2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
James C. Scott's 2017 revisionist history of early state formation — arguing that the first states emerged not from voluntary settlement but from coercion, that they were fragile and often collapsed, and that the peoples who avoided state incorporation were often doing so deliberately.
James C. Scott's 1998 argument that high-modernist state planning (Soviet collectivization, Le Corbusier urban planning, scientific forestry) systematically fails because it imposes legible, simplified order on the complex, tacit knowledge of local practice — and that the combination of authoritarian states, modernist ideology, and weak civil society is catastrophic.