July 21, 2024
One of the most uncategorizable, serious, and subtle thinkers in the social sciences and social philosophy—Yale University political scientist/anthropologist James C. Scott—has passed away.
The New York Times, in a 2012 piece called, “Professor who Learns from Peasants,” called his work “highly influential and idiosyncratic.”
True. I didn’t (don’t) always agree with substantial elements of his perspective(s), but I list his Seeing Like a State: How Certain Conditions to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (SLaS) as one of a few “Mindquake” books on my Goodreads account.
SLaS is a classic—Scott’s most famous—and is a devastating and empirically rich examination of attempts to impose order on human societies top-down. Inspired by Jane Jacobs, he writes in SLaS:
“Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, ‘the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities … is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.’”
And:
“Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half-baked) social theory have done irreparable damage to human communities and individual livelihoods. The danger was compounded when leaders came to believe, as Mao said, that the people were a “blank piece of paper” on which the new regime could write.”
Scott is a joy to read because he can turn a phrase and intersperses his writing with many colorful metaphors and one-liners:
“After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quick as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience.”
“Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.”
“Society is the most potent engine for human development yet devised.”
Other provocative books include his The Art of not Being Governed (TAonBG) and Against the Grain.
About TAonBG, Chris Coyne concludes:
“The Art of Not Being Governed is an important book precisely because it shatters the
common view that those living outside the nation state are primitive and uncivilized. In stark
contrast, Scott shows that outsiders can choose to remove themselves from the confines of the
predatory state. This insight has implications not only for understanding the highlands of
Southeast Asia, but also for how we think about other stateless societies. The efforts to ‘fix’
weak and failed states are ultimately grounded in the idea that civilization and progress require
the nation state and that outsides (foreign governments, IGOs, NGOs, etc.) can build an effective
state through a variety of interventions (e.g., foreign aid, military occupation, technical assistance, etc.). Scott’s arguments indicate that some indigenous people may not want to be part of the state apparatus and that it must be recognized that they may have made a conscious choice to be outside the state system.”
And about TAonBG and SLaS, Coyne writes:
“…there is an interesting connection between the thesis of The Art of
Not Being Governed and Scott’s previous book, Seeing Like a State (1999). In his earlier book,
Scott explored how a variety of state-led social engineering efforts failed because of a lack of
practical knowledge. Interventions aimed at aiding what are perceived as primitive societies are
examples of social engineering writ large. When the arguments from these two books are
combined, they provide critical insights into why so many efforts to aid people around the world
have had the opposite effect. The state not only knows very little about how to fix perceived
problems, but also has a limited understanding of the preferences and desires of those it seeks to
help. When combined, these two arguments should lead to skepticism regarding the ability of
government to effectively improve the human condition through planning and intervention.
I mentioned not always agreeing with Scott. Much of my divergence from Scott boils down to him not being a hard-boiled methodological individualist. As Peter Leeson has observed about Scott’s work, it often lacks an account of the mechanisms which generate the social order that Scott rightly identifies. Additionally, Leeson notes that The Art of Not Being Governed conflates “governance with government.” The peoples of Zomia, Scott shows, have lived for millennia without an effective state, but they—like all people—wouldn’t have survived long without governance. Still, there is much for economists to learn from Scott’s fine-grained and meticulous historical research.
Ideally, he will be read and debated for years to come.