Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed - James C. Scott

"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 �"A powerful, and in many [ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning."-Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca � 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 � The Institution for Social and Policy Studies