High modernism

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As James C. Scott articulates it in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, a muscle-bound self-confidence in expansion of production; our growing ability to satisfy human needs and master nature (including human nature) “and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”.

It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of the word and depends on central state vision to bring about big projects (enormous infrastructure projects, genocidal agricultural programmes, banner IT projects and so on).

See also

• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed