James C. Scott

Quotes

• “As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision.”
• “The state's increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world.”
• “An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare.”
• “A key characteristic of discourses of high modernism and of the public pronouncements of those states that have embraced it is a heavy reliance on visual images of heroic progress toward a totally transformed future.”
• “Redesigning the physical layout of a village is simpler than transforming its social and productive life. For obvious reasons, political elites–particularly authoritarian high-modernist elites–typically begin with the changes in the formal structure and rules.”
• “Changing the rules of regulations is simpler than eliciting the behavior that conforms to them.”

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