WORD LIMIT: 500
Analyze the text below. Your analysis should have three parts: (1)
Explain the meaning of each text in your own words. (2) Analyze its
significance to the author’s general theory. (3) Tell us whether or not you
believe this text is relevant for understanding social life today and why.
FROM JAMES C. SCOTT, “SEEING LIKE THE STATE”
“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. Having begun to think in these
terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The
pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind. It knew
precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields,
their location, their very identity” (2).