Remembering Scott as a Political Theorist

Abstract

James C. Scott was the most incisive theorist of the state for people who are ambivalent about the state’s existence. He was a major theorist of power, revealing the covert weapons that groups without formal, coercive power wield against the state and its representatives. He pioneered ethnography in political science, insisting throughout his career on dangers of neglecting local context and knowledge. In doing so, he expanded our understanding of politics to include the politics of peasants, pre-state, and stateless people. Despite Scott’s eminence and his relevance to central questions in the field, his thought remains at the margins of political theory. The field has barely begun to mine the potential of Scott’s scholarship for new insights and research programs. If there is a theme that unifies Scott’s major works, it is the need to dispel state myths and to uncover and examine social and political life that are omitted or distorted by state agents (among whom are academics, especially political scientists). Scott dedicated his career to overcoming a major blind spot: that much of our evidence is produced by states. He consistently applied an “anarchist squint” to political life, illuminating features that otherwise remained invisible (Scott 2014).