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James C Scott
Blackstone Audiobooks

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

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AuthorJames C Scott
PublisherBlackstone Audiobooks
PublishedMar 30 2019
Book FormatAudio
ISBN-139781538552872
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BISAC
CategoriesPolitical Science > History & Theory - General
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural modernization in the Tropics-the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. 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 large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not-and cannot-be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against development theory and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a high-modernist ideology that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

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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