James C. Scott Trampled Across Borders to Explain the World

Starting with The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1979 and continuing through to his last published work, Against the Grain in 2017, Scott’s topics ranged from German forestry to Malaysian villages, unified by a thematic concern with how centralized forms of control are both exerted and resisted.

Technically, Scott was blessedly unconstrained by the boundaries of academic disciplines—apropos for a writer who argued against surveillance and control. And he maintained a healthy disrespect for the conventions of his own major field of political science. Few other scholars would have been as prepared to begin novel anthropological fieldwork in Malaysia at the age of 42—a two-year excursion, including 14 months of life in one village that led to one of his early major works: Weapons of the Weak.

It’s an open question why studies of Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s provided the basis for an impressive array of influential interdisciplinary work over that period—not just Scott, but Clifford Geertz, Anna Tsing, and Benedict Anderson. Perhaps it was the tumultuous nature of relatively young states, grappling with issues of identity and governance, or, as Scott wrote in Weapons “the now fading left-wing, academic romance with wars of national liberation.”

Scott’s work was geopolitical in the most basic sense of the word. He focused relentlessly upon the natural environments in which political societies develop, with particular attention to how those societies attempt (and often fail) to control those environments. Before he died, he was working on a book on rivers, including a discussion of the Chinese classic “The Water Margin,” a tale of outlaws in an area Scott found fascinating, the wetlands and other topographies that seem by their very nature to resist centralized domination.

Marginality was central to his work. He wrote about people and places on the edge of the great powers, and popularized the term “Zomia”—the highland regions of Southeast Asia where distant governments have held little sway. Nor was his interest in landscapes limited to the theoretical. He held cross-posted positions at Yale in forestry and agrarian studies and maintained his own farm in Connecticut.

Perhaps Scott’s greatest contribution was his dazzling accretion of details to fill out his narratives. It is one thing to hear about surveillance and control and another to see the cadastral maps of early modern Europe. One thing to hear about scientific forestry and another to see those uniform rows replacing the tangled variety of old-growth forests. Such examples among so many others have helped impress his account upon the minds of generations of readers now.

He was also an uncommonly political writer. I don’t mean this in the tiresome way that we call academics political for marching in demonstrations or making partisan arguments on social media. I mean he was a thinker who looked at political phenomena from the perspective of a citizen and not just as a social scientist. Works like Weapons of the Weak and The Art of Not Being Governed harken back to Herodotus in their sensitivity to foreign modes of social organization and his appreciation for the importance of collective liberty. In practical terms, he was something like a constructive anarchist, but one who respected the rights of organized communities.

Some of James C. Scott’s works.

Scott consciously sought to expand our understanding of what political life entailed—to treat the various modes of rule and resistance employed by peasant societies as meaningfully political. He resisted exoticization, demonstrating how these ideas could translate across historical and cultural divides, for example linking the activities of preindustrial societies with class conflicts in developed ones, or drawing literary parallels with Zola and Eliot. This is, in its way, a massive question, requiring sustained consideration of just what we really mean by “politics.” At a minimum, however, Scott is persuasive that these practices are not less political than those of the modern state itself.

The modern state was the subject of what may be his most important and lasting work: Seeing Like a State, which the philosopher John Gray called “one of the most profound and illuminating studies” on the 20th century. In his Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche mocks the idea of an eye that doesn’t think, that merely observes and records—an eye that does not have a mind behind it choosing what to see and how to interpret what it sees. Scott shows us that the state does not “see” the area in which it operates objectively but rather in terms of its own purposes of control and rule.

Using a wide and often unexpected variety of case studies, from the development of scientific forestry in early-modern Saxony to the planning of modern cities like Chandigarh and Brasilia to villagization in East Africa, he demonstrates how “legibility”—i.e., the ability of state bureaucracies to identify and categorize the populations they administer—profoundly reshapes both public and private institutions, often to their detriment. Surnames, standardized weights and measures, property titles, and much more are all products of the process. But this approach, which he calls “high modernism,” is it at odds with (and not necessarily superior to) more traditional forms of local knowledge and fundamentally serves the desires of the state rather than its citizens.

But while he was embraced by libertarians and anarchists skeptical of the power of the state, Scott was far more ambiguous about its role than many of his fans. He notes that the tools of the modern state “are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of the would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.” Legibility is a necessary component of the modern welfare state. You can’t tax the rich and help the poor without knowing who is whom and who has what.

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Analysis

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Remarkably, Scott, never one to shy away from a big idea, doubled down in his later work, Against the Grain, one of the most aptly named works of social science ever. Now, the problem was not limited to high modernism but was traced back 5000 years to the origins of hierarchical societies and their use of agriculture as a form of social and economic control. Among much else, this proved one of the most ambitious attempts to synthesize Rousseauean skepticism of society, according to which our natural happiness is disrupted by our introduction into social life, with modern historical methods. This kind of reopening of questions long considered closed, such as the goodness of settled political societies, is exactly what good history and good political thought are supposed to do.

There was always a tension in his work of course (the kinds of societies he tended to valorize did not tend to support tenure-granting institutions). More broadly, his normative and descriptive claims sometimes seemed at odds with one another. The subtitle to Seeing Like a State was: “How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.” But while clear examples of such failures abound—like Nyerere’s collectivization schemes in Tanzania—many modernist schemes have proven successful beyond measure.

An aerial view of Bangau-Bangau village in Malaysia on May 23.Mailee Osten-Tan/Getty Images

Indeed, one can think of modernism itself as a comprehensive and centrally planned scheme to improve the human condition. One does not have to go full Steven Pinker to acknowledge its successes. But one of the premises of modern science is that local knowledge is insufficient to secure material benefits. However useful knowing how to get ants off a tree in Malaysia might be, to cite one of Scott’s examples, vaccines, the Green Revolution, and a variety of measures to “master nature” have proved far more successful in extending lifespans and generally improving the health and comfort of the human species.

As others have pointed out, it is not always clear where and how Scott makes his cut in distinguishing successful from unsuccessful forms of modern intervention. Many of its failures—like Le Corbusier’s hideous and inhuman architectural constructs—can best be understood as such in light of some non-material idea of human flourishing, which such modernist approaches fail to satisfy. There is something eerie about seeing a single species such as Norway Spruce replace the natural variety of greenery like some sort of arboreal Levittown. Bruges’ winding maze attracts us far more than Brasilia’s vast planned spaces.

Scott was not a philosopher as such, but his work verges on certain implicit claims about human nature: There is something in us that does not love planned cities, just as there is something in us that resists (or should resist!) foreign domination. Though he distanced himself from conservatives, the philosopher he most resembles is Michael Oakeshott, another iconoclastic critic of modern political life. Like Oakeshott, he introduces a powerful sense of dissatisfaction with dreary routinization, and as with Oakeshott, the reader is left somewhat uncertain of what the real alternative might look like.

Scott’s scholarship was shaped by a narrative of political society. Like all narratives, it was necessarily incomplete and overdetermined, yet it allowed him to organize an awesome array of historical details across different fields of study in a way that exerted a powerful effect on anyone who discovers his work. In the end, his corpus survives both its own flaws and others’ critiques, because of how it reshapes the way its readers see their world. Of how many writers in this—or any—age can you say that about?