Seeing Like a State

James C. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University and current president of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author of Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, and The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, all published by Yale University Press.

出版者:Yale University Press

作者:James C. Scott

页数:464

出版时间:1999-2-8

价格:USD 21.00

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9780300078152

图书标签:社会学人类学政治学政治politicsAnthropology比较政治

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward 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 plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans. "A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners

用户评价

翻来覆去的high modernism vs local knowledge，第一二章用啰嗦的篇幅叙述了Weber精炼的”理性化”理论，忽视了理性化科层制与社会的相互作用，过于抬高metis，对不同理性的区分阐释不够，将国家行政计划和市场自我调节机制的逻辑等同因而混为一谈。总体理论亮点不多，写作太啰嗦。

城市规划和苏联集体化两章很精彩，最后对metis的强调不仅话痨，而且跑题。因为政治权力推行的high modernism是多种不同的意识形态，既未必涉及知识，也未必是为了改善人类状况。这不是认识论缺陷导致的失察，而是政治斗争的结果。（全书莫名话痨，可能为了强化一种metis吧。）

翻来覆去的high modernism vs local knowledge，第一二章用啰嗦的篇幅叙述了Weber精炼的”理性化”理论，忽视了理性化科层制与社会的相互作用，过于抬高metis，对不同理性的区分阐释不够，将国家行政计划和市场自我调节机制的逻辑等同因而混为一谈。总体理论亮点不多，写作太啰嗦。

很多examples和metaphors，语句也算优美，如果不那么话唠就完美了

high modernism的出处