Seeing Like a State
Administrative simplification can enable coordination while becoming dangerous when it displaces local knowledge and suppresses correction.
States make complex societies legible through standard categories and records.
A form makes a complicated life easier to administer by leaving things out. Scott asks when that necessary simplification becomes dangerous because officials mistake the form for the entire person or place.
Legibility helps taxation, administration, and large-scale coordination.
The simplified map omits relations important to lived practice.
High-modernist confidence treats that map as a complete design.
Authoritarian power can impose plans despite contrary local evidence.
Local knowledge is often practical rather than neatly documented. A plan needs ways to learn from it, especially when the people affected can see failures that the central model does not register.
Weak civil society limits resistance and correction.
Metis names practical knowledge acquired through situated experience.
Historical cases expose the costs of disregarding that knowledge.
The book does not reject all planning or standardisation.
It argues for adaptability and institutions capable of learning from people affected.