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

For the modern state to exist, it must transform the vernacular and the idiosyncratic into a set of standardized units that can be properly analyzed and understood from a geographic and conceptual distance. Without legibility, the state is blind. But making things legible means reducing their complexity, their nuance, their crooked lines.