Seen Like a State

Abstract

Every Fall, I teach a large lecture course required for City College political science majors called Introduction to World Politics, a course whose vague title and broad catalog description allow me to teach more or less what I want, as long as students learn something about the world and its politics. Taking advantage of that fact, I teach the first half as a broad history of state formation around the globe: what states are, where their origins can be found, how they work, and why people have historically avoided them. Although I didn’t start out with this intention, as the unit has developed over the years, it has basically become a lesson in James Scott-ism. We start with some material about ancient states from Against the Grain, take a tour through Southeast Asia’s Zomia region with a chapter from The Art of Not Being Governed, and by the end find ourselves staring at photographs of Brasilia while discussing the logic of high modernism described so well in Seeing Like a State. The point of this last lesson is for students to consider how the aesthetics of order can feed a fetish for state authority and for students to realize that many of them, unknowingly, may be fetishists themselves. The lesson is a culmination of a theme that runs throughout the semester: that students of politics need to understand how states see, how states are seen, and how students of the state often see through eyes trained on the order states provide while overlooking the disordering violence through which state authority is built and maintained. Particularly when the lessons turn to violence being a primary means through which states create order, some students are uncomfortable. This discomfort is exactly the point. I want