| Details | | Publication Date: | 1999-02-08 |
| Size | | Length: | 464 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 23.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In a wide-ranging and original study, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when schematic visions are imposed on long-established structures without taking into account preexisting interdependencies.
Industry Reviews
In a treatment that can only be termed brilliant, [Scott] has produced a major contribution to developmental literature. Richly illustrative cases include the total modernist city planning of Brasilia, Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian compulsory villagization, the Great Leap Forward in China, and others. . . . Scott argues strongly for practical knowledge and even outright improvisation. His critique of the massive, sometimes utopian plans that have emerged from the state isolate such common conditions as an unqualified belief in the benefits of scientific intervention and a willingness to employ authoritarian power. In sum, this is a book of seminal importance for comparative politics and, indeed, for the social sciences. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Stevenson
This is an unusual book, and much of its value is owed to the details of the particular case studies, and to Scott's enthusiasm and ingenuity in seeing links among apparently different human projects. . . . To the extent that he is arguing against hubristic tendencies in planning, his thesis is unobjectionable, but it is not especially arresting. . . . And Scott also offers larger implications. . . . A state that attempts to improve the human condition should engage not in plans but in experiments, secure in the knowledge that people will adapt to those experiments in unanticipated ways. Scott offers no plans or rules here. . . . But he has written a remarkably interesting book on social engineering, and he cannot be much faulted for failing to offer a sure-fire plan for the well-motivated . . . social engineer.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Sunstein
In what must be one of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades, Scott contends that . . . apparently disparate experiments exemplify a single body of ideas. He calls this system of beliefs 'high modernism,' and he tells us that it inspired such different figures as Robert McNamara, Walther Rathenau, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Lenin, Trotsky and Julius Nyerere. . . . The lesson of 'Seeing Like a State' is that the disasters of 20th-century social engineering come from its neglect of metis. Without the human capacity for this practical understanding, the harm done by grand schemes of human improvement would have been even worse.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Gray
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