The Omnivorous James C. Scott

The Omnivorous James C. Scott

Like so many romantics, Scott mixed radical and conservative themes. No wonder he found appreciative readers across the political spectrum.

When James C. Scott died earlier this summer at the age of eighty-seven, tributes to the scholar poured in from a bewildering variety of sources. Like members of a fractious clan rushing to the family estate upon the death of the pater familias, the mourners formed an unusual crowd of people seldom seen in the same room. The anarchists at Freedom News claimed Scott as one of their own; the libertarians at Reason suggested more modestly that he was a fellow traveler; the prime minister of Malaysia thanked him for his “exceptional contributions to political science and anthropology” in a post on Instagram. Others felt free to speak ill of the dead. Across the internet, he was accused of having CIA ties.

It is hardly surprising that Scott’s work aroused such passions. He was a scholar of remarkable gifts and scope, and his politics were always hard to pin down. Though a political scientist by training and official title, he was never satisfied with the label. In an age when his colleagues increasingly embraced quantitative methods, Scott went his own way, developing an idiosyncratic and eclectic methodology. After receiving tenure, he embraced ethnography—despite being warned that it would be career suicide—and was delighted to be frequently mistaken for an anthropologist. Many of his books were essentially historical. He was also a passionate advocate for the value of literature to the social sciences. One of his books began with a close reading of a passage from George Eliot’s Adam Bede. His own prose, with a keen eye for metaphor and nimble turns from eloquence to irreverence, had a literary flair uncommon in academic tomes.

If his methodological range was big, the range of subjects he studied was even bigger. His first major works from the 1970s, on peasant politics and culture in Southeast Asia, offered a deeply sympathetic account of why peasants so often tolerated terrible oppression—and why they sometimes rose up in revolt, as they recently had in Vietnam. Later, his main theme became the modern state and its misguided attempts to make society legible and manageable. In these works, Scott roamed with ease over a vast territory, gathering evidence from peasant rebellions in eighteenth-century Russia, nineteenth-century Prussian forestry, Soviet agriculture, Tanzanian development schemes, French modernist architecture, and Brazilian city planning. His last published book went even further afield, to ancient Mesopotamia. Though he once claimed he wanted to “kick the habit of writing books,” luckily for us he never succeeded. He completed a final book in the months before he died. Due to come out next year, it will offer an ambitious environmental history of the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar.

In all his works, Scott’s curiosity was omnivorous, and he frequently displayed a marvelous knack for making illuminating comparisons and drawing connections between seemingly remote phenomena. “[Rosa] Luxemburg… saw the workers’ movement in much the same light as [Jane] Jacobs saw the city”—this was a classic Scottian sentence. And yet it can be hard to see what unites Scott’s work. His oeuvre has struck many readers as an eclectic assemblage, hard to unify under any rubric. (Among such readers was Scott himself. “I believe I just stumbled from topic to topic,” he once told me in an interview.) The political stance and implications of his work have also been hard to define. At times he called himself a “crude Marxist”; at others he flirted with the anarchist label. But some of his later works—with their sweeping skepticism of the state, appreciation of the spontaneous order of the market, and kind words for the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek—can strike an almost neoliberal note. The economist Brad DeLong went so far as to claim that Scott’s most famous book, Seeing Like a State, “mark[ed] the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning.” Complicating matters further is the fact that, as a young man, Scott did indeed have connections to the CIA.

Much as scholars used to fret over das Adam Smith Problem—the question of how to reconcile the great economist’s seemingly contradictory arguments in The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments—one might pose das James Scott Problem. Is there a guiding thread that unites his work? Did he have a consistent political outlook? Which, if any, of his would-be heirs has the best claim to his legacy?

Little in Scott’s early career suggested he would become a world-renowned scholar. He stumbled into his main area of expertise as an undergraduate at Williams College when his advisor, displeased with his lack of progress on a thesis about Nazi economic policy, told him to find someone else to work with. Scott chanced upon another professor who was willing to take him on as an advisee on the condition that he work on Burmese development projects. It hardly seemed like the start of a stellar career as a Southeast Asianist.

After graduating in 1958, Scott received a Rotary Fellowship to study in Burma, which he followed with a stint working for the National Student Association (NSA). It was during these years that he developed connections to the CIA—with which the NSA was closely affiliated—even writing reports on Burmese student politics for the agency. It is regrettable that Scott never grappled with the question of how he went from seeing for the state to writing Seeing Like a State. His frankest acknowledgement of his CIA ties appeared in a long interview from 2018, where he spoke of the episode somewhat flippantly.

