Legibility

A state cannot administer what it cannot read. Legibility is the work of making a population, a landscape or an economy readable from the centre: permanent surnames, standard measures, cadastral maps, freehold tenure, a single official language. Simplification is the mechanism rather than a side effect. What is recorded is what can be governed, and what cannot be recorded is not so much ignored as rendered invisible.

Direction

The term carries no direction on its own, and the direction is usually where the argument is. The case schema records it as a controlled field with six values, running from citizen-to-state through state-to-itself to state-to-citizen. A benefits risk-scoring system and the publication of law are both exercises in legibility, and they point opposite ways. That distinction is held in the case records rather than in a concept of its own, because a separate record would share almost all of this one's links.

Disagreement

Scott is read too often as holding that legibility is simply bad. He is explicit that it underwrites public health, famine relief and the rule of law. The argument is about what is lost in the simplification and about the confidence with which the simplified picture is then acted upon, not about whether states should see at all.