I have in the past praised Seeing Like a State; this is by far the most interesting criticism of it that I’ve encountered. That said, I think that the critique leans too heavily on a view of Modernist motivation as fundamentally aesthetic; in many of the cases Scott discusses, it was purely pragmatic, eg in order to more effectively impose taxation.

A defence of metis (and Scott is right that it needs defending) must be mounted with great care, since otherwise it looks like an attack on education itself, which does more than anything else to help people discard those aspects of their local traditions that do them harm. Scott would be horrified to be associated with the school of conservatives who oppose education on the grounds that it gives power to the great unwashed, but they at least have the virtue of brutal honesty. What doesn’t horrify him, but ought to, is his keeping the company of the ‘something-precious-is-lost-to-modern-life-once-mothers-no-longer-circumcise-their-daughters-and-you-can-buy-rambutan-in-Sainsbury’s’ school. There is no feebler pretext for conservatism than the anxiety that progress is somehow inimical to charm.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/paul-seabright/the-aestheticising-vice