This book is the Turkish translation of Seeing Like a State, originally published by Yale University Press.

Why did planning projects that set out to improve living conditions fail?

Starting from this fundamental question, anarchist thinker James C. Scott examines the experiences of state-centered city and village planning. While analyzing the failures of statist planning by traveling from France to Brazil, from the Soviet Union to Tanzania, he also reveals the conditions common to all similar social engineering disasters.

Scott examines the only men who try to fit reality into their own visions, the officials who look at reality only from the plan they have developed at a desk, ignoring every aspect that does not fit into it, and above all, the despotism that is an integral part of authoritarian high modernism and that sees reality as an object to be shaped. In Seeing Like a State he actively defends the position that “planning” is incompatible with the real social fabric.

“Seeing Like a State is an extremely important book, which anyone who wants to understand the modern world should read.”

-Michael Biggs, University of Oxford, Department of Sociology

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”

-John Gray, New York Times Book Review