SEEING LIKE A STATE.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. By James C. Scott (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. xiv plus 445pp.).

It does not require a very thorough examination of the history of the long twentieth century for one to conclude that political extremism, in both leftist and rightist varieties, has been a major, if not the main, cause of the unprecedented levels of human suffering unleashed in the twelve or thirteen decades since European imperialist domination encompassed the entire globe. Focussing mainly on case examples that explore massive projects in social engineering directed by those who have claimed to be inspired by leftist political philosophies, James Scott argues that these exercises in bureaucratic hubris share a common commitment to tenets of what he terms "high modernist" ideology. He argues that the ideas and urges, organizational strategies, and technologies of coercion that informed Soviet schemes for collectivization, "villagization" in Tanzania, and agricultural modernization in accordance with Western precedents in the colonial and post-colonial eras were all constructed to advance high modernist ends . Detailed analyses of these grand schemes for political and socioeconomic transformation, which form the core case studies for Seeing Like a State, reveal that they originated in a constellation of seemingly disparate processes. Some of these can be traced back to early modern times, particularly to the Enlightenment; others are products of twentieth-century sensibilities and technological breakthroughs.

In the early chapters of Seeing Like a State, Scott explores a wide range of more limited, earlier high modernist projects, from German forest conservationism and urban planning to cadastral surveys and language standardization. All of these he argues persuasively shared a common goal of enhancing what he terms the legibility of urban and rural landscapes and human populations. Legibility, as Scott employs the term in demonstrating the commonalities among these processes, includes standardization, simplification, codification, abstraction, and the valorization of procedures deemed to be scientific (that is objective, precise, and universally valid) at the expense of local knowledge. He links high modernist projects generally with the imperatives of state bureaucracies that initiate and doggedly implement them, often in the face of considerable resistance and clear evidence that their actual effects are rather different from those the officials in charge intend.

Beginning with the Russian revolution and the draconian Soviet campaigns under Stalin to collectivize (hence modernize) agriculture and capture the peasantry that had made its own revolution in 1917 and the years of the civil war, Scott employs an impressive array of secondary sources and key primary documents to demonstrate the dehumanization, destruction, and environmental degradation that have very often been the main products of these grand schemes to remake the world according to high modernist ideals. Brutality had become a central feature of the Soviet regime even before collectivization and the liquidation of the Kulaks were launched, and for reasons that were often contrary or peripheral to high modernism. But Scott argues that even under relatively benign leaders, such as Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, modernizing projects have invariably resulted in widespread bureaucratic bullying and state violence against its citizens, the destruction ofviable communities and patterns of livelihood, and environmen tal devastation. As Scott demonstrates in each case, it is most appropriate that the ideologues and bureaucrats who create and direct high modernist projects have frequently resorted to military imagery and techniques--strategies, regimentation, chains of command, discipline, drill, and uniforms--to inspire and intimidate the populations who are the objects of their ambitious designs.

In the general introduction to his case and thematic studies, Scott identifies three key processes whose convergence he sees as responsible for the excesses of society-wide social engineering projects in the past century. First, civil society is levelled by severe traumatic shocks, such as defeat in war, state collapse and revolution. In its prostrate condition, the society is vulnerable to the seizure of power by political factions determined to build an authoritarian regime. Finally, the ideologues of the extreme factions are committed to some version of high modernism as a grand blueprint for societal transformation. This convergence of forces corresponds perfectly with those that gave rise to the Soviet state and the forced modernization of the Stalinist era. Though Scott does not deal with either case in any depth, this convergence of forces and similar outcomes have also occurred in China and Cambodia in recent decades.

