High modernism

Not a method but a disposition: that the past is an obstacle, that expertise scales, and that a society can be laid out afresh on rational lines by people who understand it better than the people living in it. It is optimistic rather than cynical, which is what makes it dangerous. Its characteristic products are the planned capital, the collectivised farm, the estate built to a diagram.

Why this is separate from legibility

Legibility is a technique; high modernism is the ideology that reaches for it and then acts on what it sees. The corpus holds each without the other. medina-cybernetic-revolutionaries carries both. eubanks-automating-inequality carries only the first: automated eligibility systems simplify aggressively, but out of cost pressure rather than any belief that the poor should be redesigned.

Attribution

Predates Scott, in art and architectural criticism. He gave it the administrative sense used here.