James C. Scott
Political scientist and anthropologist (1936 to 2024) whose Seeing Like a State (1998) explained how states' schemes to make society legible and planned have failed, by ignoring local, practical knowledge.
James C. Scott did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsI call myself a sort of “half-assed anarchist,” and that's why the book that I wrote was called Two Cheers for Anarchism, not three cheers. I don't think we're going to abolish the state.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 1st of 6 in this piece
-
Their wordsthe thing to remember about the welfare state and the emancipatory things it does is that it has only done that with the pistol at its temple.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 2nd of 6 in this piece
-
Their wordsLife was better for hunters and gatherers than it was for subjects in the early state.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 3rd of 6 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe modernist vision requires for its high modernism, for its most extreme examples, the absence of the restraining factors of democratic social organization—resistance.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 4th of 6 in this piece
-
Their wordsIn the course of writing Seeing Like a State, I was struck again and again by the mistaken assumption that visual order is synonymous with efficiency and working order.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 5th of 6 in this piece
-
Their wordsIf we've got to have states, let's have social-democratic states with functioning democracies and a welfare state.
↗James C. Scott on the Perils of State Power (The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, Persuasion transcript)persuasion.community 6th of 6 in this piece
-
Our reading
Their wordsLegibility is a condition of manipulation.
↗Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998)archive.org All 4 from this book
-
Their wordsAny large social process or event will inevitably be far more complex than the schemata we can devise, prospectively or retrospectively, to map it.
↗Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998)archive.org All 4 from this book
-
Our reading
Formal order always depends on informal processes it does not recognize and cannot create
Their wordsFormal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.
↗Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998)archive.org All 4 from this book
-
Our reading
Planned social order is schematic and always ignores essential features of real social order
Their wordsDesigned or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.
↗Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998)archive.org All 4 from this book