Yale University Press
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Key Metrics
- James C Scott
- Yale University Press
- Paperback
- 9780300246759
- 7.7 X 5 X 1.3 inches
- 0.8 pounds
- Political Science > History & Theory - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
A powerful, and in many insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning.--Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca
Hailed as a magisterial critique of top-down social planning by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.
Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.--New Yorker
A tour de force.-- Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Author Bio
James Scott, Ph.D., Yale University, 1967, is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program and a mediocre farmer. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism.
His publications include
- Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale Press, 1985
- Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale Press 1980
- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Press, 1998
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Press, 2008
- Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton Press, 2013
- Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States, Yale Press, 2017
Education
1954-58 B.A. Williams College, Political Economy
1958-59 auditor Rangoon University, Burma; Economics
1959-60 auditeur, Institut des Sciences Politiques, Paris; Political Science
1961-63 M.A. Yale University; Political Science
1963-67 Ph.D. Yale University; Political Science
Source: Yale University
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