Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a book (hardcover release March 1998, paperback February 1999) by James C. Scott critical of a system of beliefs he calls high modernism, that center around confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with scientific laws.

John Gray, author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, reviewed the book favorably for the New York Times, concluding: "Today's faith in the free market echoes the faith of earlier generations in high modernist schemes that failed at great human cost. Seeing Like a State does not tell us what it is in late modern societies that predisposes them, against all the evidence of history, to put their trust in such utopias. Sadly, no one knows enough to explain that."

Economist Brad DeLong wrote a detailed online review of the book. DeLong's interpretation of the book was critiqued by Henry Farrell on the Crooked Timber blog, and there was a follow-up exchange including further discussion of the book.

Economist Deepak Lal reviewed the book for the Summer 2000 issue of The Independent Review, concluding: "Although I am in sympathy with Scott’s diagnosis of the development disasters he recounts, I conclude that he has not burrowed deep enough to discover a systematic cause of these failures. (In my view, that cause lies in the continuing attraction of various forms of “enterprises” in what at heart remains Western Christendom.) Nor is he right in so blithely dismissing the relevance of classical liberalism in finding remedies for the ills he eloquently describes.

Political scientist Ulf Zimmermann reviewed the book for H-Net Online in December 1998, concluding: "It is important to keep in mind, as Scott likewise notes, that many of these projects replaced even worse social orders and at least occasionally introduced somewhat more egalitarian principles, never mind improving public health and such. And, in the end, many of the worst were sufficiently resisted in their absurdity, as he had shown so well in his Weapons of the Weak and as best demonstrated by the utter collapse of the soviet system. "Metis" alone is not sufficient; we need to find a way to link it felicitously with—to stick with Scott's Aristotelian vocabulary—phronesis and praxis, or, in more ordinary terms, to produce theories more profoundly grounded in actual practice so that the state may see better in implementing policies."

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