James C. Scott, iconoclastic social scientist, dies aged 87

NEW YORK – Professor James C. Scott, one of the world’s most widely read social scientists, whose studies on why top-down government schemes of betterment often fail and how marginalised groups subtly undermine authority led to his embrace of anarchism as a political philosophy, died on July 19 at his home in Durham, Connecticut.

He was 87.

His death was announced by Yale University, where Prof Scott was Sterling professor emeritus of political science.

He also taught in Yale’s Department of Anthropology and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies before retiring in 2022.

The author of a shelf of disparate, iconoclastic books, several of them regarded as classics, Prof Scott was “one of the great intellectuals of our time”, Dr Louis Warren, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a 2021 oral history of Yale’s agrarian studies programme, which Prof Scott co-founded.

Prof Scott’s wide-ranging scholarship was approachable to non-scholars. It won him a readership that was both broad and politically diverse, including the free-market libertarians of the Cato Institute and the lefty theorists of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

His study of rural ethnic groups in South-east Asia, and the theories about resistance to power that he extrapolated, led to a new view of supposedly primitive peoples and to a new academic field, resistance studies.

Prof Scott’s most influential book, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed (1998), is a wide-ranging examination of government programmes to better society – collectivised farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brazil’s futuristic capital, the standardisation of weights and measures – and seeks to explain why they so often produced human misery.

Prof Scott theorised that the schemes of improvement grew from the rationalist thinking of bureaucrats, an ideology he called “high modernism”, and that the best-laid plans clashed with the common-sense wisdom of people with a natural resistance to authority.

Seeing Like A State scrambles the usual left-right political duality for a more complex picture.

British political philosopher John Gray, writing in The New York Times Book Review, pronounced it “one of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades”.

Another reviewer, Dr David Laitin, a political scientist then at the University of Chicago, wrote that the book “will last forever, and it will become a classic”, but added: ‘‘It ain’t social science, because methodologically, it’s a mess.”

Prof Scott was unfazed by criticism that his work fell outside the norms of political science.

In the 1970s, when he decided to move to Malaysia for two years of ethnographic research, he ignored warnings from political science colleagues that he was endangering his career.

Instead, his field work in a rural Malay village led to Weapons Of The Weak: Everyday Forms Of Peasant Resistance (1985), one of his best-known books.

“People told me I was wasting my time, and I went off to Malaysia thinking I was making the stupidest professional move of my life,” he told an interviewer, Mr Richard Snyder, in 2001, for a scholarly book – Passion, Craft And Method In Comparative Politics.

“But Weapons Of The Weak turned out to be the work I am proudest of,” he said, adding that it was the hardest thing he had ever done.

The Malay farmers in Prof Scott’s study were being pressed to adopt mechanised agriculture and by the authorities to pay taxes. In resistance, they practised small acts of sabotage, foot dragging, laziness, sarcasm and feigned ignorance.

In these acts of non-compliance, Prof Scott perceived a type of political activity that was unrecognised by theorists of class struggle and revolution, but that in the end was more important.

“I came to realise that this form of struggle, below the radar on purpose, has probably constituted most of history’s class struggle, and that’s why it’s important,” he told an interviewer in 2017 for The Journal Of Resistance Studies.

In the resistance of disparate communities to state power over centuries of modern history, Prof Scott saw anarchism at work, a tendency that he celebrated.

It was not the stereotypical anarchism of bomb throwers or a state of chaos; rather, as he wrote in a late work, Two Cheers For Anarchism (2012), it was a spirit of cooperation among people without a hierarchy.

On his refrigerator door, he taped a saying in German that meant “all kinds of little people doing little acts in little ways in little places have changed the world”.

Prof Scott, the younger of two sons of Dr Parry Scott and Mrs Augusta (Campbell) Scott, was born on Dec 2, 1936, in Mount Holly, New Jersey, and raised in Beverly, New Jersey.

His father, a small-town doctor, died of a stroke when Prof Scott was nine, plunging the family into poverty.

He attended Moorestown Friends School, run by the Quakers, and Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in economics and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1958.

His interest in South-east Asia began when he won a Rotary fellowship to spend the 1958-59 academic year in Burma (now Myanmar).

“I got quite involved in student politics, working in Rangoon for the national students’ association,” he told Mr Snyder.

In an interview for the history of the agrarian studies programme, conducted by Dr Todd Holmes in 2018, Prof Scott acknowledged that while he was in Burma, he wrote reports on local student politics for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The CIA, he said, then arranged “to have me go to Paris for a year” as a representative of the National Student Association.

In 1961, he married Ms Louise Glover Goehring. She died in 1997.

For 25 years, his romantic partner was Dr Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She survives him, as do Prof Scott’s three children from his marriage – Aaron, Noah and Mia Scott – and five grandchildren. NYTIMES