This configuration of historical processes fits in equal measure the history of Germany in the decades after World War I, which might have provided a key test case from the right side of the political spectrum. For reasons that he does not elucidate, Scott has little to say about the potential for lethal social engineering by rightist regimes, such as the Nazis or the Fascists in Italy. But either of these cases could certainly be employed to expand the applicability of his arguments concerning high modernism. As studies such as Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge, 1984) demonstrate, they would also complicate his thesis considerably. For the Nazis and Fascists, and many other proponents of rightist militarism, the high modernist agenda was diluted significantly by highly romanticized revivals (or inventions) of ancient myths and rituals as well as an idealization of the agrarian past. Recall the striking sequences in "The Triumph of the Will" of German peasants--male and female, adults and child ren--marching exuberantly to pay their respects to Der F[ddot{u}]hrer. Or, consider Hitler's obsession with what he declared was the eternal struggle between Aryans and Jews, and the ways in which that conviction contributed to the massive campaign for their extermination, which exceeded even the horrors of Stalinist Russia as an example of high modernist regimentation and technologizing gone awry.

These references to important examples from the right is not meant to suggest that Scott ought to have written a different book from the one he actually has, but rather to suggest that high modernism and social engineering have come together in a multiplicity of ways, and that the factors that have contributed to their convergence have often varied widely from those Scott appears to offer as generalizable from the Soviet debacle. In this regard, it is significant that his second major case example, Tanzania, exemplifies fully only the commitment to high modernism and very partially the authoritarian state components of his general formulation. The society in which Nyerere's planned village experiments were conducted had known neither war nor revolution. It may well have been the poorer for decades of British and German colonial rule, but its disparate ethical groups and local communities were hardly prostrate when villagization began--a point Scott convincingly demonstrates. Tanzania had, of course, recentl y undergone the divisive process of decolonization, and the even more charged episode of the forced union of Zanzibar with the newly formed state. But none of these occurrences compares to the catastrophes that had eviscerated civil society in Russia. And Russia had little of the external aid that international lending agencies poured into Tanzania in support of Nyerere's misconceived experiment in modernization. In fact, this outside assistance may well have played a role in buffering the impact of the Tanzanian villagization. As Scott shows there was plenty of bureaucratic idiocy, arrogance and even incidents of brutal coercion in Tanzania. But none of this even begins to compare to the waves of genocide and destruction unleashed against humans, animals and the environment itself in the Stalinist drive for collectivization. In the hubris and insensitivity of their high modernist architects, the two cases share a good deal; much else, including the forces that gave rise to the state-sponsored social engineer ing projects, provides a study in contrasts.

This divergence points to broader questions regarding the origins of the authoritarian experiments in high modernism that are the focus of Seeing Like a State. As the later chapters of the study document in detail, these grand engineering projects have been undertaken in much of the post-colonial world in the name of liberal market capitalism and non-command communist varieties of state socialism. Though they have often engendered community disintegration, falloffs in agrarian productivity, and environmental degradation comparable to that which occurred in the Soviet Union or Tanzania, in most cases the scale of these setbacks was much reduced and the failed experiments vastly less lethal than the Soviet or Chinese Communist ventures proved to be.

These contrasts also raise even more fundamental questions about the links between high modernism and state tyranny that remain to be answered. As Scott's examples of high modernist interventions suggest-and he himself explicitly concedes--censuses, maps, forest conservation, and even improved techniques of police surveillance, are not intrinsically pernicious; in fact, more often than not these techniques or schemes have served to promote human well-being. As the vibrant street life and community cohesion of many areas of Manhattan (and the world's other great cities) demonstrate, for example, urban grids, expansive scale and geometric abstraction need not lead to dehumanization, social atomization and alienation. Jane Jacobs, whose philosophy of urban planning Scott explores with sensitivity and to good effect, rejected not the high modernist city that New York had become long before the 1960s when she wrote, but the arrogant and community-hostile vision of planners like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses as to how that modernism ought to be extended and enhanced. Human Agents--and here grasping and insensitive bureaucrats, both those linked to states and international lending agencies, have a lot to answer for--have transformed the elements of high modernism into instruments of oppression and destruction. They have done so in circumstances that have varied significantly from what have to be seen as the exceptional calamities and extraordinary levels of social disintegration that made the Stalinist (or Nazi) abuses possible. Thus, a full assessment of the impact of high modernism requires a much more diverse and representative set of case examples than those Scott analyzes as well as an approach to causation that allows for factors less extreme than those he implicitly generalizes from the Soviet experience.

