James C. Scott

1. Introduction

James C. Scott (b. 1936) is an American political scientist and anthropologist whose work has become a central reference point for the study of power, resistance, and the modern state. Trained in comparative politics but long based in an interdisciplinary environment at Yale University, he is best known for theorizing how ordinary people resist domination in subtle, everyday ways and for criticizing large-scale schemes of social engineering.

Across several decades, Scott has combined fieldwork in Southeast Asia with historical and theoretical inquiry to develop a distinctive vocabulary: moral economy, everyday forms of resistance, hidden transcripts, legibility, high modernism, mētis, and non‑state spaces. These concepts are widely used in political science, anthropology, history, development studies, and political theory.

Scott’s work is often described as having an “anarchist sensibility” rather than a systematic ideology. He is skeptical of state power and technocratic authority, but his writings also acknowledge the ambivalent role of modern states in providing certain protections and services. Scholars from diverse traditions—Marxist, liberal, anarchist, postcolonial, and communitarian—draw on his analyses while disagreeing about their implications.

Because his major books address topics ranging from peasant rebellion to urban planning and the deep history of early states, Scott is treated both as an empirically grounded area specialist and as a theorist of domination and order. This entry focuses on his life and historical context, the evolution of his ideas, his principal works and concepts, and the debates they have generated across the social sciences and philosophy.

2. Life and Historical Context

2.1 Biographical Outline

James C. Scott was born on 2 December 1936 in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in the United States. He pursued higher education during the post‑war expansion of American universities and completed his PhD in Political Science at Yale University in 1967. His professional career has been closely tied to Yale, where he has taught for decades and played a leading role in establishing the interdisciplinary Agrarian Studies Program, active from the early 1990s and formally institutionalized by around 2007.

Scott’s research has been shaped by extended fieldwork and archival work in Southeast Asia, notably in Malaysia, Vietnam, and neighboring regions. His empirical grounding in rural communities, peasant politics, and upland societies provides the basis for his broader theoretical interventions.

2.2 Historical and Intellectual Milieu

Scott’s formative years as a scholar coincided with the Cold War, decolonization, and the heyday of modernization theory in American political science. Early comparative politics often framed the “developing world” through lenses of stability, order, and economic growth, frequently aligned with U.S. strategic interests. Scott’s work initially operated within this milieu but gradually became critical of its assumptions.

Key contextual factors include:

Within this broader historical context, Scott’s scholarship moved from relatively conventional studies of peasant politics toward a more radical examination of state power, everyday resistance, and the unintended consequences of development projects.

3. Intellectual Development

Scott’s intellectual trajectory is often divided into several overlapping phases, each marked by a shift in empirical focus and conceptual vocabulary while retaining a consistent concern with power and subordination.

3.1 From Modernization to Moral Economy

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Scott worked within comparative politics and peasant studies, influenced by debates over revolution, agrarian reform, and class conflict. The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) emerged from historical and archival work on Southeast Asian peasant uprisings, especially in Vietnam and Burma. It signaled a move away from purely rational‑choice or modernization frameworks toward attention to subsistence security, norms of fairness, and peasant conceptions of justice.

3.2 Everyday Resistance and Ethnography

Fieldwork in a Malaysian village in the late 1970s produced Weapons of the Weak (1985). This marked a methodological and theoretical shift toward ethnographic, micro‑level analysis. Scott began to argue that much peasant politics occurs as everyday forms of resistance—gossip, foot‑dragging, minor theft—rather than in overt rebellions. This broadened his focus from rare, dramatic events to continuous, low‑profile practices.

3.3 Domination, Discourse, and Hidden Transcripts

In the mid‑1980s to early 1990s, Scott generalized insights from agrarian contexts into a more abstract theory of domination. Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) introduced the contrast between public and hidden transcripts, exploring how subordinate groups sustain offstage critiques and alternative identities. This work connected his empirical research with debates in cultural studies and critical theory about ideology and performance.

3.4 State Vision, High Modernism, and Deep History

With Seeing Like a State (1998), Scott extended his analysis to large‑scale state and development projects, synthesizing historical cases from around the world. He elaborated the concepts of legibility, high modernism, and mētis, thereby engaging with epistemology and the philosophy of science. Later works—The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Against the Grain (2017)—turned to “non‑state spaces” and the early history of states, while Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) made explicit the anarchist orientation implicit in his earlier work.

4. Major Works

The following overview highlights Scott’s most influential books, their main topics, and typical interpretations.

4.1 Peasant Politics and Moral Economy

The Moral Economy of the Peasant challenges models that portray peasants as pure profit‑maximizers. Scott argues that subsistence cultivators operate with a moral economy centered on security and reciprocity, and that rebellions often seek to restore violated norms rather than to inaugurate revolutionary transformations. This thesis has been both influential and widely debated.

