Review Essays
Looking at the State: An American Perspective
MORTON KELLER
JAMES C. SCOTT'S Seeing Like a State is in essence a post–Cold War book. That is to
say, it is not caught up in the which-side-are-you-on, Free World versus Communist
World, capitalism versus socialism divisions that for so long colored social science
scholarship. His thesis is simple, significant, substantial. He holds that, from earliest
historical times—though for his purposes, the eighteenth century is a sufficient
starting place—those in authority have tried to organize society through centralized, from-the-top-down plans, and that, with the leaden consistency of dum-dum
bullets, their plans have failed. What lies behind these schemes, and why their
record of achievement has been so dismal, is the theme of Scott's book. His interest
in the subject grew out of his work on rural life in Southeast Asia, an area rich in
failed settlement and rural improvement projects. While Seeing Like a State
discusses non-arboreal topics such as urban planning and industrial Taylorism, its
primary concern is with centralized agricultural and village planning, and how and
why it so inexorably goes awry. 1
Scott takes note of a dizzying variety of devices that over the course of time have
been enlisted to serve top-down control. These include the creation of permanent
last names (in the late medieval West), standardized units of weight and measurement, cadastral surveys and population registers, freehold tenure, public health,
political surveillance, poor relief, taxation, the standardization of language and law,
the design of cities, and the organization of transportation. What do these "state
simplifications" have in common? They seek, above all, to make people's activities
and relationships more uniform and more "legible," and thus more readily
controlled from the center. Scott deals with these devices in familiar contexts: social
control, state autonomy, a managed economy. With more originality, he also
explores their cultural meaning. Top-down planning, he argues, has its own
aesthetic. Central planners seek "legibility": that is, the capacity to "read" the units
that they seek to organize and control. Hence the regularized names, numbers,
maps, lists, language, law, and other "state simplifications." 2
There is a philosophy as well as a structure and a language to state planning. Scott
calls it "high modernism," a faith (often disguised as a science) in the aesthetic and
social superiority of well-ordered forests, farms, and cities. Nature and society alike
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 1.
2 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 3.
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become canvases on which high modernist planning is imposed. The state has been
the major source of centralized planning, although corporate capitalism also is
attracted to it. (Scott makes clear his ideological distance from Friedrich Hayek's
and Milton Friedman's unleashed market.) And while big projects crop up through
much of recorded history (the pyramids, the water systems of Babylon or ancient
China), it is in modern times that large-scale, state-run schemes have come into
their own. Only then do the instruments of public control, the ability to render civil
society incapable of strong resistance, and the belief that the state is responsible for
all that goes on in society attain the authority necessary for these worst-laid plans
to come into effect. 3
His first case study in "state projects of legibility and simplification" is the effort
in eighteenth-century Prussia to subject its forests to scientific exploitation. That
meant straight rows, cleared undergrowth, a single type (or a few types) of trees:
more systematic, more efficient, more easily farmed, more profitable. Then that
omnipresent social fact, the law of unforeseen consequences, kicked in. The
denizens (human and animal) of the forests, who relied on them in their natural
state for fond, fuel, medicine, and building material, were badly harmed by the
cleanup. And stands of one breed of tree turned out to be more vulnerable to pests
and diseases that could wipe out larger numbers than before, when the creative
chaos of diversity kept these destructive forces contained. 4
The Prussian experiment was not an isolated one. Scientific forestry would have
a continuing life around the world. And the mechanisms of centralized planning
and control steadily grew. The mapping of territory became an accepted instrument
of territorial control: in Napoleonic France, in Great Britain's colonies and the
Torrens system of land registration that began in late nineteenth-century Australia
and New Zealand, in Thomas Jefferson's vision of an American West divided into
ten-mile-square "hundreds." 5
The city was another major setting for these planning-and-control (im)morality
plays. Medieval towns were notably disordered places. Scott sees method in their
mixup. Spatial "illegibility" offered insulation from the onslaught of armies, tax
collectors, higher authorities of any and every sort. From the late seventeenth
century on, cities (like forests) came under the sway of an aesthetic of straight lines
and visual order. Nor was the linear baroque city limited to Europe. It crossed over
to the New World in the form of William Penn's late seventeenth-century plan for
Philadelphia, Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's late eighteenth-century blueprint for
Washington, D.C., and in the grid system of streets that became the norm for so
many nineteenth-century American cities. 6
Notable applications of top-down urban planning in the twentieth century are the
capital cities of Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigarh in India. Starkly modernist
buildings, districts carefully segregated by use, massive (and massively dehumanizing) plazas: these are the hallmarks of plans hatched de haut en bas with little or no
regard for the reality of the lives of the inhabitants. Scott sees the work of
4
5
6
Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 3, pp. 7-8.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11-22.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49-50.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 2.
