1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910816104503321

Autore

Scott James C.

Titolo

Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed / / James C. Scott

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, CT : , : Yale University Press, , [2020]

©2020

ISBN

0-300-25298-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (462 pages)

Collana

Veritas Paperbacks

Disciplina

338.9

Soggetti

Central planning - Social aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Nature and Space -- Chapter 2. Cities, People, and Language -- Chapter 3. Authoritarian High Modernism -- Chapter 4. The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique -- Chapter 5. The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis -- Chapter 6. Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dream -- Chapter 7. Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization -- Chapter 8. Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity -- Chapter 9. Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Metis -- Chapter 10. Conclusion -- Notes -- Sources for Illustrations -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review   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