Open AccessJames C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 445 pages. Price not given.
Author(s) -
Faisal Bari
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
pakistan development review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.154
H-Index - 26
ISSN - 0030-9729
DOI - 10.30541/v39i1pp.76-78
Subject(s) - peasant , subsistence agriculture , resistance (ecology) , haven , the arts , state (computer science) , politics , sociology , political economy , political science , history , law , agriculture , ecology , mathematics , archaeology , algorithm , combinatorics , biology , computer science
The key question addressed in the book is: Why have so manylarge-scale schemes to improve the human condition failed so badly? AndJames Scott is the right person to have asked this question. Scott isthe Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at YaleUniversity. He is also the author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant:Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1977), Weapons of the Weak:Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987), and Domination and the Artsof Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1992). All of the above have givenhim an excellent understanding of the nature of conflict in societiesand the means of survival for the poor. Often the protagonists in theconflict have been people on one side and governments on the other. Thisis essential background for the book under review.