James C. Scott

James C. Scott (1936–2024) was a political scientist and anthropologist at Yale who studied how states see — and fail to see — the societies they govern.

His masterwork Seeing Like a State (1998) introduced legibility: the process by which complex, local, practical arrangements get simplified into standardized categories the state can read and control. Vernacular measures become metric. Customary land rights become cadastral maps. Diverse forests become monoculture plantations.

Legibility enables control but destroys mētis — the practical knowledge embedded in local arrangements. High-modernist planning combines legibility with authoritarian power and produces catastrophe: Soviet collectivization, Brasília, Tanzanian villagization.

Scott’s lesson: beware those who would rationalize what they don’t understand.

Related: [[legibility]], [[high-modernism]], [[tacit-knowledge]], [[chestertons-fence]]