James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of “structural dysfunctionalism.” The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate<\m>but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.