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 July 19, the New York Times reported. He was 87. Scott was Sterling professor emeritus of political science at Yale University. He also taught in Yale's department of anthropology and the school of forestry and environmental studies before retiring in 2022.
His bibliography includes "disparate, iconoclastic books, several of them regarded as classics," the Times noted, adding that his wide-ranging scholarship was approachable to nonscholars, giving 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."
Scott's most influential book is Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998). Other works include Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010), Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Against the Grain (2017). His final book, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings, was completed in March and will be published by Yale University Press in February 2025.
In a tribute, Yale wrote that Scott "used his impeccable and on-the-ground scholarship, fierce intellect, and clear and uncompromising eye to write on a broad range of subjects, including peasant resistance, top-down state social planning, and anarchism. Often this writing captured the stories of neglected and misunderstood communities....
"Always working against the grain, always blind to what was au courant in his disciplines, always suspicious of any administrative power that reflected the power of the state, always focused on his passion for his work and the causes for which he cared, he went his way, an inspirational teacher and colleague, invested in what he believed, transforming scholarship as he went."