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Review

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State arrives like a slow-burning fuse laid under the foundations of the planning certainties that defined the twentieth century and, in different guise, still structure the twenty-first. Its most distinctive move is not the catalogue of spectacular failures it assembles—Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian villagization, Brasília’s sterile superquadras—but the epistemological diagnosis that runs beneath them: the claim that formal, synoptic knowledge is not simply insufficient but actively parasitic on the informal, context-sensitive practical know-how Scott names, borrowing from the Greeks, mētis. The book is, at its core, an argument about the relationship between ways of seeing and the capacity to act destructively, and Scott’s insistent refrain is that the catastrophic social engineering of the past century arose exactly when ways of seeing were narrowed to a tunnel, handed to an authoritarian state, and backed by an ideology of comprehensive rational design that mistook its own aesthetic of order for science. The result is a work that is at once a devastating indictment of high-modernist hubris and a plea for an institutional pluralism that takes improvisation, diversity, and local knowledge seriously. My argument is that while the binary Scott erects between top-down episteme and bottom-up mētis occasionally flattens the messier entanglements of power and knowledge, the diagnosis is overwhelmingly persuasive, and the book’s real force lies less in its constructive prescriptions than in its relentless exposure of the blindness that state simplifications cultivate—a blindness that becomes lethal when it no longer encounters resistance.

Scott frames the whole inquiry with a proposition that is as crisp as it is chilling. He writes, “I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements,” and then unpacks them: an administrative ordering of society and nature that renders them legible through simplifications like cadastral maps, standardized surnames, and monocultural forests; a “high-modernist ideology” that arrogates to itself the certainty of science; an authoritarian state with the will to impose that vision; and a civil society so weakened that it cannot push back. A few pages later he distils the dynamic further: “The legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” The formulation is deliberately schematic, almost a social-scientific equation, but Scott immediately complicates it by showing that the schemes it describes systematically fail—not because of a lack of good intentions, but because “the formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain.” That double movement, the identification of the four elements and the insistence on the parasitic character of formal order, is the engine of the entire book.

The early chapters perform a kind of genealogical excavation of state legibility, and they are among the most elegant and unnerving passages in the book. Scott opens with the parable of scientific forestry in late-eighteenth-century Prussia and Saxony, where state foresters, intent on maximizing the yield of commercial timber, reduced a chaotic old-growth forest to the abstractions of the Normalbaum—a standardized tree whose volume could be read off a table. Real forests were replanted as monocrop stands of Norway spruce, legible and calculable, until the soil depleted, pests multiplied, and the dreaded Waldsterben set in. Scott uses the parable to make a wider point: “Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality.” The narrowing is not an accident; it is the condition of state action. The same logic travels through the imposition of the metric system, the cadastral mapping of land, the grid-planning of cities, the freezing of patronymics into permanent surnames in Renaissance Tuscany and the Spanish Philippines. In each case, Scott insists that the state does not merely observe—it actively remakes the social world to fit its instruments. As he writes at the end of the opening chapter, “The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.” This reading of statecraft as internal colonization, glossed in imperial rhetoric as a civilizing mission, gives Scott’s narrative a sharp critical edge that draws equally on Michel Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power and on the anarchist tradition’s deep suspicion of the state form.

From these legibility projects, Scott pivots to high modernism itself, which he takes care to distinguish from genuine scientific practice. High modernism is “fundamentally, as the term ‘ideology’ implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.” The genealogy runs from Saint-Simon’s fantasies of a rational industrial order through Rathenau’s wartime economic mobilization and Lenin’s electrification dreams to Taylor’s scientific management—each instance an effort to subject society to a single, synoptic rationality. Scott’s treatment of high modernism is less a dispassionate intellectual history than a polemical anatomy, but it is anchored in careful readings of the primary texts. He quotes Le Corbusier, that supreme high-modernist priest, declaring that “the despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan,” and then sets that voice against Jane Jacobs’s fierce street-level rebuttal: “A city cannot be a work of art. … The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.” The chapter on the high-modernist city is built around that pairing—Le Corbusier’s radiant vision of monofunctional towers separated by green space versus Jacobs’s celebration of mixed uses, short blocks, eyes on the street, and the dense unpredictable interactions that make urban life resilient. Scott’s own judgment is unambiguous: the high-modernist city, even when realized in Brasília and Chandigarh, produces environments that are, in practice, hostile to the very social vitality that makes cities work. The theoretical force of the chapter lies in its demonstration that the elements of the four-part framework can coalesce even in relatively open societies, but the full catastrophe is held at bay so long as civil society can push back.

