Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory understood in Brasilia, the Great REVOLUTION in China, agricultural “modernization” in the Tropics―the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned programs for enhancing the human being condition move tragically awry?

With this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed situations of about Viewing Like a Condition: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Individual Condition Possess Failed large-scale authoritarian programs in a variety of fields. Centrally managed sociable programs misfire, Scott argues, if they impose schematic visions that perform violence to complicated interdependencies that are not―and cannot―be fully comprehended. Further, the success of designs for social firm depends upon the acknowledgement that local, useful knowledge is really as important as formal, epistemic understanding.

The author builds a persuasive case against “development theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He recognizes and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative buying of nature and society with the state; a “high-modernist ideology” that areas confidence in the power of science to boost every aspect of human life; a willingness to make use of authoritarian condition power to impact large- size interventions; and a prostrate civil culture that cannot successfully resist such plans.