Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1999 by Brian C. Anderson

Since it first arrived three centuries ago, the modern state has relentlessly sought to increase both its knowledge and power. It has defined borders, assigned surnames, applied science to nature, determined standard units of measurement, and counted, counted, and counted yet again. And, as all but the most romantic antimodern will admit, the modern state has brought with it many goods: political liberty, widespread education, dramatic improvements in health, and, through the dazzling inventiveness it has made possible, relief from toil and drudgery. But the modern state has also been the deadliest of man's enemies, and at no time more so than in the twentieth century - perhaps the bloodiest in human history. We will never know the exact number of men, women, and children killed by the state in this century, but it surely exceeds 150 million.

In his important new book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,(*) Yale anthropologist and political theorist James C. Scott seeks to understand why the state has proven so destructive, even as it has substantially expanded the range of human possibilities. Working from a great variety of examples and case studies - from Soviet collectivization to the planned city of Brasilia - Scott concludes that the state doesn't "see" very well at all. When it tries to manage the natural or ordinary human world, it invariably simplifies, with often grave consequences.

As Scott shows, the project of the modern state from the outset has been to make society more "legible." How could governments effectively govern their citizens, after all, when they had no clear idea of where those citizens lived, or no standard method of counting how much they produced, or no recourse to stable last names? Scott reconstructs the fascinating post-Enlightenment history of "the administrative ordering of nature and society" and sees in it the story of the inexorable growth of state power. But to raise society's legibility in this way is to take only the first, unremarkable, step toward transforming the state into the potentially devouring beast the French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel called "the Minotaur." Three additional elements were necessary.

The first was tile ideology of high modernism. High modernism, Scott argues, grew out of the Enlightenment faith in scientific progress. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the natural sciences, following mathematical techniques, had discovered vast new continents of knowledge, dissipating a great deal of obscurantist fog in the process. It was only to Be expected, then, that some philosophes would view the same approach as applicable to human affairs, which remained untidy and unjust. These thinkers - among them now unread writers such as Helvetius and Holbach - expressed a dangerous confidence in the ability of human reason to master nature (including human nature) and to design rationally a just political order according to the fundamental laws that science had ostensibly discovered.

High modernism also featured a powerful aesthetic vision that its prophets didn't readily acknowledge: a preference for what looked ordered over what seemed disorganized. High modernism drove a sharp division, too, Between those in the know and the backward and foolish they had to lead out of the shadows into the bright light of reason. Marxism was the terminus of these ideas. But, as Scott observes, their reach was far, from urban planning to agricultural practices.

The second additional element was an authoritarian or totalitarian order willing to use force to accomplish the ideals of high modernism. Scott stresses that political instability is the ground in which high-modernist experiments take root. During the twentieth century, for example, revolutions have brought ruthless new elites to power, drunk with a sense of historical destiny and filled with virulent contempt for the past. For evil men such as Lenin or Ethiopia's Colonel Mengistu Halle Mariam, to take just two of Scott's examples, human beings were mere clay with which to mold the new order, only to be east aside the moment they were no longer malleable.

Lastly, the absence of a vibrant civil society proves to Be a fatal weakness that opens the floodgates to wide-scale social engineering: Without the protective cover of associational life, individuals can find no escape from the state's grasp. When these various elements are in place, Scott explains, we have set the conditions for the worst state atrocities.

Scott's theoretical analysis will be familiar to readers of Raymond Aron, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott, all of whom the author draws on at length. As intellectual history, though, Scott's narrative is thin; the book could have used a chapter tracing in greater detail the intellectual progenitors of the modern state. Where Seeing Like a State is original, and often startlingly so, is in its meticulous accumulation of empirical evidence that describes the failure of grandiose state projects to improve the human condition.