Scott’s book deals with
the failure of large-scale state-initiated schemes of social engineering. Based on various experiences in the 19th and 20th century, such schemes seem possible when four conditions are given:
- Socities that are administratively ordered; they have to be “legible”
for the state to be able to intervene.
- Decision-makers believing in the possibility of designing the social and natural order (“high modernist ideology”).
- An authoritarian state willing to use its coercive power to bring
high modernist schemes to life.
- A civil society unable to resist the state imposing high modernist
schemes.
Scott shows how European
state-building has been based on the harmonization and standardization of units of measurement and land tenure rights (including the introduction of the necessary documents and statistics). While harmonization and standardization constituted a great simplification of
local realities, they made society "legible" for state administrators. Originally
artificial inventions such as land titles also became important elements in peoples’ daily lives.
The first
high-modernist scheme Scott examines is 20th century urban planning, particularly
the work of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. These schemes focused
on creating “modern” cities with single purpose districts (separating shopping,
workplace, residences) and were organized for motorized traffic. Scott argues that modernist urban
planning failed to create cities where people actually want to live. The lack
of informal, unplanned public spaces (sidewalks, cafés) prevents the emergence
of the networks of relations that are central to an attractive and functional urban
life.
The second high
modernist scheme examined is Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary mass party,
which is contrasted with Rosa Luxembourg and Aleksandra Kollontay’s views. Lenin takes a top down view of revolution, with party cadres having to
guide “unconscious masses”. Luxembourg and Kollontay, on the other hand, take a
much more bottom-up approach. In their vision, revolutionary parties should
take advantage of the lessons learned and creative energies of the working
class.
Two more chapters are
devoted to land reforms in the Soviet Union and Tanzania. Soviet
collectivization put an emphasis on mechanization, mono-cultures, centralized
procurement and planning. Inefficient from a pure production perspective, collectivization still greatly enhanced the Soviet Union political stability. Specifically, it made
rural society “legible” for the state, destroyed potentially dissident peasant communes, and made peasants dependent on the state.
Finally, Scott
delivers a fierce critique of “high-modernist agriculture”. Modernist
agriculture is marked by monocultures rather than polycultures, permanent
fields rather than shifting cultivation, the indiscriminate employment of
fertilizer, and an emphasis on short-term outputs. Scott argues that high-modernist
agriculture is based on a version of agricultural science that aims to isolate
central variables in experiments rather than taking into account the complex localized
interactions of soil, temperature, climate etc..
In two concluding
chapters, Scott makes the argument for “metis”, the ancient Greek term for practical
knowledge. “Metis” is acquired through experience in a constantly changing and
complex environment. „Metis“ is based on local and customary knowledge and
mainly concerned with the application of rules of thumb in local environments
rather than the deduction of universal principles. Scott also provides four pieces
of advice for planners: take small steps; favor reversibility; plan
on surprises; and plan on human inventiveness.
Overall a nice read, making a sensible
argument. The amount of historical material covered is nothing less than
impressive. Planning for public policy of any kind of should take Scott’s
insights on the pitfalls’s of large-scale social engineering into account. Some
thinking on military planning continues for instance to be coined by an overly
mechanistic understanding of how military actions can achieve desired effects
in complex war settings. A similar reproach can be made against overly
simplistic understandings of nation-building in the aftermath of military
interventions.
Still, Scott’s argument didn’t fully convince
me. First, Scotts fails to develop counterfactuals that would
demonstrate the pernicious effects of some of the high-modernist schemes he presents.
How much better would the developing world be off on average without the
introduction of high-modernist agriculture? Has modern urban planning made city
inhabitants’ life worse on average? Would a communist revolution inspired by
the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg really have taken a more human face? In a related
vain, the whole book sometimes seems overly long. Scott introduces a tremendous
amount of details on the failed modernization schemes he presents, but not all
of it seems necessary to the case he is trying to build. Finally, some of the
implications are also not too new given that the book was written in the 1990s.
Scott’s book could have profited from engaging with say Herbert Simon’s work on
bounded rationality, Charles Lindblom’s work on incrementalism, and FriedrichHayek’s works (without ever having read the latter).
Random movie/ TV reference:
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