James C. Scott: Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998)
Introductory Remarks by Chris Brooke
Following in the tradition inaugurated by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, whereby a specialist on South East Asian politics writes a book of much more general interest, James C. Scott's study of the ideological preconditions of the failures of large-scale state planning is a rich and important contribution to contemporary social science, has garnered much deserved praise, and is a fitting subject for the first Symposium of the Turtle.
This might not seem the most promising of subjects. It is not hard, after all, to think of plausible reasons as to why Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture in the USSR wasn't successful, or why the construction of Brasilia was a silly thing to do, and we might be legitimately sceptical as to what a comparative study might have to teach us. But the case studies are themselves embedded in a gripping historical narrative which gives the book its distinctive power. For Scott has a story to tell about the rise of the bureaucratic state and its desire to render its environment, both human and physical, "legible", transforming "social hieroglyphs" into easily-administered landscapes and peoples through systematic efforts of rationalisation and standardisation [p.3]. Scott's first case study, which sets the tone for what follows, is a terrific discussion of eighteenth-century German forestry, which details the transformation of the central European forests into planned and administered resources for controlled exploitation by the state. And similar processes were at work when early modern states mapped their territories, standardised weights and measures, counted and taxed their populations, reorganised their cities, harmonised their land tenure practices and compiled their dictionaries.
Scott reminds us just how much diversity was stamped out by the modernising European states; but he also goes much further, showing forcefully how so many of the practices deemed primitive, naïve or irrational by bureaucratic states were the product of centuries of intelligent adjustment to local circumstances and idiosyncracies, and how the scientific policies of government often proved strikingly counter-productive: the German forests, for example, delivered vastly increased timber yields for a century or so, before the phenomenon of Waldsterben, or "forest-death" set in, for the "scientific" forestry did much to sabotage the age-old ecosystems that had made the forests flourish for so long. The state likes to set rules for everyone else to follow, but Scott is a good Aristotelian and insists that effective practice has very little to do with rule-following. Indeed, in his most telling example, when taxi drivers in Paris are disgruntled, they sometimes protest by obeying all the rules in the traffic code, effortlessly bringing the city to a stop. The power of the work-to-rule strike is not an accident.
Scott's main target in Seeing Like A State are those he terms the "authoritarian high modernists", the planners and theorists and statesmen and artists possessed of a great and abiding faith in the emancipating power of modern science who persevere with the project of engineering human and natural existence way past the point where dangerous pathologies set in. The ideology of high modernism Scott describes appealed to Fabians and Bolsheviks alike, to ministers in Nazi Germany and South Africa's apartheid state, to the administrators of the World Bank's development programmes and to the leaders of postcolonial regimes. In Scott's high modernist Hall of Fame we find quite a diverse crowd: "Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Julius Nyerere" [p.88]. And the more detailed studies that the book presents -- of collectivisation in the Soviet Union, of villagisation in Tanzania, of the blueprints of Le Corbusier and the construction of Brasilia -- put useful flesh on the polemical skeleton that Scott has so vividly assembled.
As academic inquiry becomes more fragmented and specialised, a book that ranges so widely across space and time is especially welcome. And as the rise of arcane jargon, statistical methods and mathematical modelling techniques in the social sciences has reversed the trend of modernity, replacing legible articles with the anti-social hieroglyphs that today pass for scholarship, it is refreshing to find Scott writing in a direct, clear and compelling fashion. His argument is bold and controversial, and it is both troubling and puzzling for those of us on the left who have always tended to favour state interventions and the self-conscious pursuit of a more rational form of social organisation. (Our consolation might be Scott's identification of the construction of the global capitalist market as the chief high modernist project of the present day).
Such a multifaceted book calls for diverse efforts at critical interpretation and analysis, which is why we're very pleased to present three different perspectives on Scott's achievememt in this Symposium: Anne Rademacher engages with Scott's theorisation of "metis" as an alternative to the rationality of high modernism and worries that his own historical narrative flattens the past and creates its own obstacles for coming to understand the power of the modern state; Caroline Brooke remarks on his treatment of Soviet Russia in the book, criticising some misleading generalisations while applauding Scott's refusal to treat Russian history as a deviant case apart from the rest of humanity; Brian Glenn (who has also reviewed the book elsewhere for the Journal of Politics) examines some of the ways in which Scott's work speaks to empirical political scientists investigating contemporary social policy. And we're very grateful to all three for their contributions.
Note: We are not the only electronic organ to sponsor discussion of Seeing Like A State. Other reviews in Cyberspace include Ulf Zimmermann's on H-Net, Jesse Walker's in Reason magazine, and by Berkeley economics professor J. Bradford De Long. 
