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

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory noticed in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural “modernization” in the Tropics―the twentieth century continues to be racked by grand utopian schemes which have inadvertently brought death and disruption to hundreds of thousands. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of about Viewing Like a State: How Certain Strategies to Improve the Human being Condition Have Failed large-scale authoritarian plans in a number of fields. Centrally managed cultural plans misfire, Scott argues, if they impose schematic visions that perform violence to complicated interdependencies that are not really―and cannot―become fully understood. Further, the achievement of styles for social business depends upon the identification that local, useful knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic understanding.

The author builds a persuasive case against “advancement theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, wishes, and objections of its subjects. He recognizes and discusses four conditions common to all or any preparing disasters: administrative buying of character and society with the condition; a “high-modernist ideology” that locations confidence in the ability of science to improve every part of human life; a determination to make use of authoritarian condition power to impact large- size interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot efficiently resist such programs.