Seeing Like a State

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.

Creates the theory of 'legibility' and 'metis' — Scott's argument that states impose simplified, legible order on complex local practice, destroying the tacit knowledge ('metis') that makes systems actually work, explains why top-down development projects so often fail despite the best intentions.