Legibility
Making people, places or rules easier to represent and administer through standardised categories and records.
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
- Publisher synopsis checked; no comprehensive review of the book’s historical examples.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
In Scott’s account, administrative legibility reduces a complex society to forms a state can use. Such representations may enable action while leaving out information that matters locally.
This collection also uses legibility for making the state’s own rules accessible to citizens. That extension is the collection’s analytic choice, not a claim that all uses share the same political effects. Scott is associated with this influential treatment; he did not invent the word.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
- Neo-Technocracy: Same Dream, Bigger Budget
Read the essay
Interactives
Sources
- Automating Inequality
Discussed in
- Cybernetic Revolutionaries
Discussed in
- From Pixels to Parliament
Discussed in
- How Not to Network a Nation
Discussed in
- Seeing Like a State
Discussed in
- The Twelve Tables
Discussed in
- Why We Built CentreAI Codify
Discussed in
People
- James C. Scott
Introduced by
Projects
- Codify
Discussed in
- Parlex
Discussed in
- Parliament MCP
Discussed in
Ideas
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/legibility.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26