Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Scott James C.

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.

About the Author

The author of several books including "Seeing Like a State", James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science, professor of anthropology, and co-director of the Agrarian Studies Programme, Yale University, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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