Saw James C. Scott square off vs. Sam Popkin once. Wallersteinian conference at UCSC wioth others in attendence http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/skocpol/ and Temma Kaplan, at UCSC. Debated, the Moral vs. Political Economy of the Peasant. Papers later published in Theory & Society, I think. The journal founded by Alvin Gouldner, author of the classic, "The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, " from 1970.
The Best-Laid Plans Date: April 19, 1998, Late Edition - Final Byline: By John Gray Lead:
SEEING LIKE A STATE How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. By James C. Scott. Illustrated. 445 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $35.
Text:
The 20th century has seen many grand schemes for improving the human condition. The collectivization of farming in the Soviet Union, compulsory ''villagization'' in Ethiopia and postcolonial Tanzania, the construction of Brasilia according to Le Corbusier's theories of urban planning, Maoist China's Great Leap Forward and the self-sufficient rural economy that was the goal of Pol Pot's Cambodia were ambitious efforts to better the lot of humankind. The ideas inspiring the schemes and the regimes that attempted them were highly diverse. The human costs of the experiments varied from an immeasurable toll in broken lives in Russia and China to a farcical waste of effort in Brazil. Despite their differences, these bold experiments had one thing in common: all failed. Why is it that such grandiose schemes of human betterment came to nothing? And can we be sure we have learned the lessons of their failure?
In what must be one of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades -- ''Seeing Like a State'' -- James C. Scott contends that these apparently disparate experiments exemplify a single body of ideas. He calls this system of beliefs ''high modernism,'' and he tells us that it inspired such different figures as Robert McNamara, Walther Rathenau, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Lenin, Trotsky and Julius Nyerere. Scott identifies the birth of high modernism with the economic mobilization of Germany during World War I, and describes Nazism as ''a reactionary form of modernism.'' As he goes on to show, high modernism is found not only in totalitarian regimes. He sees evidence of high modernist ideas in what he terms the ''Soviet-American fetish'' of ''industrial farming'' -- the enthusiasm for mass production in agriculture that led some American agronomists to support Soviet collectivization. What is this set of beliefs that so easily crosses boundaries between regimes, economic systems and political ideologies?
For Scott, high modernism is the attempt to design society in accord with what are believed to be scientific laws. Typically, high modernists think that the best way to meet human needs is by expanding production in agriculture and industry. They want society to be governed not by the practical intelligence of its members but by scientific knowledge. Some believe that production itself should be planned. All are convinced that society must be reshaped according to a rational design. Seeing the apparent disorder of societies that are not governed by some overall scheme as a sign that they are not yet modern, they believe that in a truly modern society everything that is traditional or accidental will have been rendered obsolete.
Scott contends that two of the largest social experiments of our century -- urban renewal and the rural resettlement of peasant farmers -- are examples of the high modernist attempt to use the power of the state to impose a rational order on society. In a fascinating interpretation of the growth of the modern state, he points out that, at least since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, governments have been making the life of society ''legible'' in order to make social life comprehensible, and thereby controllable, by political power. The lives of medieval cities and peasant farmers could not easily be known by outsiders; to understand them local knowledge was needed, because the order of people's lives differed from place to place. Modern states need standardized techniques of measurement to tax and monitor their citizens and mobilize the resources of society. The clutter and lumber of peasant and medieval life were obstacles to such goals. Accordingly -- in contexts as different as the development of ''scientifically managed'' forests containing only a single type of tree (a telling example Scott cites from 19th-century German history); the construction of straight, gridlike streets in cities; and the introduction of fixed surnames -- modern states have implemented systems of classification that allow them greater control over resources and the lives of their citizens.
High modernists have used the increased powers of states to reshape society so that it functions as an enterprise whose goal is to maximize production. They have done so in the faith that they can thereby improve the human lot. Yet wherever it has been attempted the high modernist project has led to poverty, and sometimes it has produced human tragedy on a grand scale. Scott argues that ''the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements.'' He suggests that the conditions that account for the failure of the great 20th-century schemes of human improvement are the administrative ordering of society by the state, a faith in high modernist ideas, an authoritarian regime ready to use its coercive power to promote high modernist designs, and a weak civil society that lacks the power to resist these plans. When these four conditions occur together -- as they did in the Soviet Union, China and certain developing countries -- the results have been some of the worst disasters of social engineering.
The grand schemes for improving the human condition that our century has witnessed failed because of an error in their perception of human knowledge. High modernists thought they knew better than ordinary human beings how society works. They aimed to replace the common understanding of social life with scientific knowledge. But scientific knowledge is too abstract to capture our understanding of local circumstances -- the practical knowledge the ancient Greeks called metis, which carried Odysseus though his adventures. This is the knowledge that modern governments ignored when they attempted to resettle peasant farmers in newly constructed villages. It is the knowledge urban planners lack when they try to construct cities according to a simple, comprehensive design.
The lesson of ''Seeing Like a State'' is that the disasters of 20th-century social engineering come from its neglect of metis. Without the human capacity for this practical understanding, the harm done by grand schemes of human improvement would have been even worse. In fact, the only thing that has saved some societies from total wreckage by the absurdities of these projects has been the presence in them of resourceful human beings who have tempered them with the wisdom embodied in metis.
Scott presents a formidable argument against using the power of the state in an attempt to reshape the whole of society. But, as he acknowledges in a number of asides that unfortunately he fails to develop, it is not only state planning that can disregard the practical knowledge of ordinary people. The free market can do it just as well. Today, when ideas of planning are in disarray, high modernism has found a home in the ideology of free markets.
The contemporary cult of the free market is just as radical an exercise in social engineering as many experiments in economic planning tried in this century. Like other kinds of high modernism, it rests on a confident ignorance of the immensely complex workings of real societies. Governments throughout the world are being advised by transnational organizations to reconstruct their economies on the basis of free markets. But no government or transnational organization can know what will be the results of promoting free markets in societies in which they have never before been central. What will be the effects on family life, on crime and on the economy itself?
In Russia since the collapse of Communism, the attempt to construct free markets has resulted in a species of capitalism very different from that portrayed in Western economics textbooks. The fact is that free market theories can tell us little about how different economies really work. Yet it is a theoretical ideal rather than a detailed knowledge of local circumstances that continues to guide economic reform in many parts of the world.
Today's faith in the free market echoes the faith of earlier generations in high modernist schemes that failed at great human cost. ''Seeing Like a State'' does not tell us what it is in late modern societies that predisposes them, against all the evidence of history, to put their trust in such utopias. Sadly, no one knows enough to explain that.
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