4.2 Resistance and Transcripts

Weapons of the Weak develops the notion of everyday forms of resistance, while Domination and the Arts of Resistance systematizes the idea of hidden transcripts. Together, they provide a framework for analyzing how subaltern groups navigate domination without open confrontation, influencing studies of labor, gender, race, and colonialism.

4.3 State Vision and Anarchist History

Seeing Like a State examines high‑modernist projects such as collectivization, urban redesign, and scientific forestry to argue that efforts to make societies “legible” often produce unforeseen harms. The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain reframe state history by emphasizing populations and regions that have sought to avoid incorporation, contributing to debates on state formation and political obligation. Two Cheers for Anarchism distills these themes in a more explicitly normative, essayistic form.

5. Core Ideas and Concepts

Scott’s work is organized around a set of recurring concepts that connect his studies of peasants, states, and non‑state spaces.

5.1 Moral Economy and Subsistence Ethics

The moral economy refers to shared norms about fairness, obligation, and subsistence that shape how peasants judge economic relations. Scott argues that when these norms—especially guarantees of minimal subsistence—are violated, exploitation becomes morally intolerable and can trigger resistance. This idea contrasts with approaches that reduce peasant behavior to market rationality alone.

5.2 Everyday Forms of Resistance and Infra‑Politics

Everyday forms of resistance denote low‑visibility acts such as foot‑dragging, sabotage, petty theft, and feigned ignorance. Scott holds that these practices are rational responses to risk under domination, allowing subordinates to contest power while avoiding open repression. He sometimes calls this domain “infra‑politics”, suggesting a hidden layer beneath formal political events.

5.3 Public and Hidden Transcripts

The distinction between public transcript and hidden transcript is central to Scott’s theory of domination. The public transcript comprises displays of deference, loyalty, and compliance enacted in front of power holders. The hidden transcript consists of offstage talk, stories, and practices in which subordinates articulate criticism and alternative values. This framework is applied to settings ranging from slave plantations to modern workplaces.

5.4 Legibility, High Modernism, and Mētis

In Seeing Like a State, Scott introduces legibility as the process by which states simplify complex social realities—through censuses, standardized property titles, and mapping—to make them administrable. High modernism names an ideology of scientific and technical mastery that favors large‑scale, rationalist planning. Against this, Scott emphasizes mētis, or practical, local knowledge that resists codification but is crucial for navigating complexity.

5.5 Non‑State Spaces and State Evasion

Later works focus on non‑state spaces—regions or social zones where state power is weak, intermittent, or resisted, such as upland Southeast Asia (Zomia). Scott suggests that some groups deliberately cultivate mobility, dispersed settlement, and certain crops as strategies of state evasion, complicating narratives that portray incorporation into states as unambiguously progressive.

6. Methodology and Interdisciplinary Approach

Scott’s scholarship is characterized by methodological pluralism and a deliberate crossing of disciplinary boundaries.

6.1 Ethnography and Historical Comparison

Much of his work combines ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis. In Weapons of the Weak, long‑term participant observation in a Malaysian village allows him to document mundane practices of resistance. In The Moral Economy of the Peasant and Against the Grain, archival research and secondary historical sources ground broader theoretical claims about rebellion and state formation.

6.2 Crossing Political Science, Anthropology, and History

Though institutionally located in political science, Scott draws heavily on anthropology, history, geography, and development studies. He often takes specific regions (e.g., Southeast Asia) as sites for theorizing general processes of domination and resistance, an approach that some describe as “theory from the margins.”

His Agrarian Studies Program at Yale is frequently cited as an institutional expression of this interdisciplinarity, bringing together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and environmental scholars around questions of rural life, property, and ecology.

6.3 Concept Formation and Mid‑Range Theory

Scott’s key notions—moral economy, everyday resistance, hidden transcript, legibility, mētis—function as “middle‑range” concepts. They are sufficiently abstract to travel across cases but remain closely tied to empirical observation. Proponents argue that this allows a productive dialogue between theory and data; critics sometimes suggest that the breadth of his comparisons risks overgeneralization.

7. Philosophical Relevance and Key Contributions

Although Scott is not formally a philosopher, his work has been taken up extensively in political philosophy, social theory, and philosophy of social science.

7.1 Rethinking Power, Resistance, and Agency

Scott’s account of everyday resistance and hidden transcripts has influenced philosophical debates about political obligation and resistance by broadening the notion of agency. Rather than focusing solely on open rebellion or civil disobedience, his work suggests that mundane acts of noncompliance can be politically significant, especially under conditions of severe repression.

7.2 Epistemic Limits of Planning and Technocracy

Seeing Like a State is widely cited in discussions of epistemic humility in politics. Scott’s emphasis on legibility and the importance of mētis has informed critiques of technocratic governance and centralized expertise. Philosophers and political theorists use his work to question the authority of planners and to argue for institutional arrangements that better incorporate local knowledge.