As was the case in his earlier and highly influential works on strategies of state control and tactics of peasant resistance from The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) to Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Scott displays an impressive aptitude for synthesis in exploring the case examples he employs in building a larger argument. He ranges across a vast literature drawn from history, economics, anthropology, literature, urban planning, ecology, linguistics, cartography and, of course, political science. Reflecting a significant shift in emphasis from much of his earlier work, which was centered on the conditions and responses of peasants and other subaltern groups, in the early chapters of Seeing Like a State, Scott's main concerns are states, bureaucrats, modernist planning and the sorry legacy of their convergence in varying locales and time periods. But it is in the two final chapters of the study where Scott turns to his underlying purpose: a measured and ultimately sobering critique of high modernism's assault on local knowledge and indigenous agricultural systems.

Drawing heavily on recent anthropological work on these ancient but imperiled survivals from the pre-industrial, pre-scientific era, Scott builds a generally cogent case for their social resonance and ecological sustainability. These are contrasted with the monocultural, large-scale, environmentally dissonant and community destructive approaches of both capitalist and command communist, industrial agriculture. Here a barely disguised current of hostility to state centrism that borders on anarchism, which runs through all but the very earliest of Scott's work, informs his defense of local diversity and time-tested techniques as well as his assault on the hubristic schemes of modernization specialists. These proclivities are evident in Scott's defense of peoples on the move and his recurrent reflections on the determination of modem states to force them to settle down or eliminate them.

His defense of shifting agriculturalists is particularly noteworthy in this regard, and he draws on a wealth of recent ethnographic research to argue for the decided ecological advantages of this once-maligned approach to subsistence production. But over the past couple of centuries, population increase, more intensive forest cutting, ethnic clashes, and the spread of sedentary agriculture have had as much or more to do with the decline of societies based on shifting agriculture--or for that matter those relying on pastoral nomadism--as state planning or military assaults in the name of high modernism. And, as Scott is well aware, whatever its virtues, shifting agriculture is not a viable alternative to intensive sedentary agriculture, whether industrial or not. The very low ratio of population to land that is essential to all systems of slash-and-burn or swidden patterns of food production means that they cannot, in an overcrowded world, present viable alternatives to the high modernist approach to agriculture and rural organization that Scott so powerfully critiques.

These critiques are followed up by a spirited defense of local communities a repositories of what Scott characterized as m[bar{e}]tris, or knowledge/practice worked out over centuries, sometimes millennia, of trial and error. But he has frustratingly little to say about real alternatives to high tech, large-scale, industrial mode of agricultural production that are increasingly dominant across the globe. Here his concessions to the success of the latter in temperate climes is at variance with his thorough critiques of the extension of these techniques to much of the postcolonial tropical and subtropical world. As Ernest Schusky's important study on Culture and Agriculture: An Ecological Introduction to Traditional and Modern Farming Systems (New York, 1989) demonstrates, the admittedly impressive increases in yields per acre that industrial agriculture has produced in the United States in the past century or so have been won at a prohibitively high cost. Schusky argues that these gains have necessitated gre ater caloric inputs-in terms of the energy needed, for example, to produce chemical fertilizers and to manufacture and run farm machinery--than they have yielded in terms of food outputs. This imbalance has so far been maintained by America's capacity to draw energy and other resources from the rest of the world, and to produce them domestically. But, if Schusky is right, such a system of agricultural production is nor sustainable for the United States, much less the rest of the world. When Schusky's findings are added to the instances of environmental degradation and wrongheaded approaches to agricultural production that Scott so convincingly chronicles in the colonial era and the post-colonial world, the need for viable alternatives to the high modernist juggernaut is obvious, and local knowledge and environmentally compatible technologies are essential. One can only hope that Scott's well-founded and thoughtful reflections on these questions of vital relevance to planetary survival will be given the attent ion they deserve in a period when high modernism reigns in its liberal market-capitalist variant and its rivals appear to have been consigned to another sort of dust bin of history.