Still, it is hard to see what this youthful dalliance tells us about his mature views. For one, his CIA affiliations seem to have ended by the time he began a doctorate in political science at Yale in 1961. Moreover, the Scott of the early 1960s was a very different man, academically and politically, than the author of the books that made his reputation. His first book—Political Ideology in Malaysia (1968), the published version of his doctoral dissertation—leaves one wondering how the same man could have gone on to write his later classics. Scott essentially disavowed the book, and it is not hard to see why. The methodology was worse than dubious: he tried to develop a general theory of the political culture of all new postcolonial nations on the basis of interviews with seventeen Malaysian civil servants. He was also blithely optimistic about the kinds of state-led development projects that he would later excoriate. Newly independent countries, he argued, were not fit for fully democratic government but required “rule by a benevolent elite”; in time, economic growth would lead to modernization and full democratization. Clearly, something happened to Scott between the publication of this book (not to mention his CIA days) and the writing of his major works.

This something was his time at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he arrived as a professor in 1967. He found a campus culture that, even in an age of widespread student unrest, was notable for its passionate opposition to the Vietnam War. Just a few weeks into his first semester at the school, thousands of students gathered to protest the presence of recruiters from Dow Chemical, a major manufacturer of napalm, on campus. The crowds were dispersed with tear gas and truncheons; it was the first student antiwar protest of the Vietnam era to turn violent. The events further radicalized the student body, and their radicalism naturally seeped into the classroom. In these years, Scott and his close friend and colleague Edward Friedman co-taught a class on peasant revolutions. The class attracted hundreds of students, and although both Scott and Friedman were active in the antiwar movement, many of the students found them insufficiently radical. After each class, a group of them would write a substantial critique of the lecture, mimeograph it, and distribute it at the next class. “It was like learning with a pistol at your temple,” Scott recalled.

It was in this combustible atmosphere that Scott took a turn that would define the trajectory of his career. In his recollections, he described it almost as a conversion experience: “I actually decided . . . that the peasants were the most numerous class in world history, and if development didn’t mean something for them, fuck development.” He dedicated himself “to the study of the peasantry.”

In the book that made his reputation, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Scott rejected the common view that peasants were a hopelessly conservative, even backward class. Many superficially irrational features of peasant behavior—their avoidance of the latest innovations in agriculture, say, or their tendency to tolerate exploitation meekly—could be seen as quite rational once one accepted one simple premise: peasants tended to put “safety first.” If they failed to plant the highest-yielding crop varieties, for instance, this was because they judged crops not by their average yield over many years but by their hardiness, their reliability in providing a minimum subsistence. Peasant societies tended to be governed by complex norms of reciprocity that sanctioned high rents and taxes as long as the right to subsistence was not infringed. But this did not mean that peasants were congenital conservatives. They were closer to instinctive anarchists, constantly dreaming of “a reconstituted village world without the state—that is to say, without taxes.” And when their right to subsistence was threatened, they were capable of extraordinary resistance. Indeed, the backward-looking orientation of peasant rebellions gave them “a moral tenacity which movements that envision the creation of new rights and liberties are unlikely to inspire.”

The thrust of Scott’s argument was to vindicate the basic rationality of the world’s peasants—and thus to undermine arguments from across the political spectrum that suggested they were confused about their own interests and needed to be guided and taught by outsiders. Peasants did not need to be modernized by a centralizing state. Nor did they need to be saved from false consciousness by a Leninist vanguard party that would teach them their true revolutionary interests.

In later years, Scott claimed that he began to study the world’s peasantry out of disillusion with the “wars of national liberation” for which he had great enthusiasm in the 1960s. And it is clear that his works on peasants in the 1970s had a deeply anti-Leninist slant. But he was not opposed to revolution tout court. Indeed, two of the greatest influences on Scott at the time, the Dutch sociologist W.F. Wertheim and his Madison colleague Edward Friedman, were both students of the Chinese Revolution who saw in it—and in the Maoism that guided it—an alternative to Leninism, one that respected the needs of the peasantry and put its faith in spontaneous popular action. This was, of course, an idealized vision of China—one that practically assimilated Maoism into the broader “small is beautiful” ethos in vogue at the time.

Shortly after the publication of Moral Economy, Scott seems to have had a change of political heart. By the mid-1980s, Mao was dead, more reliable information on the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had become available, and the great tide of peasant revolution had ebbed. Scott’s revolutionary hopes faded as well. But an old leitmotif continued to run through his work. His next books took up where Moral Economy left off, with an attack on theories of false consciousness and hegemony—anything that suggested subordinate classes had come to accept the values of their social superiors and were thus confused about their own interests. In Weapons of the Weak (1985), Scott drew on his experiences living in a village in Malaysia to argue that, even when peasants were deferential to authority, they had not come to accept their society as just. In private, they were critical of authorities whom they respected in public, and they engaged in all manner of covert resistance: “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.” Such actions were unspectacular on their own, but taken together they were effective in protecting the peasants’ way of life from outside incursions. Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) generalized the argument, drawing on examples from Renaissance France to contemporary Poland.

