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 the “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.

High modernism is to a rational, ordered, geometric, “legible” and view of the natural world that can be manhandled, literally, to optimal social outcomes through big, centrally-governed projects (housing, infrastructure, agriculture, technology, banner IT projects and so on).