Template:High modernism capsule

As James C. Scott articulates it in his magnificent Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, high modernism is a “muscle-bound” self-confidence in the power of enlightenment — with or without a capital E — to satisfy human needs and master nature (including our own) by the central organisation of society according to scientific and logical principles.

This is the rational, ordered and geometric view that the world can be manhandled, literally, to optimise social outcomes through big, centrally-governed infrastructural, agricultural and technological projects.