Seeing Like a State

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

James C. Scott

View Inside Format: Paper
Price: $21.95
YUP
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

Also Available in:
e-book

“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
 
"A powerful, and in many insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning."—Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca

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


The Institution for Social and Policy Studies

James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and codirector of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.
ISBN: 9780300246759
Publication Date: March 17, 2020
Publishing Partner: The Institution for Social and Policy Studies
464 pages, 5 x 7 3/4
36 b/w illus.