It does not require a very thorough examination of the history of the long twentieth century for one to conclude that political extremism, in both leftist and rightist varieties, has been a major, if not the main, cause of the unprecedented levels of human suffering unleashed in the twelve or thirteen decades since European imperialist domination encompassed the entire globe. Focussing mainly on case examples that explore massive projects in social engineering di? rected by those who have claimed to be inspired by leftist political philosophies, James Scott argues that these exercises in bureaucratic hubris share a common commitment to tenets of what he terms "high modernist" ideology. He argues that the ideas and urges, organizational strategies, and technologies of coercion that informed Soviet schemes for collectivization, "villagization" in Tanzania, and agricultural modernization in accordance with Western precedents in the colonial and post-colonial eras were all constructed to advance high modernist ends. Detailed analyses of these grand schemes for political and socioeconomic transformation, which form the core case studies for Seeing Like a State, reveal that they originated in a constellation of seemingly disparate processes. Some of these can be traced back to early modern times, particularly to the Enlighten? ment; others are products of twentieth-century sensibilities and technological breakthroughs. In the early chapters of Seeing Like a State, Scott explores a wide range of more limited, earlier high modernist projects, from German forest conservationism and urban planning to cadastral surveys and language standardization. All of these he argues persuasively shared a common goal of enhancing what he terms the legibility of urban and rural landscapes and human populations. Legibility, as Scott employs the term in demonstrating the commonalities among these processes, includes standardization, simplification, codification, abstraction, and the valorization of procedures deemed to be scientific (that is objective, precise, and universally valid) at the expense of local knowledge. He links high modernist projects generally with the imperatives of state bureaucracies that initiate and doggedly implement them, often in the face of considerable resistance and clear evidence that their actual effects are rather different from those the officials in charge intend. Beginning with the Russian revolution and the draconian Soviet campaigns under Stalin to collectivize (hence modernize) agriculture and capture the peas? antry that had made its own revolution in 1917 and the years of the civil war,