Flipping the Script: Upending Approaches to Power in the Work of James C. Scott

Abstract

When you read about James Scott, you commonly come across words such as ‘provocative,’ ‘contrarian,’ alongside ‘counter-narrative’ – such are the attempts to place his histories as outside the mainstream of thought. For this reason alone, his work is so worthwhile. He has always offered a striking perspective that can have a lasting influence on how you view things thereafter. In a way, he finds the blind spots in much of historical and cultural perspectives, and shows us how much we miss when not shining the light in such directions. I maintain here that it is the anarchistic elements of Scott’s thought that leads him to address the blind spots of others. He developed his anarchist perspective increasingly throughout his books, culminating in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012). At first, he described how he characterized political organizations in his lectures and seminars in ways in which he found himself noticing how much they shared with anarchist perspectives, finding himself saying, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue” (Scott 2012: ix; see also 2020: 64; Holmes 2023). So, he began to explore anarchist theorists more closely, and in the process he even taught a course on anarchism at Yale. We should note that his anarchism is not at full throttle. After all, he did only offer “two cheers” (2012) for it, not three, but the weight of his scholarship is surely towards the anarchist side. In this sense, Scott represents one of the few prominent intellectuals that opted to work in this vein, alongside the contributions of Noam Chomsky (2005, 2013) or David Graeber (e.g., 2004, 2009, 2020). There are also several works that collect together scholars working in this direction for the social sciences, social movements, and theory (e.g., Shukaitis et al. 2007; Klausen and Martel 2011; Lilley and Shantz 2015; Levy and Newman 2019), all of which reveals that there’s been an increasing turn to this line of thought, after a period in which Marxist thinking was more common in the academy. Here, I discuss how Scott’s lifework has had an important influence on archaeology, anthropology, political science, and history through his theoretical approach in addition to several concepts that he developed that have been useful for considering political dynamics at various scales, in ancient early states (and their peripheries) to contemporary states and non-state regions such as the zomias of Southeast Asia. Throughout, I emphasize how Scott’s thinking upends so many common perspectives about political dynamics.