Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)

leavergirl Says:

April 8, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Øyvind, I just read Scott’s Seeing like a state, where he describes in great detail how the mad modernist planners and gigantism cultists readily collaborated back and forth between America and the Soviet Union. A brisk movement of ideas and people. Here is a mad mad story for ya: the major American proponents of gigantic modern farms were offered a sweet deal by Stalin: practically unlimited land, and nearly unlimited numbers of intimidated muzhiks to work for you, and the crushing power of the state behind you! So they got together in a Chicago hotel and in two weeks designed the soviet state farm (sovchoz). (And no, it does not have a happy ending.)

- James C. Scott on Wikipedia