The fundamental question that drives Scott's work is that of 'legibility'. That is the states ability to see, read and make sense of its own society. The work originally stemmed from an interest in the tension between the state and those communities or identities that pose a difficulty to document or account for, such as nomadic tribes or immigrants. Scott's pursuit quickly led him to concentrate on the state's method of documentation itself. The cornerstone Scott's concern is that of 'difficulty', that is the difficulty of the state implementing and managing this feedback loop of accounting of its own society. Thus rather than an account, or document, 'legality' becomes the key concept, as it incorporates the states intentional viewpoint, operation and hits at the limitation that is struggled with. However, the pursuit of this concept quickly reviles another dimension of this content, that is that legibly is not achieved through mere tactics of scrutiny, but rather through the arrangement. In other words, the state makes legible through statecraft. The thrust made here is that the state's sovereignty is interwind with the act of making legible, which itself is intertwined with resistances that have to be contended with. Thus going forward legibility is both the goal of the statecraft which is the object of the study, and it's a difficulty.
