Seeing Like a State

Review

I think this book was aptly titled—it explores a certain way of seeing and dives into the motivations and consequences of that method. The sections about naming and agriculture were the most interesting to me, and I enjoyed the last two chapters as well.

The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.