing like a state (legibility and high modernism) · Author: Polity Atlas editorial team
“Scott argued that the worst failures of state planning combined four elements: administrative ordering of nature and society, high-modernist ideology, an authoritarian state willing to use coercion, and a prostrate civil society unable to resist.”
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Context
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília
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