作者:
James C. Scott 出版社: Yale University Press 副标题: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 出版年: 1999-2-8 页数: 464 定价: USD 21.00 装帧: Paperback ISBN: 9780300078152
Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving ...
Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans. "A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners
作者简介
· · · · · ·
James C. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University and current president of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author of Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, and The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia...
James C. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University and current president of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author of Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, and The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, all published by Yale University Press.
作者的初衷： 最初想理解为什么国家看起来是”四处流动人群“的敌人。 在东南亚，流动的刀耕火种的山民 和 种植水稻的山谷王国 是对立的。（见《逃避统治的艺术》） The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants（巡游者）, runaway slaves, and serfs(农奴） have always been a th...
2021-09-17 14:27:401人喜欢
作者的初衷：
最初想理解为什么国家看起来是”四处流动人群“的敌人。
在东南亚，流动的刀耕火种的山民 和 种植水稻的山谷王国 是对立的。（见《逃避统治的艺术》）
The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants（巡游者）, runaway slaves, and serfs(农奴） have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project-perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded. 引自第1页
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed "map" of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to "translate" what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.
It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. 引自第2页
The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man's goals. Whatever their other purposes, the designs of scientific forestry and agriculture and the layouts of plantations, collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more legible -and hence manipulable-from above and from the center.
A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. In pre-modem times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive-patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modem beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper's problem. With a device called a "queen excluder," it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing "bee space"-the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper's point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, "legible" hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully. 引自第3页
"These typifications are indispensable to statecraft. State simplifications such as maps, census, cadastral lists, and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality; in order for officials to be able to comprehend aspects of the ensemble, that complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories." ---------------------------------------- I kind o...(1回应)
2012-05-02 19:18:281人喜欢
"These typifications are indispensable to statecraft. State simplifications such as maps, census, cadastral lists, and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality; in order for officials to be able to comprehend aspects of the ensemble, that complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories."
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I kind of want to carry this argument one step further: the making of the simple categories does not only provides the state with the synoptic knowledge it needs, but also makes possible the public policies.
For example, we have several categories for describing family structures, e.g., traditional, single parenthood, etc...
Based on this, demographers have done a lot of research, trying to figure out the influence of family structures on children's wellbeing. Or, maybe they were the people who first made those categories. In any case, their research will justify the expense of government funding, for example, to start a campaign against divorce.
Yet in reality, family structure itself rarely decides children's wellbeing (Gerson, 2010).
So, the simple categorization makes the public policies sound "reasonable", if you are thinking through the categories made by the state. On the other hand, however, such knowledge may not be relevant to the reality at all, and the kind of policies based on the knowledge are not likely to have real effects. But nevertheless, such policies give the impression that the state is really doing something good for the public.
"Society must be remade before it can be the object of quantification. Categories of people and things must be defined, measures must be interhcangeable; land and commodities must be conceived as represented by an equivalent in money. There is much of what Weber called rationalization in this, and also a good deal of centralization." ---- Theodore M. Porter, "Objectivity as Standardization"
2012-05-02 03:40:09
"Society must be remade before it can be the object of quantification. Categories of people and things must be defined, measures must be interhcangeable; land and commodities must be conceived as represented by an equivalent in money. There is much of what Weber called rationalization in this, and also a good deal of centralization." ---- Theodore M. Porter, "Objectivity as Standardization"
"Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that consitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty - that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant cha...
2012-05-02 04:59:59
"Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that consitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty - that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple." ---- Herbert Simon
"Some of the categories that we most take for granted and with which we now routinely apprehend the social world had their origin in state projects of standardization and legibility."
2012-05-02 10:43:19
"Some of the categories that we most take for granted and with which we now routinely apprehend the social world had their origin in state projects of standardization and legibility."
Talking about the standardization of language... "Standard (Parisian) French and Paris were not only focal points of power; they were also magnets. The growth of markets, physical mobility, new careers, political patronage, public service, and a national educational system all meant that facility in French and connections to Paris were the paths of social advancement and material success. It wa...
2012-05-02 11:25:06
Talking about the standardization of language...
"Standard (Parisian) French and Paris were not only focal points of power; they were also magnets. The growth of markets, physical mobility, new careers, political patronage, public service, and a national educational system all meant that facility in French and connections to Paris were the paths of social advancement and material success. It was a state simplification that promised to reward those who complied with its logic and to penalize those who ignored it."