7.3 Moral Economy and Theories of Justice

The concept of moral economy has contributed to debates on distributive justice and exploitation, particularly under conditions of vulnerability and risk. Some ethicists draw on Scott to argue that subsistence rights impose stringent moral constraints on market relations and state policies, while others engage his work to contrast local norms with universalist theories of justice.

7.4 Anarchist Sensibility and State Legitimacy

Scott’s later writings, especially Two Cheers for Anarchism and The Art of Not Being Governed, offer an empirically informed anarchist sensibility that questions the inevitability and moral priority of the state. Philosophers interested in state legitimacy and political obligation use these accounts to explore the plausibility of non‑state forms of order and to reassess standard arguments for state authority.

7.5 Public Discourse, Ideology, and Recognition

The notion of public versus hidden transcripts has been integrated into critical theory, feminist philosophy, and postcolonial thought as a tool for analyzing how domination shapes speech, recognition, and identity. It provides a vocabulary for understanding why marginalized groups may outwardly endorse norms they privately contest, and how artistic or ritual practices can encode resistance.

8. Scott’s Anarchist Sensibility

Scott describes himself as having an “anarchist squint” or sensibility rather than subscribing to a strict anarchist doctrine. This stance becomes explicit in Two Cheers for Anarchism and is foreshadowed in earlier works.

8.1 Features of the Anarchist Sensibility

Key elements include:

• Skepticism toward centralized authority: Scott views states and large organizations as structurally inclined toward domination and simplification.
• Appreciation of informal order: He emphasizes how everyday interaction, mutual aid, and customary norms can generate functional social order without hierarchical command.
• Valuing autonomy and self‑management: His accounts of peasants, squatters, and upland communities highlight efforts to preserve local control over work and life.

In Two Cheers for Anarchism, he writes:

"

“The state is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.”

— James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism

This captures his critical but not wholly dismissive attitude toward modern states.

8.2 Empirical Anarchism and Non‑State Spaces

Works such as The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain provide what some commentators call empirical anarchism: historical and ethnographic accounts of people who avoid, escape, or minimize state control. Scott interprets practices like shifting cultivation, mobility, and dispersal as deliberate strategies of state evasion.

8.3 Relation to Classical Anarchism

Scott’s sensibility draws selectively on classical anarchists (e.g., Kropotkin) but diverges in several ways. He does not offer a comprehensive blueprint for a stateless society, nor a unified ethical theory. Instead, his anarchism is often framed as a heuristic: beginning analysis from the perspective of those subject to power, assuming skepticism about authority, and favoring small‑scale, experimental, and reversible arrangements. Some anarchist theorists welcome this empirically grounded perspective; others argue that it remains underdeveloped normatively compared to traditional anarchist philosophy.

9. Critiques and Debates

Scott’s work has generated extensive discussion and criticism across disciplines. Reactions vary by field and by specific book.

9.1 Debates on Moral Economy

Historians and political economists have challenged Scott’s moral economy thesis. Critics such as Samuel Popkin argue that peasants are better understood through rational choice frameworks, emphasizing individual incentives and strategic behavior rather than shared norms. Others contend that Scott underestimates the diversity and contestation within peasant communities, where elites and subgroups may hold conflicting moral expectations.

9.2 Assessments of Everyday Resistance

The concept of everyday forms of resistance has been praised for revealing subaltern agency but also criticized. Some scholars argue that Scott overstates the political efficacy of minor acts, suggesting that such practices may coexist with, or even reinforce, broader systems of domination. Feminist and labor theorists sometimes note that everyday resistance can be ambiguous, with its cumulative impact difficult to measure.

9.3 Critiques of Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State has attracted both admiration and critique. Supporters view it as a powerful caution against hubristic planning, while critics claim it risks:

• Overgeneralizing from failed cases and underemphasizing successful planning efforts.
• Romanticizing local knowledge, which may itself be exclusionary or oppressive.
• Attributing too much coherence to “the state,” thereby downplaying internal conflicts and learning processes within bureaucracies.

Some development theorists argue that Scott’s analysis, if taken too broadly, might discourage necessary infrastructural or welfare interventions.

9.4 Debates on Non‑State Spaces and Early States

In The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain, Scott’s reinterpretation of state formation has been contested by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists. Critics question aspects of his use of archaeological evidence, the generality of conclusions drawn from specific regions (e.g., Mesopotamia, Zomia), and the extent to which populations really chose state avoidance versus being excluded. Proponents reply that, even if some details are disputed, his work usefully foregrounds coercion and exit in state histories.

10. Influence on Political Philosophy and Social Theory

Scott’s ideas have been widely adopted and adapted in political philosophy and broader social theory.