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Chandigarh's architect Le Corbusier as the embodiment of the high modernist
aesthetic. (That aesthetic bridged the ideological gulf between right and left.
Corbusier's polities, insofar as he had any, tended to the right, but he was as ready
to lend his talents to Lenin's and Stalin's USSR as to Marshal Petain's Vichy
France. The Brazilian Communist Oscar Niemeyer was chiefly responsible for
Brasilia.)?
Similar in concept and consequences were major land and village consolidation
schemes of the twentieth century: most notably, Stalin's collectivization of Russian
agriculture during the 1920s and 1930s, Mao's Great Leap Forward in China, and
Julius Nyerere's ujamaa scheme of compulsory villagization in Tanzania. Now we're
on Scott's home turf, and he dwells at length on the conflict between these
top-down agricultural schemes, brutally overriding local customs and conditions,
and the accumulated folk wisdom of local farmers whose seeming inefficiency was
in fact a set of painfully learned, highly applicable adaptations to local needs. 8
SCOTT'S SPREADER drops a lot of grass seed on a lot of territory. Much of what he
says about state planning and local wisdom makes sense (though his disclaimer of
a belief in small-is-beautiful, tradition-is-good romanticism is not very convincing).
His anthropological perspective frequently results in illuminating insights. What
remains is to consider the degree to which his observations apply to the United
States. To do so requires taking on a question that at present commands substantial
attention in American historiography: the extent to which it is still possible, in this
relativistic, multicultural time, for the idea of American exceptionalism to have
historical meaning. 9
Scott tells us that in an early draft of his book he included a case study of the
Tennessee Valley Authority as the American equivalent to Prussian state forestry,
Soviet collectivization, and Tanzanian villagization. One can understand the appeal
of the TVA as a case study in high modernist planning. The widely reproduced
photographs of TVA dams—paeans to a brutalist modernism—are reminiscent of
the Soviets' celebrations of the Dnepropetrovsk dam and other massive construction projects. Indeed, the utopian visions of the TVA as an exercise in full-service
regional planning had more than a dollop of the hubris that Scott detects, and
decries, in his other large-scale state projects. 1 °
But, he says, a superabundance of material and a shortage of space led him to
drop the TVA from his book. This omission is as intriguing as the initial linkage. It
is difficult to think that only considerations of space led to his decision. Surely, the
history of the TVA bears no meaningful relation to Stalinist collectivization or
Tanzanian and Ethiopian resettlement schemes. The Authority was a reasonably
successful effort to pump some money into a benighted American region during the
8
Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 4.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, chaps. 6-8.
9 Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," American
Quarterly 45 (1993): 1-43; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998), prologue; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A DoubleEdged Sword (New York, 1996).
10 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 6.
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Depression, provide electricity to a population woefully short of it, and do some
proselytizing for better agricultural techniques. Truc, some of its originators had
larger regional planning ambitions. But grass-roots polities and a profoundly weak
American state put paid to that. Fifty years after its 1933 origins, the TVA was little
more than a public corporation generating and selling electricity. 11
If anything, the dog-that-didn't-bark history of the TVA suggests how unfriendly
an environment the United States has been to government-led, high modernist
schemes. The history of American agricultural policy—the distribution of the public
lands in the nineteenth century, the agricultural support programs of the twentieth
century—is not so much a tale of Grand Designs as of Great Barbecues.
