Quotes from James C. Scott

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, "the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities … is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

But all these systems of 'education' lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times.

We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.

What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.

The cultivation of a single staple grain was, in itself, an important step in legibility and hence, appropriation. Monoculture fosters uniformity at many different levels. . .A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.

Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.

Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.

After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quick as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience.

The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and services?" Her answer is simple: "Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man would want to.

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.

modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission.

One of the great paradoxes of social engineering is that it seems at odds with the experience of modernity generally. Trying to jell a social world, the most striking characteristic of which appears to be flux, seems rather like trying to manage a whirlwind.

results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.

Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in point. Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first "discover"—in the epidemiological sense—such hitherto unknown diseases as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire's disease, and AIDS.

Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture.

The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called métis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as "cunning," métis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.

Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances—including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.

Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.