Age, like landholding, meant something different to the state than in local practice. People used approximate ages or birth order; the state required exact years for taxes and conscription.
Strict chronological age, like surnames, was a state project.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc
#books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...
Where civil society was strong and organized, it resisted cadastral mapping, forcing it to be late, voluntary, and fragmented (England). Only where society was weak could a strong central state impose early, uniform maps — turning land into legible, taxable property (Napoleonic France)
#JamesCScott
Set up by the #Stolypin reform agricultural property system had not become legible to central tax officials as was demonstrated by the immensely damaging procurement policies pursued by the czarist government during World War I.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
The #HistoryOfProperty in this sense is the inexorable incorporation of what were once the free gifts of #nature: forests, game, wasteland, prairie, subsurface minerals, water and watercourses, air rights, breathable air, and even genetic sequences, into a #property regime.
#JamesCScott
The collective form of taxation meant that it was in the interest of local officials to misrepresent their situation in order to minimize the local tax burden. The point of the cadastral map and land register was precisely to eliminate this fiscal feudalism and rationalize the taxation
#JamesCScott
The cadastral map and property register are to the taxation of land as the maps and tables of the scientific forester were to the fiscal exploitation of the forest.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
The very concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
The revenue of the early modern state from levies on land implied attaching every parcel of taxable property to an individual responsible for paying the tax on it. As straightforward as this procedure seems in the context of the modern state, its achievement was enormously difficult.
#JamesCScott
Three factors made the “ #MetricalRevolution” possible: the growth of market exchange; popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France; the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building enforced the metric system in France and the empire
#JamesCScott
Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
#HowCertainSchemesToImproveTheHumanConditionHaveFailed
Because local standards of #measurement were tied to practical needs, reflected particular cropping patterns, varied with climate, were “an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege,” they represented a mind-boggling problem for #statecraft.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
Feudal claimants often found it difficult to increase feudal rents directly; the charges were the result of long struggle, and even a small increase was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition. Adjusting the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the same end.
#JamesCScott
“As #Hayek proclaims, and as #Scott deplores, these vast machineries are simply incapable of caring if they crush the powerless or devour the virtuous. Nor is their crushing weight distributed evenly.” #JamesCScott #AI open.substack.com/pub/programm... #Singularity
Seeing Like a State How Certain Schemes to improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott
#TheState is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our #freedoms and our #unfreedoms. [Our task is] to weigh judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their costs.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
#HowCertainSchemesToImproveTheHumanConditionHaveFailed
Designed or planned #SocialOrder is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
It is not so difficult to understand why so many human lives have been destroyed by #violence between ethnic groups, religious sects, or linguistic communities.
But it is harder to grasp why so many #well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry.
#JamesCScott
I’m reading Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by #JamesCScott.
#books #BookSky
#NationalReadABookDay
#Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, #Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
2 " They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always at some distance from the full reality these #abstractions are meant to capture." - #JamesCScott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
2 “My case is that certain kinds of #states, drive by #utopian plans and an #authoritarian disregard for the values, desires and objections of their subjects, are indeed a threat to human well-being.” - #JamesCScott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
🅱️Revue Ballast🅱️ L’abécédaire de James C. Scott: L'ABC de James C. Scott.
L’article L’abécédaire de James C. Scott est apparu en premier sur BALLAST. #JamesCScott #Ballast #Politique #Sociologie #Résistance
Watch James Scott's online talk, "How to Talk Like a River" here.
Is it possible to write a book about rivers narrated in the first person… of the river itself? If it is possible, how might it be done?
niche-canada.org/2021/02/28/j...
#jamescscott #rivers #envhist #envhum
Practise your anarchist calisthenics by regularly breaking pointless laws and regulations so that, when the big test comes and you must stand against injustice, you are ready to do so #jamescscott
