James C. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political
Science and Anthropology at Yale University and current president
of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author of Weapons of
the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Domination and the
Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, and The Moral Economy of
the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, all
published by Yale University Press.
“A magisterial critique of top-down social planning that has been
cited, and debated, by the free-market libertarians of the Cato
Institute (which recently dedicated an issue of its online journal
to the book), development economists, and partisans of Occupy Wall
Street alike.”—Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century
to have been published in recent decades. . . . A fascinating
interpretation of the growth of the modern state. . . . Scott
presents a formidable argument against using the power of the state
in an attempt to reshape the whole of society.”—John Gray, New York
Times Book Review
“Illuminating and beautifully written, this book calls into sharp
relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker
“To my mind, Seeing Like a State is one of the most stimulating and
ambitious synthetic works of recent years.”—John Agar, British
Journal for the History of Science
“Seeing Like a State is an important work. It will, I believe, be
used widely in university courses and by a wider reading public who
seek to understand the broad contours of our recent history.”—Jane
Adams, Rural History
2015 Wildavsky Award for Enduring Contribution to Policy Studies,
from the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science
Association
Winner of the 2000 Mattei Dogan Award
“The ‘perfection’ Scott so rightly and with such tremendous skill
and erudition debunks in his book he himself has nearly reached, as
far as positing and presenting the problem is concerned. The case
of what the order-crazy mind is capable of doing and why we need to
stop it from doing it has been established ‘beyond any reasonable
doubt’ and with a force that cannot be strengthened.”—Zygmunt
Bauman, emeritus professor, University of Leeds
“A tour de force. . . . Reading the book delighted and inspired me.
It’s not the first time Jim Scott has had that effect.”—Charles
Tilly, Columbia University
“Stunning insights, an original position, and a conceptual approach
of global application. Scott’s book will at once take its place
among the decade’s truly seminal contributions to comparative
politics.”—M. Crawford Young, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded
treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and
make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For
anyone interested in learning about this fundamental tension of
modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth
century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of
the simplifying state, this is a must-read.”—Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners
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