Culture & Agriculture
A Publication of the Culture and Agriculture Section
American Anthropological Association

Book Review

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Reviewed by Dion Dennis, Division of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at San Antonio.

In his introduction, James C. Scott unpacks the key features of his argument. His thesis is that the most disastrous incidents of state-initiated social engineering have emerged from a historical combination of four factors: (1) a state-initiated bureaucratization of life processes and products, both human and non-human; (2) a fanatic faith in what Scott calls a "high modernist" ideology; (3) an authoritarian state that has the will and means to impose a number of centrally planned, high-modernist schemes on to various localities; and (4) a society too divided, defeated, or economically devastated to effectively resist these grand schemes. Against the folly, violence, and tragedy of such ill-conceived, and grandiose projects, Scott argues for the importance of incorporating localized, practical knowledge, which he dubs metis, as the antidote to the hubris of detached central planners. In making his case, he cites as prescient theoretical predecessors 19th century European anarchists (Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) and early 20th century European communist revolutionaries (such as Rosa Luxembourg and Madame Kollantay). In Scott's discursive thought-world, they join hands with E. F. Schumacher and contemporary neo-liberals as advocates of human freedom and inventiveness.

In its narrative strategy, Scott's book is essentially an odd pastiche of historical-moral tales. Whether the narrative describes 19th-century Prussian forestry practices, the mid-20th- century construction of Brasilia, the compulsory villagization programs in East Africa, or Soviet collectivization of the early 1930s, all the historical complexities of these and other events are ultimately reducible to a simple binarism: an easily memorized lesson. Big and centralized is bad. Small and local is good. It is a standard structuralist dualism, no different than the plot lines of popular culture film and TV products (e.g., the Jedi v. the Empire in the film Star Wars). Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the book has been well received in the popular press.

Rather than critiquing its surface logic, this review argues that the reductionism and conceptual shortcomings of Seeing Like a State are shaped by a series of ambivalent, and largely uncited and unacknowledged "takings" from two prominent strands of contemporary thought. The first is taken from postmodernist theory. The second, and more significant, is the very partially and ambivalently deployed borrowings from the emerging field of governmentality studies, a legacy of the work of Michel Foucault.<1>

The remainder of this review shows how some these ambivalent "takings" from the contemporary intellectual climate shape some of the more significant, and arguably flawed, polemics in Scott's book. For example, the first of Scott's constituent ingredients, the bureaucratization and management of life processes, which he terms "state projects of legibility and simplification," has a progenitor in Foucault's (1978) notion of biopower. Expounding a similar note, Scott bypasses Foucault, instead citing Condorcet (also discussed by Foucault):

Arguably, Condorcet's thought forms the initial basis for the Foucauldian notion of biopower. Biopower refers to regimes of knowledge that we recognize as the human sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.). These disciplines that take human life as an object of knowledge emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. For Foucault, biopower has two axes. At the aggregate level of the population (birth, death, public health, etc.), these are techniques to optimize the health and productivity of the social body. But biopower also operates at the level of the individual by deploying disciplinary techniques that break down and re-form (or train) individuals as docile and productive subjects. Thus, biopower was not merely a legibility strategy for simplification, as Scott seems to want to redefine it. Rather, as Foucault used it, biopower is actually a productive strategy of statistical complication, not reduction. As populations poured in from the countryside to the cities during the Industrial Revolution, disciplinary strategies were employed to invent and shape the relationships between people and between those people and the institutions and technologies with which they interacted, as well as producing improved public health and private profit. For Foucault, disciplinary strategies are not simplifications but complex, actuarial extrapolations of relations of knowledge and power. However, for Scott to directly appropriate Foucault's notion of biopower, with its notion of productivity rather than simplification and implied repression, would bring into play a set of ideas (such as Foucault's notion that power is an activity, not a possession or entity) that contradict Scott's conceptualization of the state.<2>

There are other places in the text where Scott appropriates ideas while eliding contemporary intellectual debate. Consider his discussion of ingredient two, "high modernism." In his introduction, Scott defines "high-modernism"

