Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks)

One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.John Gray, New York Times Book ReviewA powerful, and in many [ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning.Robert Heilbroner, Lingua FrancaHailed as a magisterial critique of topdown social planning by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often failsometimes catastrophicallyin grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters.Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.New YorkerA tour de force.Charles Tilly, Columbia UniversityThe Institution for Social and Policy Studies