Scott’s next book, Seeing Like a State, became his most famous—and his most controversial. For the first time, Scott concerned himself not with subalterns resisting the claims of the state but with the state itself. He developed a sweeping critique of “high modernism,” the conviction that society could be improved through careful planning by technocratic experts. This ideology had widespread appeal across the political spectrum during the twentieth century—paradigmatic high modernists included everyone from Le Corbusier and Lenin to Henry Ford and Julius Nyerere—but the projects it inspired often failed miserably. This was because central planners view society through simplified models that necessarily exclude the kind of fine-grained information about local conditions and the practical know-how that are crucial to the health of any social order. The consequences were visible everywhere from the desolate fields of Stalin’s Ukraine to the eerily lifeless streets of Brasilia.

Scott’s argument about the epistemological limits to central planning bore a close resemblance to Hayek’s paeans to the spontaneous order created by the free market. Indeed, Scott believed that the economist got a lot right and even praised the ability of markets to curb the overweening ambitions of high modernists. To some, it seemed that Scott had taken a hard turn to the right—that he had learned to stop worrying and love neoliberalism.

After the publication of the book, figures from the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and other libertarian institutions flocked around Scott like missionaries rushing to witness and assist in the final steps of a conversion. Scott was always uneasy about this attention, sometimes claiming that the argument of Seeing Like a State applied equally to modern capitalism: much like the state, enormous corporations saw the world through simplified models that relentlessly reduced quality to quantity. Still, the title of Seeing Like a State was entirely fitting: in over 400 pages overflowing with historical case studies, Scott never offered a single example of seeing like a Fortune 500 company.

And yet the path from celebrating revolutionary spontaneity to echoing Hayek’s ideas about “spontaneous order” was surprisingly direct. If before he had defended the rationality of allegedly backward peasants, he now attacked the irrationality of the institutions that purported to modernize them. If in earlier works he had criticized the theories of false consciousness that undergirded Leninist vanguardism, he now condemned Lenin himself as an emblematic high modernist and argued that the October Revolution had been more of a popular uprising than a carefully planned action by a disciplined party. All these works were united by a faith in the spontaneous actions of the common people, along with a rosy vision of precisely what Napoleon is said to have derided: a nation of shopkeepers and smallholders.

Scott’s work was, in the end, deeply romantic. And like so much romantic political thought, it contained a promiscuous and labile mixture of radical and conservative themes. Up to his last days, Scott sympathized with armed freedom struggles. (His children have requested that mourners, in lieu of flowers, donate to movements resisting the military junta in Myanmar.) Yet he could also wax rhapsodic over the virtues of the petty bourgeoisie in a way that, he acknowledged, sounded almost reactionary. “Small property . . . represent[s] a precious zone of autonomy and freedom,” he enthused in a late essay. (Scott’s remark a few paragraphs later that “the exploitation [the petty bourgeoisie] practice[s] is largely confined to the patriarchal family”—as though this was obviously preferable to exploitation by a boss—suggested that he was somewhat blind to the oppression of wives and children.) Elsewhere, he praised the vitality and resilience of “the family, the small community, the small farm, the family firm in certain businesses. . . .” Add some stock footage of swaying grain and an ersatz Fanfare for the Common Man, and you have a presidential campaign ad. No wonder Scott found so many appreciative readers from across the political spectrum.

Was his ideal of a petty-bourgeois utopia plausible? Scott admitted that his work was shaped by a rather idealized view of the past. As he told me, “It would be a fair critique [of my work] that, in a sense, having started out falling in love with the revolution, and being disillusioned, what I forget is how awful the ancien regime was in all these places.” And his praise of spontaneity could be oddly equivocal. He saw in the small and uncoordinated acts of resistance he witnessed in Malaysia “a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better.” And yet in a moment of admirable scholarly honesty, he admitted that the peasants whose acts of defiance and self-protection he praised so eloquently were “a handful of history’s losers,” a group that stood no chance against the political, economic, and natural forces it resisted. To content oneself with the weapons of the weak, in that case, was to resign oneself to oblivion. The corollary, it would seem, was that effective resistance would require greater levels of discipline and organization. Perhaps Lenin had a point.

If spontaneous resistance was not enough to hold off the mechanization of agriculture in the rice paddies of northern Malaysia, then surely it will not suffice in addressing the most pressing problems of our time. Scott’s political outlook was shaped by an era of often hubristic confidence in the capacity of grand schemes to transform the world—and, relatedly, an era when it seemed to many, in the words of the anthropologist Eric Wolf, that “peasant rebels were the harbingers of hopes for a more equitable and just social order.” In today’s world, Scott’s celebration of spontaneous resistance and spontaneous order provides dubious guidance. After decades of neoliberal attacks on state capacity across the world, it is as implausible to see the excesses of central planning as the main threat to human flourishing as it is to envision redemption at the hands of peasant revolutionaries. The greatest single crisis of our time, climate change, is not the product of any single state project gone awry, and any response to it will require the kind of concerted, organized action of which Scott was skeptical. As he once noted in an interview on Seeing Like a State, “the moment the book describes has passed.”

Lorenzo McClellan is a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard.