High Modernism

James C. Scott’s term from Seeing Like a State (1998): “a strong version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress” combined with “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society.”

High modernism believes experts can design complex systems from scratch — cities, economies, forests, societies. It favors the view from above: grids, standardization, legibility.

Scott identifies four conditions for planning disasters: state-imposed ordering, high-modernist ideology, authoritarian power, and weak civil society. Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian villagization, Brasília — each flattened local complexity into centralized design.

The failures share a pattern: what was simplified away turned out to be load-bearing.

Go Deeper

Books

• Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott (1998) — The essential source. Case studies of planning disasters from Soviet collectivization to Brasília.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961) — The counterargument from street level. On what planners miss.
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt — On what totalizing ideologies flatten.

Essays

• Scott’s essay “The High-Modernist City” distills the urban planning critique.
• Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture shows the ideology from inside.

Related: [[legibility]], [[galls-law]]