作者的初衷： 最初想理解为什么国家看起来是”四处流动人群“的敌人。 在东南亚，流动的刀耕火种的山民 和 种植水稻的山谷王国 是对立的。（见《逃避统治的艺术》） The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants（巡游者）, runaway slaves, and serfs(农奴） have always been a th...
2021-09-17 14:27:401人喜欢
作者的初衷：
最初想理解为什么国家看起来是”四处流动人群“的敌人。
在东南亚，流动的刀耕火种的山民 和 种植水稻的山谷王国 是对立的。（见《逃避统治的艺术》）
The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants（巡游者）, runaway slaves, and serfs(农奴） have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project-perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded. 引自第1页
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed "map" of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to "translate" what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.
It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. 引自第2页
The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man's goals. Whatever their other purposes, the designs of scientific forestry and agriculture and the layouts of plantations, collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more legible -and hence manipulable-from above and from the center.
A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. In pre-modem times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive-patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modem beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper's problem. With a device called a "queen excluder," it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing "bee space"-the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper's point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, "legible" hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully. 引自第3页
High Modernism的危险，在下面这几句话里表达得直接明了： For Lenin, the vanguard party is a machine for making a revolution and then for building socialism - tasks whose main lines have already been worked out. For Le Corbusier, the house is a machine for living, and the city planner is a specialist whose knowledge shows him how a city must be built. For Le Corbusier, the people are irrelevant to...
2014-02-13 02:54:11
High Modernism的危险，在下面这几句话里表达得直接明了：
For Lenin, the vanguard party is a machine for making a revolution and then for building socialism - tasks whose main lines have already been worked out. For Le Corbusier, the house is a machine for living, and the city planner is a specialist whose knowledge shows him how a city must be built.
For Le Corbusier, the people are irrelevant to the process of city planning, although the result is designed with their well-being and productivity in mind. Lenin cannot make the revolution without the proletariat, but they are seen largely as troops to be deployed.
Each of these schemes implies a single, unitary answer discoverable by specialists and hence a command centre, which can, or ought to, impose the correct solution. 引自 The Revolutionary Party
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作者的初衷： 最初想理解为什么国家看起来是”四处流动人群“的敌人。 在东南亚，流动的刀耕火种的山民 和 种植水稻的山谷王国 是对立的。（见《逃避统治的艺术》） The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants（巡游者）, runaway slaves, and serfs(农奴） have always been a th...
1 有用 暮兮云 2020-04-22 01:21:59
读了关于城市和人口的部分，读完后开了个脑洞：这本书某种意义上挺适合跟《大国宪制》对照着读，比如对同一段材料如何正练与逆练，很好的思维训练。
0 有用 少侠 2014-04-23 07:25:59
引了我最爱的卡尔维诺！！！
0 有用 RyZ8 2014-07-10 00:19:59
high modernism vs. local knowledge
1 有用 Ir77 2015-10-08 18:25:53
哎 太长了 赶什么一样终于大概撸了一遍。。。总得来说 逻辑简单粗暴又随意 方法论有点问题 瞄到豆瓣简评我就震惊了。。。 究竟我们读的是同一本么！anarchist你个头啦 人家哪里anarchist了。。。
0 有用 宝宝TWO 2016-05-23 10:39:03
非常渴望了解的话题，可是书却让人非常看不下去。。。
0 有用 豆友58206385 2022-07-28 02:22:14
Like every James Scott book, bold, sharp and insightful but often repetitive to the point of being intolerable.
0 有用 QWERTY 2022-04-29 14:20:34
1999
0 有用 小狗牛奶 2021-11-26 20:14:00
在英國讀出了社會主義共鳴。
0 有用 飒 2021-07-24 15:14:15
论点简单，论述很长，之前有空看一点还能接受，最后想一口气读完就有点痛苦。很多都不是作者的专业，论述有问题，当作一种科普，更喜欢前半部分提到的很多小细节
0 有用 别叫我和桑 2021-05-13 23:24:46
真的很好的一本书，就是有时候真的很啰嗦，感觉其实这本书减半的长度，表述的东西也会是一样多的。但这个视觉角度出发的论点真的很有意思，甚至可以从这种ethnography里捕捉到一个真实存在的“state”就很有意思。