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Cover image for book Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
By:James C. Scott
Publisher:Yale University Press
Print ISBN:9780300246759
eText ISBN:9780300252989
Edition:0
Format:Reflowable

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“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review
 
Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.
 
“Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker
 
“A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University