Question

"Seing like a state" The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique by James C. Scott. ( boundaries and context) 2 paragraphs)

Answer 1

• His Seeing Like a State is largely about the failure of planning in modernist cities such as Chandigarh in India and Brasilia in Brazil, and of collectivized agriculture, particularly in the Soviet Union and Tanzania.
• He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.
• In Seeing Like a State, Scott makes several main arguments. Perhaps the most general is that states by their nature want to make everything “legible” in order to control society. To establish such control, states have to have an understanding of it and information about society and the territory they occupy.
• In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.
• Legibility is key because having created such a simplified vision of what constitutes society, any plan based on it is quite likely to suffer from unintended consequences and perhaps go wildly wrong.