James C. Scott (1936–2024)

A look at the history and culture of stateless people in Southeast Asia. Scott's book challenges the idea that tribal people living in remote or hard-to-access areas have been "left behind" by "civilization". Instead he constructs an alternative history in which statelessness is often a choice and a survival mechanism by people seeking to avoid the burdens of living within a state.

Although the subject matter may appear obscure at a glance - Southeast Asia receives little attention in the US show more (where I'm from) outside of occasional reports about the military dictatorship in Burma, and is not on the anarchist radar - I thought this book was relevant in a few ways. One of the most interesting parts of the book is its look at social and economic structures within stateless peoples that encourage horizontal power and avoid permanent concentrations of power. I've been an anarchist for about 4 years, and one of the big questions I've encountered is how to create a "culture of radicalism". Seeing how some people have created intentionally leaderless in other contexts was both exciting and informative.

Also, there is a fairly lengthy section on the use of religion in resistance to state control, which as a religious studies major I found really interesting.

Scott is a great author, and I'd also like to recommend his other book, Seeing Like a State, if you're interested in a critical look at how states were made. show less

A collection of mini-essays about government and society, told from a thoughtful and gentle anarchist perspective. “Two Cheers” instead of three, because Scott is more or less resigned that the state is here to stay, and not only that he admits that the state sometimes does useful things. But the tendency of even well-meaning governmental action, and people’s submission to it, is often injurious to the common good, and Scott is great in looking at that. If your association of show more anarchists is antifa or assassins that’s a shame, this book would be a friendly intro to a peaceful and optimistic type of anarchism, a la Peter Kropotkin. show less

I don't know how I found this book. I wish I remember where I saw it cited, in such a way that I was inspired to read it, because it's one of those books that's affected my thinking-- not just as a scholar, but as a person. Like the best works of nonfiction, it gave me a powerful concept that provided not only answers but new questions. If you pay attention to these kinds of things, you'll know that I'm interested in what it means to "see like a scientist" (a wording I adopted after reading show more this book) in Victorian literature: I study how scientists are literally depicted as seeing the world differently than other people. Key examples include Swithin St. Cleeve of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), who can see the horrific depths of space but not that the love of the woman standing in the room with him; Tertius Lydate of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), who can see cellular arrangements but is blind to social ones; and Tom Thurnall of Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1857), who knows everything about a person he observes but the goodness below the surface.

Yet there was this subset of Victorian scientist novels from the 1890s featuring future war. Or perhaps this subset of Victorian future was novels from the 1890s featuring scientists. And somehow there was a relationship between science, revolution, apocalypse, and utopia, and it wasn't just that you need a scientist to invent the air-ship that you're going to use to bomb your enemies into oblivion (though it helps). Don't get me wrong, I had some ideas of my own about how the scientist serves as an authorizing figure, but Scott's monograph was helpful in articulating them. Scott's whole deal is that the state maps things, makes models, and sometimes even goes up in an airplane to look at them, because doing this makes those things legible: "[b]y virtue of its great distance, an aerial view resolved what might have seemed ground-level confusion into an apparent vaster order and symmetry" (58).

So that's why these 1890s proto-sci-fi novels are all about air-ships, because they allow the protagonists to see the world in a distanced way, which makes it easier for them to use their weapons to remake the world. They have the perspective that Scott calls "Authoritarian High Modernism," which consists of three things: "aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society" (88), "a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life" and "unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs" (88-9), and a "civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans" (89). All of these things converge in the 1890s air-ship novel, where would-be revolutionaries use air-ships to bombard the world into submission, thereby creating a utopia.

I should add that Scott's book is called "Seeing Like a State," but in Victorian fiction it's usually would-be states that are the authoritarian high modernists. Though most of Scott's work focuses on authoritarian high modernism as a tool of contemporary statecraft, he does cite one revolutionary group that derived its authority from a detached, scientific perspective: during the early days of the Russian Revolution, Lenin considered the "vanguard party" of the Revolution "an executive elite whose grasp of history and dialectical materialism allows it to devise the correct 'war aims' of the class struggle. Its authority is based on its scientific intelligence" (151). Revolutionaries and statists of the twentieth century share authoritarian high modernism, as do those on the right and the left.