That point is sharpened in the parallel chapter on the revolutionary party, where Scott reads Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? as a high-modernist political blueprint in miniature. Lenin’s vanguard party is the organizational analogue of Le Corbusier’s plan: a small rational elite designs and directs the masses, who are treated as raw material to be shaped. Scott contrasts this with Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence that the 1905 mass strike was a spontaneous, creative eruption that taught the party what revolution actually meant, and with Aleksandra Kollontay’s Workers’ Opposition, which argued for the self-activity of the producing classes. The comparison is not merely historical; it is a structural argument about the incompatibility of authoritarian high modernism with genuine democratic learning. Luxemburg emerges as the heroine of the chapter because she grasped that revolutionary practice is a form of mētis—irreducible to a plan, dependent on the accumulated experience and tactical improvisation of thousands of actors. Scott’s reading of Lenin is deliberately provocative, and it draws on a long anarchist and council-communist critique, but it fits neatly into the book’s larger architecture: the vanguard party is another thin simplification that, when empowered by an authoritarian state and facing a prostrate opposition, wreaks destruction precisely because it eradicates the informal knowledge it cannot encode.

The heart of the book, however, lies in the two great case studies of Part 3, and here Scott’s method—comparative historical analysis, drawing on an astonishing range of secondary scholarship and primary archival material—reaches its full persuasive power. Chapter 6, on Soviet collectivization, argues forcefully that the drive for total (sploshnaia) collectivization in 1929–30 was propelled not primarily by an agrarian blueprint but by a procurement crisis: the state could not extract enough grain to feed the cities, and it responded by destroying the village institutions that had previously hidden resources and organized resistance. The mir, the peasant commune, is Scott’s antagonist here—or rather the object of the state’s antagonism—because it was precisely the opaque, illegible, self-governing body through which peasants had defended their interests for centuries. The kolkhoz that replaced it was designed to be a factory in the fields, its spatial layout, administrative hierarchy, and production quotas all engineered for legibility and extraction. Scott shows that the high-modernist catechism of scale, mechanization, and monoculture largely failed on its own agronomic terms, but that it succeeded brutally in its unacknowledged political objective: eliminating the social basis of organized rural opposition. He quotes M. M. Khateyevich’s horrifyingly candid confession, recorded in Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: “It took a famine to show them who was master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay, we’ve won the war.” And he amplifies the human cost with a peasant voice from Andrei Platonov’s fiction: “It’s a sly business. First you hand over the land, and then you take away the grain, right down to the last kernel. You can choke on land like that!” The combination of the planner’s chilling clarity and the peasant’s bitter irony gives the chapter a visceral weight that no abstract framework could supply.

The Tanzanian and Ethiopian cases that follow are less well-known in Western scholarship, and Scott’s treatment of them is one of the book’s major contributions. He reads Nyerere’s ujamaa villagization campaign—which relocated at least five million people between 1973 and 1976—as a direct descendant of colonial soil-conservation and population-concentration schemes, driven by a quasi-religious aesthetic of the neat rectilinear village rather than by any careful assessment of ecological or social realities. The Ethiopian Dergue’s 1985–86 villagization, which moved 4.6 million people into geometrically uniform grid settlements, is presented as a still more brutal variant of the same legibility imperative, its spatial templates lifted almost directly from colonial model-village designs. Scott’s most biting diagnosis here is that such schemes are animated by a “miniaturization of perfection and control,” a retreat to small, visually ordered islands that stand in for genuine transformation. The model village becomes a Potemkin tableau, and the planners’ obsession with pure-stand crops and straight lines travels globally as a kind of visual signifier of modernity that is accepted on faith. The argument is, as Scott acknowledges, indebted to James Ferguson’s “anti-politics machine” critique of development in Lesotho and to a broader postcolonial literature, but Scott pushes it further by linking the visual aesthetic of order directly to the state’s need for legible subjects. He closes the chapter with the Tolstoyan image of the ship: “But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, … suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.” The administrators of villagization, he implies, could not steer the social world they had conjured, and their plans ran aground on the very terrain they had so confidently mapped.

