Quotes from James C. Scott

I racket di protezione, abituali e persistenti, sono una strategia a lungo periodo rispetto al saccheggio occasionale e quindi dipendono da un ambiente politico e militare ragionevolmente stabile. E sono difficilmente distinguibili dallo stesso stato arcaico che, come loro, si appropria del surplus sostenibile di comunità sedentarie e respinge attacchi esterni per proteggere la sua base.

Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.

There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.

It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many

Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple. —Herbert Simon

Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong

Why the histories of states should have so persistently insinuated themselves in the place that might have been occupied by peoples merits reflection.

That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.

Zygmunt Bauman, "Living Without an Alternative

which the sovereign state finds in its interest.19 The nature of the acts themselves

we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone's imagination to create a community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by.

For nearly three hundred years, the Spanish calendar for the Philippines had been one day ahead of the Spanish calendar, because Magellan's expedition had not, of course, adjusted for their westward travel halfway around the globe.

every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from and exercise more control over the very populations it was designed to serve.

Universal last names are a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Tracking property ownership and inheritance, collecting taxes, maintaining court records, performing police work, conscripting soldiers, and controlling epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses.

Holston asked a class of nine-year-old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of "home." Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof.

If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius N~erer

First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the "general truths" behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity.

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: "You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes."3

The classical view that ancient Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong.

The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.