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 marginalized groups subtly undermine authority led to his embrace of anarchism as a political philosophy, died on July 19 at his home in Durham, Conn. He was 87.
His death was announced by Yale University, where Dr. Scott was Sterling professor emeritus of political science and where he also taught in the 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, Dr. Scott was “one of the great intellectuals of our time,” Louis Warren, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a 2021 oral history of Yale’s agrarian studies program, which Dr. Scott co-founded.
Dr. Scott’s wide-ranging scholarship was approachable to nonscholars. 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 Southeast 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.
He was a big-picture scholar harking back to the likes of the German sociologist Max Weber, a rare breed today in the social sciences, which became increasingly reliant on statistics and what Dr. Scott disparaged as “fourth-order abstraction.”
“Many of us are one-book wonders,” Michael R. Dove, a professor of social ecology and anthropology at Yale who taught alongside Dr. Scott, said in the oral history. “But each of Jim’s books was an important book, and they were all different. The titles have entered into the everyday speech of academics.”
Dr. 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 programs to better society — collectivized farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brazil’s futuristic capital, the standardization of weights and measures — and seeks to explain why they so often produced human misery.
Dr. Scott theorized that the schemes of improvement grew from the rationalist thinking of bureaucrats, an ideology he called “high modernism,” and 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.
The 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, David D. 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.”
Dr. 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, 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, “It was the hardest thing I had ever done.”
The Malay farmers in Dr. Scott’s study were being pressed to adopt mechanized agriculture and by the authorities to pay taxes. In resistance, they practiced small acts of sabotage, foot dragging, laziness, sarcasm and feigned ignorance.
In these acts of noncompliance, Dr. Scott perceived a type of political activity that was unrecognized by theorists of class struggle and revolution, but in the end was more important.
“I came to realize that this form of struggle below the radar on purpose, right, 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.
“Weapons of the Weak” expanded on themes that he had introduced in an earlier book, “The Moral Economy of the Peasant” (1976), and that he went on to flesh out more fully in “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” (2010).
That book presented a new view of people living in the hill areas of a half dozen South Asian countries: that they were not primitive, but had migrated in a “strategic adaptation” to centralized state power to avoid taxes, slavery, epidemics and wars.
The paradigm was applicable to similar stateless peoples like Berbers and Bedouins.
In the resistance of disparate communities to state power over centuries of modern history, Dr. Scott saw anarchism at work, a tendency that he celebrated. It was not the stereotypical anarchism of bomb throwers or a state of chaos, but, as he wrote in a late work, “Two Cheers for Anarchism” (2012), 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.”
James Campbell Scott, known as Jim, the younger of two sons of Parry Scott and Augusta (Campbell) Scott, was born on Dec. 2, 1936, in Mount Holly, N.J., and raised in Beverly, N.J.
His father, a small-town doctor, died of a stroke when Jim was 9, plunging the family into poverty.
Jim attended Moorestown Friends School, run by the Quakers, and Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in economics and earned a B.A. in 1958.
His interest in Southeast 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 Professor Snyder.
In an interview for the history of the agrarian studies program, conducted by Todd Holmes in 2018, Dr. Scott acknowledged that while he was in Burma, he wrote reports on local student politics for the Central Intelligence Agency. The C.I.A., 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 Louise Glover Goehring. She died in 1997. For 25 years, his romantic partner was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She survives him, as do Dr. Scott’s three children from his marriage — Aaron, Noah and Mia Scott — and five grandchildren.
Dr. Scott received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 1967. He taught for several years at the University of Wisconsin, where he was active in the antiwar movement and acquired a deeper interest in Southeast Asian rural peoples. But he came to realize that wars of national liberation often led to repressive governments that were worse than the regimes they replaced.
“I began to think that if revolution doesn’t work for peasants, maybe there’s not that much to say for it,” he told The New York Times in 2012.
In 1976, he returned to Yale and joined the faculty. He taught there for 45 years.
His other books included “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” and “Against the Grain.”
In “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” he made the case that people should practice “anarchist calisthenics” by performing small acts of insubordination — jaywalking, loitering and the like — so that if it became necessary to break a big law, as in a sit-in to protest segregation, they were ready.
Dr. Scott didn’t just study and theorize about rural life; he lived one. He had a 46-acre farm about 20 miles from New Haven, Conn., where he lived in an 1826 farmhouse and raised cattle, honeybees and laying hens.
“I’m as proud of knowing how to shear a sheep as I am of anything,” he told The Times.
Read More: James C. Scott, Iconoclastic Social Scientist, Dies at 87
