James C. Scott

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Lore & Background

Scott was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on December 2, 1936. He grew up in Beverly, New Jersey. Scott attended the Moorestown Friends School, a Quaker Day School, and in 1953 matriculated at Williams College in Massachusetts. On the advice of Indonesia scholar William Hollinger he wrote an honors thesis on the economic development of Burma. Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1958, and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 1967. Upon graduation, Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma, where he was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Scott agreed to do reporting for the agency, and at the end of his fellowship, took a post in the Paris office of the National Student Association, which accepted CIA money and direction in working against communist-controlled global student movements over the next few years. Scott began graduate study in political science at Yale in 1961, though originally intended to study economics. His dissertation on political ideology in Malaysia, which was supervised by Robert E. Lane, analysed interviews with Malaysian civil servants. In 1967, he took a position as an assistant professor in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science. In 1991, he became director of Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies. Scott retired from teaching in 2022.

Reader's Guide

Scott's work focuses on the ways that subaltern people resist domination. In The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), Scott asserted that the highest priority for most peasants is ensuring that their incomes will not fall below minimal subsistence level. He argued that in traditional societies, many peasants have relationships with the elite that provide some assurance against falling below subsistence, and that peasants believe elites are under a strong moral obligation to respect peasant needs. The processes of modernisation often reduce peasant leverage, and when elites abandon their traditional moral obligations, peasants react with shock and outrage, sometimes with riot or rebellion. In Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Scott expanded his theories to peasants in other parts of the world. Scott's theories are often contrasted with Gramscian ideas about hegemony; against Gramsci, Scott argues that the everyday resistance of subalterns shows that they have not consented to dominance. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Scott argues that subordinate groups employ strategies of resistance that go unnoticed, terming this 'infrapolitics'. He describes the public interactions between dominators and oppressed as a 'public transcript' and the critique of power that goes on offstage as a 'hidden transcript'. In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), Scott showed how central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. He highlights collective farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brasília, and Prussian forestry techniques as examples of failed schemes. In The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott addresses how certain groups in the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia managed to avoid state exploitation, taxation, and grain cultivation, arguing that aspects of their society seen as backward were in fact part of the 'Arts' of limiting visibility to the state.

Did You Know?

• Scott wrote his honors thesis on the economic development of Burma on the advice of Indonesia scholar William Hollinger.
• Scott agreed to do reporting for the CIA after being recruited by an American student activist while on a Rotary International Fellowship in Burma.
• To research Weapons of the Weak, Scott spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia between 1978 and 1980, then returned for two months to solicit villagers' impressions of his draft.
• Scott married Louise Glover Goehring in 1961; they had three children and were married until her death in 1997.
• In 2011, Scott and other scholars convened at Yale to re-establish the Journal of the Burma Research Society, which led to the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship in 2016.