10.1 Power, Domination, and Resistance

The concepts of everyday resistance and hidden transcripts are used in analyses of gender, race, class, and colonialism to complement theories of structural power such as those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Critical theorists employ Scott’s framework to explain why dominated groups often appear compliant while sustaining subversive cultures, and how “official” public spheres may misrepresent underlying attitudes.

10.2 Democratic Theory and Epistemic Justice

In democratic theory, Seeing Like a State has been influential in arguments for participatory and deliberative institutions that respect local knowledge. The distinction between formal, codified knowledge and mētis informs debates about epistemic injustice, expertise, and the design of inclusive decision‑making processes. Some theorists use Scott’s arguments to criticize technocratic governance; others integrate his concerns into proposals for more reflexive, learning‑oriented bureaucracies.

10.3 Liberalism, Communitarianism, and Anarchism

Scott’s work has been cited by liberal, communitarian, and anarchist thinkers alike. Liberals draw on his critique of paternalistic interventions, communitarians on his emphasis on embedded norms and practices, and anarchists on his documentation of viable non‑state orders. His refusal to endorse a single normative framework has allowed diverse appropriations while also prompting debates about the ethical commitments implicit in his analyses.

10.4 Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies

In postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, Scott’s vocabulary of hidden transcripts and infra‑politics has been used to analyze colonial subjects, indigenous movements, and diasporic communities. Scholars explore how cultural forms—songs, rituals, rumors—encode critique and preserve autonomy. Some argue that Scott’s focus on Southeast Asia provides a useful counterpoint to theories derived mainly from South Asia or the Atlantic world.

11. Impact on Development, Anthropology, and Area Studies

Scott’s influence is especially pronounced in development studies, anthropology, and Southeast Asian area studies.

11.1 Development Theory and Practice

In development studies, Seeing Like a State has become a key text for critiquing top‑down planning and large‑scale modernization schemes. Development scholars use Scott’s ideas to interrogate projects involving land titling, resettlement, agricultural intensification, and urban renewal. Some practitioners draw practical lessons about the need for:

• Incremental and reversible interventions
• Genuine participation by affected communities
• Attention to existing local practices and institutions

Others caution that his critique, if interpreted too broadly, may foster excessive caution or pessimism about state‑led development.

11.2 Anthropology of Peasants and Resistance

Anthropologists of rural societies have drawn on Scott’s concepts of moral economy and everyday resistance to reinterpret peasant behavior beyond class‑struggle or modernization narratives. His approach has influenced ethnographies of labor, migration, and informal economies worldwide. At the same time, some anthropologists argue that later work has moved away from fine‑grained cultural analysis toward more sweeping historical generalization.

11.3 Southeast Asian and Agrarian Studies

Within Southeast Asian studies, Scott’s research on Malaysia, Vietnam, Burma, and upland regions has helped reframe the relationship between lowland states and upland populations. The idea of Zomia as a vast, relatively stateless upland zone has sparked extensive discussion about frontiers, ethnicity, and mobility. His leadership in Yale’s Agrarian Studies Program has also fostered interdisciplinary work on land, property, and rural transformation across regions, influencing generations of scholars.

12. Legacy and Historical Significance

James C. Scott is widely regarded as a major figure in late 20th‑ and early 21st‑century social and political thought, particularly for reorienting the study of power toward subaltern experience and everyday practice.

12.1 Reframing State–Society Relations

Scott’s sustained critique of state‑centered narratives has contributed to a broader shift away from viewing the state as the primary locus of order and progress. His work encourages historians and social scientists to examine how people avoid, negotiate, or reshape state power, and to see state formation as contingent, contested, and often coercive rather than inevitable.

12.2 Conceptual Innovation and Diffusion

Terms such as moral economy, everyday resistance, hidden transcript, and legibility have entered the standard vocabulary of multiple disciplines. They are frequently used by scholars who do not otherwise engage directly with Scott’s texts, indicating a high degree of conceptual diffusion. These notions have been adapted to contexts far beyond agrarian Southeast Asia, including urban politics, digital surveillance, and social movements.

12.3 Institutional and Generational Influence

Through his teaching and the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale, Scott has mentored numerous scholars and helped institutionalize interdisciplinary research on rural societies, the environment, and development. Workshops and seminars associated with this program have been described as important incubators for new work on peasant studies, environmental history, and critical agrarianism.

12.4 Ongoing Debates and Reassessments

Scott’s legacy remains dynamic rather than settled. As new archaeological evidence, development experiences, and theoretical frameworks emerge, scholars continue to reassess his arguments about early states, planning, and resistance. Some see his work as a foundational caution against authoritarian modernization; others view it as a starting point for more nuanced accounts that integrate his insights with analyses of gender, race, ecology, and global capitalism.

In this sense, Scott’s historical significance lies not only in his specific theses but also in his methodological and conceptual invitation to study power “from below,” attending to the knowledge, strategies, and aspirations of those subject to domination.