Week 4: Villagization and African socialism: State power and utopian imagination
DVST 6901: The global politics of development (Semester 2,
2026)
August 24, 2026
Left (socialist) and right (bourgeois) ideological visions of modernity are intrinsically utopian and thus necessarily involve an almost willful blindness to practical reality and practical wisdom
Main reading: Scott (1998), intro. and chap. 7; Lal (2015), chap. 4
Other reading: Rist (2014), chap. 8
Notes
Notes to be added later.
Keywords
utopianism, seeing like a state, bureaucratic rationality and practical wisdom
Learning outcomes
- Understand the contrast between practical wisdom and bureaucratic rationality and its implications for approaches to development
References
Lal, Priya. 2015. African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rist, Gilbert. 2014. The History of Development: From Western
Origins to Global Faith. Translated by Patrick Camiller. 4th ed.
London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5915284.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University
Press.