The penultimate chapters supply the diagnostic vocabulary that gives the whole analysis its normative thrust. Chapter 8 catalogues the “catechism” of high-modernist agriculture—large scale, mechanization, monoculture, hybrids, high inputs—and documents its export from the temperate West to the Third World. Scott draws on Paul Richards’s ethnography of West African polyculture, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s studies of Andean potato farmers managing dozens of distinct microenvironments, and the genetic vulnerability exposed by the 1970 U.S. corn leaf blight, when a single cytoplasmic uniformity made 71 percent of the crop susceptible. The point is not merely that high-modernist agriculture fails; it is that cultivators’ own adaptive experimentation, their on-farm breeding, and their intimate knowledge of local variation constitute a form of practical intelligence that the formal station-based research system systematically ignores. Chapter 9 then formalizes the contrast under the heading of mētis. Drawing on Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s study of cunning intelligence in Greek culture, Scott defines mētis as the contextual, experience-based, bodily skill that resists codification—the knowledge of the navigator reading subtle shifts in wind and current, the polycropper managing interspecies relations, the midwife reading a laboring body, the work-to-rule striker who reveals just how much informal know-how keeps a factory running. The chapter’s emblem is the Cook Ting parable from Chuang Tzu: “Perception and understanding have come to a stop and the spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are.” Scott places this against the universalist pretensions of episteme and techne, and the effect is to elevate mētis from a local curiosity to a fundamental category of analysis. The risk, which the book never entirely dispels, is that the binary can become too neat—that mētis can start to sound like a romanticized folk wisdom, while all forms of codified, state-backed knowledge appear as uniformly oppressive. Scott is aware of the danger, and he notes in passing that markets, like states, produce their own simplifying fictions, but the architecture of the argument militates against the kind of nuanced institutional analysis that would show how mētis and formal knowledge are more often interwoven than opposed. Even so, the chapter is a tour de force of synthetic argument, pulling together Bugis navigation, West African farming systems, the history of variolation, and the micro-politics of the factory floor into a single persuasive frame.

Viewed against its canonical commitments, Seeing Like a State belongs most obviously to the anarchist and agrarian-studies traditions that Scott had already helped to shape in earlier work on peasant resistance and moral economy. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and Tolstoy are present as epigraphs and subterranean influences, and the book’s celebration of mutuality, local knowledge, and nonstate spaces carries a clearly anarchist inflection. At the same time, the analysis is saturated with the kind of historical-materialist attention to class, extraction, and institutional power that marks the Marxist and socialist traditions, even while Scott distances himself from the Leninist variant with something approaching ferocity. The cross-references are exceptionally wide: Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust supplies the warning that bureaucratic rationality can become genocidal when institutionalized; Foucault’s Discipline and Punish shadows the discussions of legibility and population management; Charles Lindblom’s “Science of Muddling Through” and Albert Hirschman’s critique of paradigm-driven development offer pragmatic counterweights to high-modernist certainty; Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation models the argument that formal market systems are parasitic on a social substrate they cannot generate. Scott also engages Friedrich Hayek directly, extending Hayek’s point about the limits of centralized planning to social production writ large, but he insists that the market is itself an instituted simplification that erodes the very communal knowledge on which it depends. The dispute with Hayek is illuminating because it reveals the distinctive cast of Scott’s thought: where Hayek sees the price mechanism as the vessel of dispersed knowledge, Scott sees mētis as a fundamentally social and ecological form of intelligence that neither states nor markets can fully harness. This is an ecological-materialist position, indebted to Aldo Leopold’s warning that “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts,” and it anchors the book’s concluding prescriptions for “mētis-friendly” institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse, and adaptive.

