Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Free Audiobook Download by James C. Scott

"Seeing Like a State" is a seminal work of modern political and economic thought. The book provides a new way to understand authoritarian high modernism and its devastating impacts. In the tradition of Thucydides, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson, Scott shows how powerful ideologies become embedded in the landscape, taking on the appearance of natural law.

Seeing Like a State is a book about the idea of states, how they see and control their subject populations, and how they imagine themselves in relation to their territories. The author suggests that efforts by states to address social problems often result in unintended consequences and that these policies reflect values which are not necessarily shared by the public. Scott's thesis is built on four analytical cases: "street-level bureaucracy", "high modernism", "quasi-states," and "big man".

Scott's thesis is that in development the West, the state has created a new form of participatory surveillance, where "the party that is to be 'developed' becomes not just a cog in the wheel of economic production but a raw material for social engineering." The village, Scott argues, was designed as an "anthropological project" to remake traditional institutions and relationships in order to produce modern citizens integrated into a national society.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a book about development and its discontents. James C. Scott, who was trained as an agronomist and anthropologist, offers a powerful critique of high-modernist ideology—the belief that a centralized state can shape society according to rational principles, especially those of scientific management.

Told in an accessible and engaging style, Seeing Like a State offers a powerful new way to think about the past and present.

The book takes a broad look at the history of efforts to improve the human condition. It looks at the international campaign to eradicate river blindness in West Africa, the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture, and the global spread of an architecture of power designed to extract wealth from colonial production.