Top-down planning on a large scale did, of course, occur during World Wars I
and II. But the postwar reaction to the distended wartime state made it clear that
Seeing Like a State Scott-style was an anomaly born of emergency conditions, and
it found little nourishment in American cultural soil. Aside from wartime, the
American state-led programs that come closest to Scott's high modernist model are
the Interstate Highway System and NASA. But, for all their scale and cost, it is
difficult to see either as an oppressive instance of top-down state planning. Other
metaphors—grass roots, pork barrels—come more readily to mind. The Interstate
was—to put it mildly—hardly unresponsive to local interests (as long as they
weren't poor or black), nor can it be accounted in the large a disaster (outside of
the larger cities). Much the same can be said of NASA: at worst, it cost a lot of
money and was of limited utility»
Then there are the American instances of planning that Scott does discuss:
L'Enfant's Washington, the organization of western land into uniform sections, the
grid system of American city streets. He takes note as well of large-scale
agribusiness: the Bonanza farms of the late nineteenth century, "industrial farming"
schemes such as Thomas Campbell's Montana Farming Corporation in 1918.
(Perhaps the most substantial instance of American agricultural organization on a
large scale is the giant-type California fruit farming cooperative, such as Sunkist
But while the exemption of agricultural coops from antitrust law helped make them
possible, these commercial enterprises were hardly instruments of state policy.) 13
Neither Penn's Philadelphia nor L'Enfant's Washington became the model for
American cities. Instead, the nation's urban areas emerged from a plethora of local
plans, or no plan at all. The pervasive grid system of streets was not so much
imposed from above as it was fostered by real estate interests seeking maximum
land use for commercial purposes, and it was popularly supported in the belief (or
at least with the excuse) that this was a democratic and egalitarian pattern of urban
development. Nor will it do to try to bring Disneyland or McDonald's (as Scott
glancingly does) into a discussion of top-down planning. Mass production can, but
" Paul Keith Conkin and Erwin C. Hargrove, TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (Urbana,
111., 1983), x—xi; Walter L. Creese, TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality (Knoxville, Tenn.,
1990), xvi.
12 Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Mark Rose,
Interstate: Express Highway Polities, 1939-1989 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); Walter M. McDougall, The
Heavens and the Earth: A Political Histoty of the Space Race (New York, 1985).
13 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 196-201; on agricultural coops, see Morton Keller, Regulating a New
Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990),
153-57.
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does not inevitably have to be, a product of the high modernist mindset.
(Sometimes, as Freud observed, a cigar is just a cigar.) And while large corporations
have often tried, statelike, to micromanage their components, harsh experience and
new managerial theory have greatly strengthened decentralization and grass-roots
innovation. 14
Scott's book turns out to be an argument more for American exceptionalism than
otherwise. That Americans have made contributions to the twentieth-century cult
of central planning is unquestionable: Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor had
honored places in the Soviet pantheon. But the idea that high modernist, top-down
state schemes had a part in modern American life in any way comparable to those
of the Soviet Union, China, parts of Africa, or elsewhere is an absurdity of the sort
George Orwell had in mind when he observed that some things are so ridiculous
only an intellectual would believe them.
14 John U. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States
(Princeton, N.J., 1965); on street grids, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, American Space: The Centennial
Years 1865-1876 (New York, 1972), 75, 194-95; Witold Rybczynski, City Life (New York, 1995), 44-46.
Morton Keller is Spector Professor of History at Brandeis University. His
publications include The Life Insurance Enterprise (1963), Affairs of State
(1977), Regulating a New Economy (1990), and Regulating a New Society (1994).
His major areas of interest are American political, legal, and institutional
history. He did his graduate work at Harvard University, where his thesis
director was Oscar Handlin. He and his wife, Phyllis Keller, have completed
Making Harvard Modern: 1933-2000, forthcoming in 2001.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2001