The strengths of the book are formidable. The four-element framework is an explanatory instrument of genuine power, capable of illuminating cases as disparate as Ceaușescu’s Romanian systematization and Pol Pot’s catastrophic agrarian utopia, and the empirical range is extraordinary: Scott moves from a Prussian forest plot to a Soviet grain-procurement crisis to a Bugis navigator’s mental map without losing either narrative momentum or analytical coherence. The writing is lucid, often epigrammatic, and at moments—the passage on the “miniaturization of perfection,” the Platonov quotation, the closing invocation of Tolstoy’s storm-tossed ship—it rises to a restrained literary force that underscores the human stakes of the theoretical argument. The book also exhibits a methodological honesty that is rare in works of such ambition: the chapter-organized endnotes are a parallel essay in themselves, filled with qualifications, alternative cases, and suppressed counter-arguments that any serious reader will need to consult. Scott’s decision to pair each high-modernist protagonist with a critic operating from a different epistemic vantage—Le Corbusier with Jane Jacobs, Lenin with Luxemburg and Kollontai, the Soviet agronomists with Paul Richards and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg—is both rhetorically effective and analytically principled, because it enacts the very dialogue between formal and practical knowledge that the book prescribes.

Yet the weaknesses are also structural, and they stem from the same binary that gives the book its clarity. Scott’s mētis is overwhelmingly the knowledge of subaltern actors—peasants, artisans, street-level city dwellers, navigators—and while he is attentive to the hierarchies that exist within nonstate spaces (age, gender, lineage), the book tends to treat those hierarchies as less dangerous than the state’s simplifications, or at least as more susceptible to correction through mutuality. The account of Tanzanian villagization concedes that the campaign inadvertently eroded some hierarchies, but Scott does not seriously explore the possibility that traditional mētis can itself be an instrument of local domination—that the communal knowledge of a village patriarch may encode and enforce exclusions of its own. The concept of “nonstate spaces” as zones of freedom and experimentation draws on Anna Tsing’s work on the Meratus Dayak, but the larger theoretical claim that states are uniquely incapable of fostering mētis goes largely unexamined; after all, the common-law tradition that Scott himself praises as mētis-friendly is a thoroughly state-embedded institution, evolved over centuries through precisely the kind of incremental reasoning he endorses. The concluding rules of thumb—take small steps, favor reversibility, plan for surprise, keep all the parts—are eminently sensible, but they are also so abstract that a planner of almost any ideological persuasion could endorse them without altering a single budget line. The gap between the diagnosis and the prescription is wide, and Scott’s invocation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Jane Jacobs’s neighborhoods as models of open-ended, participatory order is evocative rather than programmatic. The book is, in the end, a more devastating account of what not to do than a reliable guide to doing better, and that proportion, while intellectually honest, leaves the reader suspended between indignation and uncertainty.

None of this erodes the book’s central achievement. It has permanently shifted the vocabulary in which we discuss state planning, development, and the relationship between knowledge and power. Scott’s own one-sentence diagnosis of the high-modernist planner, deployed near the close of the book, distills the entire argument into a formulation that has the sting of moral clarity: “The progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were.” That sentence is the book’s ethical fulcrum, and it is hard to read it without recognizing the pattern in development agencies, urban planning departments, and central banks. Seeing Like a State should be read by anyone who designs policies that affect people they will never meet, but it should also be read by citizens who want to understand why the schemes that promise to rationalize their lives so often produce the opposite of improvement. It is a book about the dangers of simplification, and it enacts its own argument by refusing to simplify its material into a tidy parable. If the binary between episteme and mētis occasionally overshoots, the fault is the kind that a productive argument generates: it pushes thought into new territory, and it leaves the reader better equipped to see the blind spots that even well-intentioned reason cultivates when it forgets that it stands on ground it did not make.

Notable Quotes

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified.

Scott's single most powerful distillation of his thesis — formal systems depend on informal knowledge they cannot acknowledge. — legibility, planning, mētis

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.

The origin moment of the book's central concept — legibility as the driving logic behind state simplification. — legibility, state power

The progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were.

Scott's most quotable single-sentence summary of why authoritarian social engineering fails. — hubris, planning, high modernism

The tendency was toward regimentation, in the strict sense of the word. The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks, as it were, to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of lookalike conscripts.

The militaristic metaphor for scientific forestry reveals how deeply the logic of command pervaded even the management of nature. — legibility, simplification, forestry

Plants that are valued become 'crops,' the species that compete with them are stigmatized as 'weeds,' and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as 'pests.' Thus, trees that are valued become 'timber,' while species that compete with them become 'trash' trees or 'underbrush.'

A brilliant passage showing how utilitarian vocabulary reorganizes the natural world around a single commodity interest. — simplification, language, nature

A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora — which were, and still are, not entirely understood — was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences.

