Ways of seeing the world: Legibility in alternative institutional settings

Abstract

Legibility refers to the ability of people to make sense of the world. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott (1998) employs this concept to analyze efforts by governments to make the world legible through top-down efforts of standardization and control. State efforts to impose order often generate harms because they lack access to local experiential knowledge (mētis). How, then, can people make sense of the complexities of the world? This paper explores the answer to this question by considering ways of making the world legible across institutional contexts. After examining Scott’s critique of state-imposed high modernism, we consider two alternative forms of legibility—the market process and local community. In doing so, we engage the criticism that markets can also be a form of imposition and control. We highlight the importance of market contestability as a way of encouraging the use of local knowledge. Finally, we argue that political capitalism makes market outcomes more akin to state-led high modernism, impeding desirable complementarities between market discovery and mētis.