Seeing Like a StateThere is a wonderful book that has been appearing often enough in my various discussions that I’ve become compelled to read it. That book is Seeing Like a State, by James C Scott, and it describes how States change the world so that the world becomes “legible” to the State. The State needs things to be legible in order to administer them. Nomadic people need to be settled, forests need to be tamed, names need to be rendered orderly. It is only thus that the State can then d...