Discussions about the limits and effects of a technocratic scientism characteristic of what Scott terms "high-modernism" have been a staple of intellectual discourse since the end of World War II. Lyotard (1984), for example, delineated much of what is now, better than twenty years later, appropriated by Scott. For Lyotard, the genocidal effects of two world wars had stripped the "master narratives" of modernism (organized around orienting concepts of rationality, the inevitability of scientific progress, the linear ascent of human history as propelled by utopian promises surrounding technology) of any legitimating power. Computerization had transformed the production and circulation of knowledge into an everyday commodity. In the absence of a legitimating worldview, organizational systems began to ground their own legitimacy in their efficiency. Lyotard termed this conflation of legitimacy and efficiency performativity. A system worships its own cybernetic, efficiency-maximizing tendencies. It is a powerful conceptual notion that makes it possible to understand a number of moral discourses that are grounded in performative notions (like those surrounding the many variants of Total Quality Management [TQM], for example). But whereas for Lyotard, like Foucault, it is probably fair to say that these practices constitute a continuum where state and society are defined by relative differences in practice, Scott chooses to maintain the Enlightenment-era state/civil society dichotomy in his explanations of "authoritarian high modernism." By doing so, his explanations ironically embody much of the high modernism that he is presumably critiquing. So it should be no surprise that Scott describes the high modernist agenda with an unreflexive use of high modernist categories. Consider the following example: In choosing his title for the book, Seeing Like a State, Scott gives us a rather broad clue as to his discomfort with much of the governmentality and postmodernist discourses. Unlike most researchers and theorists in these fields who view the state as constituted by the dialectic of extra-statist practices as they are imported into administrative bureaucracies. (For example, consider the recent rise of actuarial justice or the use of TQM at the Department of Defense.) Simply put, Scott essentializes the state as an entity, a thing, a noun. His choice to "smuggle in" portions of the governmentality and postmodernist discourses, while maintaining his modernist notion of an essentialist state (a state that can "see," after all), creates some odd inconsistencies and tensions in his analysis. For example, in a suggestive section, Scott describes Lenin's desire for the Soviet Union to endorse and adopt American Taylorism in the worker's paradise: On the face of it, Lenin's enthusiasm to import and adapt Taylorism, as an official practice in the Soviet Union, is a good fit with current notions that the state is produced by the techniques practiced in its name. And, in the paragraphs below this quote, Scott makes his only extended mentions of Foucault's work, ultimately marginalizing Foucault's careful theoretical explanations for the historical impossibility of an economic sovereignty. Instead, according to Scott, the most significant obstacle to the horrors of central planning has been This is not a theoretical or empirical proposition. It is merely an article of faith, and Scott offers no evidence to demonstrate that this is a sufficient or adequate explanation. It is merely a restatement of the very traditional American conceit of exceptionalism.<3> Although Scott finds governmentality discourse useful and interesting, it is also a threat to his essentialist notion of the state. Thus, he smuggled into his analysis borrowed and reshaped insights derived from governmentality discourses.

One of the most interesting things about the governmentality discourses is the attention given to the relationship between practices that are housed in governmental bureaucracies and those that are conditionally ceded to businesses. For whereas totalization practices have been receding somewhat from state venues, they have been multiplying at commercial sites. If "small is good and big is bad," what are we to make of the massive concentration of agriculture and business represented by Archer-Daniels-Midland, or the commodification and cataloging of organic and genetically engineered life forms? In a possible megacorporatist world will we be less, or more, the objects of corporatist governmentality? It is a question that Scott avoids in this book, reflecting an ambivalence that is foreshadowed even in the acknowledgments. There, he confesses that he would "like to kick the habit of writing books. If there were a detox unit or an analog to the nicotine patch for serial offenders, I would sign up for treatment." (p. xiv). Scott's description of his writing as an addiction that he cannot control (or be responsible for) carries the stamp of an ambivalence that resonates with the intellectual trajectory of Seeing Like a State.

Notes

1. Governmentality studies take as objects of knowledge how widely adopted practices for the shaping or governing of human behavior (such as current risk management and actuarial techniques) produce the state. For many governmentality scholars, the state is the result of ensembles of practices, not the author of them.

2. Foucault was responding critically to popular (and essentialist) 1950s and 1960s Marxist and psychoanalytic notions of power as an instrument of repression. Finding these notions inadequate, Foucault formulated often misunderstood ideas about power and knowledge. For example, traditional concepts of power work off the premise that it is the ability to directly compel "X" to do something that "X" would not otherwise do, through some form of coercion. In this sense, power and coercion are essentially the same, some "thing" to be wielded. For Foucault, this is not an accurate or useful understanding of power. Rather, for him, power is always part of a contestable relationship. Even if that relationship is one-sided (a state of domination), Foucault's conceptualization of power always has the possibility of resistance and inversion. The most cited Foucauldian definitions of power are "action on a field of possible action" and "action on others' actions." Apparently aware of Foucault's critique, Scott's essentializing tendencies nevertheless often produce equally essentialist descriptions of centralized state power.

3. American exceptionalism is a recurrent credo in political life that "America, the state" is the unique exception to the inexorable historical rise and fall of the mighty imperial powers due to the character of its founding and the nature of its institutions. Popular among contemporary neo-liberal Republicans (actively propagated by Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich), the concept postulates an eternal America, embodying an essence immune to fact of earthly life--death.

References Cited

Foucault, Michel
        1978 The History of Sexuality. New York : Pantheon Books.

Lyotard, Jean Francois
        1984 [1979] The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.