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James C. Scott ’54

James C. Scott, a world-renowned author, professor, and social scientist, died on July 19 at his home in Connecticut. He was the 2001 recipient of the Alumni Association’s Alice Paul Merit Award.

His research concerned political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. His publications included: Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1985); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1980); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998); The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2008); Two Cheers for Anarchism (2013); and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States (2017).

His death was announced by Yale University:
      James C. Scott, Sterling Professor Emeritus, Political Science; Acting Director, Agrarian Studies; Professor Emeritus, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Anthropology and Institute for Social and Policy Studies passed peacefully in his home in
Durham, CT on Friday, July 19, 2024.

Jim, who returned to Yale in 1976, was the founding director of the Agrarian Studies Center at Yale University, an experimental, interdisciplinary effort to reshape how a new generation of scholars understands rural life and society. He was described in the 2012 New York Times article “The Professor Who Learns From Peasants” as the “unofficial founder of the field of “resistance studies,” in which his book Weapons of the Weak (1985), a study of peasant resistance based on fieldwork in a Malaysian village, is a kind of Bible.

On August 27, 2021 the Berkeley Library Oral History Project at the University of California announced the release of the Yale Agrarian Studies Oral History Project, a two-part series featuring the life history of James C. Scott, and shorter interviews with over a dozen affiliates of the Yale Agrarian Studies Program. He was awarded the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honor.

Numerous other tributes and retrospective of his life and career were written:

The New York Times:
…The author of a shelf of disparate, iconoclastic books, several of them regarded as classics, Dr. Scott was “one of the great intellectuals of our time,” Louis Warren, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a 2021 oral history of Yale’s agrarian studies program.

The Yale News:
James Scott was born in Beverly, New Jersey, the son of a doctor with West Virginia roots who died when Scott was nine years old. He was educated at the Moorestown Friends School, a small Quaker school where the Quaker ethos, he said, had a distinct influence on him. One reason: the Quaker meeting, a form of religious
gathering with no clergy, where a group of elders held prominence and anyone could speak, was intellectually and emotionally appealing to him — “an anarchist step,” as he said. The second reason was the history of Quakers as proponents of peace, dissenters and outliers; some were conscientious objectors even during World War II. Scott said he did not agree with them, but he admired their “courage, persistence and dignity.” As he put it, Quakerism acquainted him with people “who were capable of being a minority of one.” And, thirdly, Moorestown Friends, in the ethos of the Quakers, gave their students the opportunity to attend week-long work camps where they worked with the indigent and needy in Philadelphia. This experience, as he said, “stayed with me forever.” Scott lived what he studied. Like some of the Quakers he saw in meetings, he was a dissenter and an outlier. Nothing intimidated him, and he resisted pomposity and domination in all their forms.”

The Washington Post:
Dr. Scott’s scholarship was diverse and often intellectually provocative. In several books, he described how rural communities in Southeast Asia fought modernization pressures and rules by central authorities. In other works, he asserted that big government programs can sometimes unintentionally harm the people they sought to help. The binding themes across all of Dr. Scott’s more than a dozen books were that sweeping ambitions by governments can often be at odds with human nature and generational wisdom. He posited, in various ways, that people possess a natural aversion to top-down authority and one-size-fits-all economic planning. Dr. Scott did not endorse anarchy in the sense of lawless upheavals. Instead, he tracked the influence of lower-voltage forms of protest — what he called the “struggle below the radar” — such as peasants intentionally burning their crops in protest or city dwellers staging local boycotts.

Foreign Policy:
…a political scientist and anthropologist who was among the most influential intellectuals of the last half-century…Starting with The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1979 and continuing through to his last published work, Against the Grain in 2017, Scott’s topics ranged from German forestry to Malaysian villages, unified by a thematic concern with how centralized forms of control are both exerted and resisted.