The following essays address the issues raised in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, a recent book by James C. Scott, a scholar who holds a joint appointment in anthropology and political science at Yale University and who has written extensively on issues of power and resistance in Southeast Asia. His departmental affiliations notwithstanding, Scott is a scholar whose work has frequently had considerable influence in several disciplines other than his own, including history. And in spite of his longstanding concern with Southeast Asia, his works have helped shape the agendas of many researchers working on other parts of the world. To cite but two examples, within Chinese studies his comments on the "moral economy of the peasant" have generated considerable debate, while within Latin American studies his arguments about "everyday forms of resistance" have been taken up and applied by a variety of specialists. Scott's work on the "hidden transcripts" that protesters in varied contexts follow when challenging the power of elites has similarly proved inspiring—or provoked criticism—among humanists and social scientists. Seeing Like a State is his latest and in some ways most ambitiously wide-ranging work, which seeks to do nothing less than provide us with a new way of thinking about the political dimensions of "high modernity," especially the tendency for regimes of this period to try to remold society in particular ways. Scott argues that there are more similarities than has sometimes been admitted between the activities of modern states associated with disparate ideologies. His claim is that there were important homologies between many twentieth-century government systems, especially in the high value placed on utopian projects and the low value accorded to local knowledge. The three scholars who comment on Scott's book combine an appreciation for some of its insights with attention to aspects of its argument that they see as either undeveloped or problematic. Jane Caplan is a specialist in German history, Morton Keller specializes in the history of the United States, and Fernando Coronil is an anthropologist and specialist in Latin American history.

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