James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale Agrarian Studies, Yale University Press, 1998.

Extract

James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of “structural dysfunctionalism.” The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate<\m>but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.