The ecological consequences of Prussia's simplified forests — the parable that opens and anchors the entire book. — ecology, simplification, unintended consequences

The great simplification of the forest into a 'one-commodity machine' was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species.

Scott identifies the fundamental tradeoff: rigor requires simplification, but simplification brackets the very complexity that sustains the system. — simplification, techne, forestry

High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term 'ideology' implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.

The crucial distinction between science and scientism — high modernism borrows science's prestige without its self-correcting skepticism. — high modernism, ideology, science

The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age.

Scott traces how the logic of rational planning necessarily implies rule by experts and the dismissal of lay knowledge. — authority, high modernism, expertise

The metaphor of gardening, Zygmunt Bauman suggests, captures much of this new spirit. The gardener — perhaps a landscape architect specializing in formal gardens is the most appropriate parallel — takes a natural site and creates an entirely designed space of botanical order.

The gardening metaphor captures the high-modernist ambition: society as a formal garden to be designed, pruned, and weeded. — high modernism, social engineering, control

Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide.

Scott historicizes high modernism — it was not an inevitable outgrowth of modernity but a specific ideological formation born of wartime planning. — high modernism, history, war

Every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations.

A deceptively simple sentence that reframes all standardization as inherently political. — power, measurement, politics

Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.

The book's deepest structural insight: every formal system depends on an informal substrate it can neither see nor produce. — mētis, formal order, planning

If your life depended on your ship coming through rough weather, you would surely prefer a successful captain with long experience to, say, a brilliant physicist who had analyzed the natural laws of sailing but who had never actually sailed a vessel.

Scott's clearest illustration of why mētis (practical knowledge) cannot be replaced by techne (formal knowledge). — mētis, expertise, practice

Mētis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the practitioner.

The formal definition of mētis — knowledge that lives in the gap between identical repetition and total novelty. — mētis, adaptation, knowledge

One might imagine trying to write down explicit instructions on how to ride a bicycle, but one can scarcely imagine that such instructions would enable a novice to ride a bicycle on the first try.

The bicycle example makes visceral the distinction between codifiable knowledge and embodied skill. — mētis, tacit knowledge, practice

Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move.

Scott's first practical rule of thumb for avoiding high-modernist catastrophe — a postulate of humility. — planning, humility, incrementalism

If the only certainty about the future is that the future is uncertain, if the only sure thing is that we are in for surprises, then no amount of planning, no amount of prescription, can deal with the contingencies that the future will reveal.

Scott quoting Stephen Marglin — the epistemological foundation of the case against comprehensive planning. — uncertainty, planning, contingency

Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences.

Scott's second rule of thumb — design for error recovery, not for perfection. — planning, reversibility, humility

There is a curiously resounding unanimity on this point, and on no others, between such right-wing critics of the command economy as Friedrich Hayek and such left-wing critics of Communist authoritarianism as Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Scott locates his argument at the rare intersection where anarchism and libertarianism agree — a powerful rhetorical move. — politics, planning, freedom

Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety.

Scott's crucial caveat — his critique of state planning is emphatically not a brief for unfettered markets, which impose their own deadly simplifications. — capitalism, state, homogenization

The door-and-window tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point. Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was proportional to the dwelling's size. Thus a tax assessor need not enter the house or measure it but merely count the doors and windows.

A darkly comic example of how state simplification reshapes reality — peasants built windowless houses for over a century. — legibility, unintended consequences, taxation

What is perhaps most striking about high-modernist schemes, despite their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses, is how little confidence they repose in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.

Scott identifies the democratic deficit at the heart of even the most well-intentioned planning — a contempt for the people supposedly being served. — democracy, high modernism, expertise

Complex, diverse, animated environments contribute, as Jacobs saw, to producing a resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in confronting novel challenges and taking initiative. Narrow, planned environments, by contrast, foster a less skilled, less innovative, less resourceful population.

Scott's most alarming insight: planned environments don't just fail to serve people, they actively degrade human capacity. — resilience, diversity, social engineering

The market is itself an instituted, formal system of coordination, despite the elbow room that it provides to its participants, and it is therefore similarly dependent on a larger system of social relations which its own calculus does not acknowledge and which it can neither create nor maintain.

Scott's even-handed final move — markets, like states, are formal systems parasitic on informal social trust and ecological limits. — markets, mētis, institutions