High modernism
In Scott’s account, a strong faith in scientific and technical planning as a means to redesign social life.
ConceptSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked the definition, attribution and stated distinctions against the listed source passages.
- Yale University Press: Seeing Like a State
Publisher summary of Scott’s account of administrative simplification and high-modernist planning.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Checked the publisher’s synopsis, not every historical case or the entire book.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Scott uses high modernism for an ideology of confident social planning. His account connects destructive schemes with administrative simplification, coercive power and weakened resistance.
This is an interpretive framework. A project’s use of statistics, software or professional expertise alone does not establish that it meets the framework, nor does the term prove that a particular intervention must fail.
In the essays
- Neo-Technocracy: Same Dream, Bigger Budget
Read the essay
Interactives
Sources
- Cybernetic Revolutionaries
Discussed in
- How Not to Network a Nation
Discussed in
- Seeing Like a State
Discussed in
- The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Discussed in
Ideas
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/high-modernism.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26