James C. Scott (1936–2024) was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Yale University. His many books include The Art of Not Being Governed, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Against the Grain.
“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
“Illuminating and beautifully written, this book calls into sharp
relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker
“Scott’s learning is formidable, but his prose is witty and
down-to-earth. His approach is less that of an academic expert
offering explanations from on high than of an explorer nimbly
navigating a rugged patch of conceptual and historical ground.”—A.
O. Scott, 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
"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
"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
Winner of the 2000 Mattei Dogan Award
2015 Wildavsky Award for Enduring Contribution to Policy Studies,
from the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science
Association
"James Scott is one of the most original and interesting social
scientists whom I know. So it is no surprise that Seeing Like a
State is a broad ranging, theoretically important, and empirically
grounded treatment of the modern state. 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, high
modernism, Seeing Like a State is a must read."—Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard
University and author of Hitler's Willing Executioners
"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
“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
“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 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
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
