A review by brnineworms
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

challenging informative slow-paced

3.5

Seeing Like a State drags. It easily could have been edited down to under 200 pages, and it would have been a better book for it. Scott gives multiple examples that demonstrate the same thing – it gets repetitive. There is such a thing as being too thorough.

That said, this is not a bad book. Scott gives some valuable insights into modernism and how it strives for legibility, and he clearly lays out the distinction between data and what he terms “mētis” (practical knowledge based on experience; wisdom, knack). The book got me thinking about utopianism; we often use the term to refer to any instance of naive idealism but perhaps it’s more effective in discussing statecraft/city planning, ie: attempts to artificially construct a “perfect” society, doomed by the fact that perfection is a myth and not a viable end goal.

Some quotes I liked:

“In dictatorial settings where there is no effective way to assert another reality, fictitious facts-on-paper can often be made eventually to prevail on the ground, because it is on behalf of such pieces of paper that police and army are deployed.”

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

“The temporal emphasis of high modernism is almost exclusively on the future. [...] The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future.”

CONTENT WARNINGS: surveillance, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics, references to racism, sexism and various other -isms based on categorisation and segregation (with mentions of apartheid and the holocaust), war, disease, famine, forced relocation, forced labour, police brutality