I said earlier that air-ships are in these novels I study because they "allow the protagonists to see the world in a distanced way," which enables remaking it. But causality when it comes to technology and epistemology is rarely one-way, so maybe the reason these novels are all about remaking the world is because the air-ship had been invented (in fiction, if not fact). It's important to point that for Scott, distance is often a metaphor: looking at a map is a form of distance. So it is too in these turn-of-the-century novels, because sometimes you have an air-ship, but sometimes you just have a sociologist, who views society from a distance by turning it into tables of data and equations, not (necessarily) maps. Scientific sight gives you both Authoritarian High Modernism's "aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society" and "a sweeping, rational engineering for all aspects of social life." I guess the air-ship and its dynamite cannons is what makes society unable to resist you.

But seriously this plot was everywhere in the 1890s: Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890), Mr. Dick's James Ingleton (1893), E. Douglas Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist (1893), George Griffith's Angel of the Revolution (1893), T. Mullett Ellis's Zalma (1895), Louis Tracy's The Final War (1897), Simon Newcomb's His Wisdom the Defender (1900). You couldn't move for all the authoritarian high modernists in early sf; Scott's real ones had plenty of fictional antecedents. A common them of these novels is destroying the world in order to save it, causing massive violence to the old society in order to build a new one from scratch, and reading Scott turns up real analogues to even this; he recounts how the architect Le Corbusier "warned against the temptations to reform.… Instead, he insisted, we must take a 'blank piece of paper,' a 'clean tablecloth,' and start new calculations from zero" (117). Of course, the clean break required to reshape a national or global society is much larger than that required to prevent urban traffic congestion by several orders of magnitude, and it requires violence.

It hasn't just helped my scholarship, though; it's enhanced my perception of the world we live in. I have a beauracrat's heart; I love rules that make things systematized and legible. But Scott's book serves as a reminder that the categories were made for man, not man for the categories. We need to be wary of what mapping hides, and of what knowledges are discarded because they don't seem objective enough to us, and of what things will be destroyed because we don't perceive them. (As a college professor, you might imagine I particularly contemplate this when undergoing the depressing task of reading my evaluations at the end of the semester.) show less

An Anarchist Look at Early History.
I'm sorry to say, but the subtitle of this book is completely off: this is not a deep history of the earliest states at all, but a very selective, ideological reading of a very limited segment of history. James C. Scott (° 1936) is an esteemed political scientist who is best known for his sharp analyzes of the negative sides of centralist and dirigistic forms of government, especially states. Hence his reputation as an "anarchist". Now I am not going to show more deny that anarchism as a theory and analysis tool definitely has its attractive sides. But when you project a vision that was developed in the 19th century back into the distant past, you run great risks. And that's exactly what happens in this book.

Scott is determined to prove that the first states were no good, nor were they attractive at all. For this he takes a selective number of studies on the Southern Mesopotamian civilization as a point of reference. I'm not going to argue that everything he says is nonsense, but he is very selective, putting forward statements that are empirically questionable. He claims, for example, that people were constantly running away from the first cities and states, trying to regain their freedom in the non-statal 'barbarism'. He also repeatedly argues that classical archeology presents a completely outdated picture of the developments before and during the Neolithic; his book is full of twists and turns such as 'contrary to'. But this is pure nonsense, because archeology has left the Gordon Childe stage (with its glorification of the 'Neolithic Revolution') behind for decades.

Moreover, what Scott fails to explain is why sedentary, agrarian societies, if they were so unhealthy and unloved, have broken through anyway. His strongest argument is that it took at least 4 millennia between the beginning of agriculture and the appearance of the first real states, suggesting that only when agriculture produced sufficient surplus, a state administration could be developed that forcibly could bind the inhabitants. And in this process grain – in all its forms – played a very important role indeed. So, this book is not really convincing to me, but at the same time I have to admit that Scott regularly puts up theses that make us think about our current view of human development. See my larger review, in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2297593346. show less