“In Praise of Floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C. Scott, arrives after a year of catastrophic floods. Last spring, heavy rainfall lifted parts of the San Jacinto and Trinity Rivers, in East Texas, at least a dozen feet above the flood stage, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In September, during Hurricane Helene, the French Broad River surged into commercial corridors in Asheville, North Carolina, wiping out restaurants, breweries, stores, and dwellings. In October, in Spain, the Magro, Júcar, and Turia Rivers overflowed their banks in the region around the city of Valencia, leading to the deaths of two hundred and thirty-two people.
Scott wants us to look past disasters such as these. Focussing on the human costs of flooding, he argues, is too anthropocentric. A flood may be, “for humans,” the “most damaging of ‘natural’ disasters worldwide,” but, from “a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” A seasonal inundation, known as a “flood pulse,” delivers crucial nutrients to organisms that depend on rivers. “Without the annual occupation of the floodplain, the channel—that line on the map—is comparatively dead biotically,” he argues. Or, as he puts it more succinctly elsewhere in the book, “No flood, no river.”
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It is as difficult to imagine a flood survivor reading these sentences without objection as it would be to picture a displaced resident of Pacific Palisades reading a book called “In Praise of Fires.” But Scott doesn’t ignore how damaging a river’s overflowing can be to those living along its banks. In celebrating periodic flooding, he is also warning about the costs of human intervention. Dams and levees lead to less frequent flooding, but erosion and deforestation mean more catastrophic floods when these barriers are breached. The more civilized you are, the less resilient you are.
“In Praise of Floods” offers a posthumous conclusion to a scholarly career of upending conventional wisdom. Scott spent forty-five years in the political-science department at Yale, where he taught until a few years before his death, last July, at eighty-seven. But his interests were broader than those of most political scientists. He started out as a specialist in contemporary Southeast Asia; just as he was beginning to gain recognition for his work, he risked his career to move to Malaysia and embark upon an ethnography of village life. He founded the agrarian-studies program at Yale, researching and teaching about rural communities from around the world. By the end of his career, he had left detailed field work behind and was writing sweeping treatments of the distant past, which nonetheless managed to broach some of the most vexing political questions of our time.
Though Scott came from the political left, his most famous book, “Seeing Like a State,” a vigorous critique of big government projects intended to improve human welfare, was warmly received by the libertarian right. When asked to define himself, he hedged and qualified: he sometimes called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’ ” He was an anthropologist “by courtesy,” in acknowledgment of the fact that he had no formal training in the discipline. Late in life, he drifted toward anarchism, but even this belief system exerted a tenuous hold, and he could offer only “two cheers” for it. He strove to cultivate a similar openness in his students. For several years at Yale, he led what he called an “incubator” workshop, in which he encouraged graduate students to bring in half-formulated ideas as a way to develop risk-taking instincts. Another risk he encouraged was student organizing: he was a strong and consistent supporter of the decades-long project to form a graduate-student union at Yale. In his private life, he tried his hand at farming (his biography on the political-science department’s website listed him as “a mediocre farmer”), and he brought eggs to his classes.
The lives of people working in agriculture were at the center of Scott’s work. Small farmers and peasants the world over endured dramatic transformations in the twentieth century and were subject to grand and ill-begotten experiments by capitalist and communist states alike. In colonial and post-colonial regimes, they were forced to plant cash crops and were heavily taxed. Under Stalin and Mao, experiments in collective farming led to famine. Scott wanted to study how rural populations responded to these upheavals.
Peasants have often been seen as docile and passive. Scott thought otherwise. He looked out for tacit “local knowledge” that states ignored in their giant programs of social remodelling, and discerned in small acts of disobedience a pattern of resistance that sometimes erupted into full-scale revolt. In his later work, he cheerfully depicted the “barbarians” who hovered on the edges of states, eluding conscripted labor and leading daring raids on grain hoards. Scott himself was a bit like one of these barbarians, constantly attacking and unsettling a seemingly stable consensus on the value of state power, and of civilization itself.
Scott first visited Southeast Asia in his early twenties. Born in southern New Jersey, in 1936, he attended a Quaker school before going to Williams College. At Williams, a professor encouraged him to study Burma, now Myanmar. After graduating, Scott went there on a Rotary Fellowship, in 1959. Riding a 1940 Triumph motorcycle, he travelled throughout the country, ending up at Mandalay University, where he studied Burmese for five months. The sojourn launched his interest in Southeast Asia, the peasantry, and the formation of states.
While overseas, Scott wrote reports on Burmese student politics for the C.I.A., and was involved in the U.S. National Student Association, then a hotbed of global student activism. As detailed by the political scientist Karen Paget, Scott’s involvement with the C.I.A. was brief, but his time with the U.S.N.S.A. seems to have whetted his interest in radical politics. This was the era of Third Worldism, when countries that had ejected colonial powers began to band together, many of them under the banner of non-aligned socialism. With the U.S.N.S.A., Scott travelled to Singapore, where he met representatives of the Socialist student union, and to Indonesia, where he was introduced to the heads of the Communist student union, many of whose members were later killed in the country’s anti-Communist purges of 1965.
In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the Vietnam War was a matter of urgent concern in politics and scholarship alike. The leading role played in the war by the Vietnamese rural poor prompted Scott to wonder what motivated peasants to revolt. This question led to his first major book, “The Moral Economy of the Peasant,” from 1976, which borrowed the idea of a “moral economy” from the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson. Scott described a universe of mutual assistance that peasants—his subject was Southeast Asia, but his conclusions were general—created for themselves to insure that they didn’t go hungry. The peasantry relied on what Scott called a “subsistence ethic,” a safety-first principle that dictated that access to food and other means of sustaining life took precedence over maximizing profit. If this fragile web of economic relationships was disturbed, it could lead to starvation and a breakdown of social trust.
Just such a breakdown had occurred in Vietnam and Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial authorities began to intrude into peasant life, privatizing village lands, forests, and fisheries and introducing a multitude of punishing taxes. These moves disrupted the tenuous balance that had allowed peasants to survive. When the Great Depression reached these countries, in 1930, putting further strain on the livelihoods of small farmers, they erupted in resistance. Crowds, sometimes swelling to the thousands, began an assault on the colonial state. In a series of rebellious actions in central Vietnam, Scott writes, “administrative offices and their tax rolls were destroyed, post offices and railroad stations and schools were burned, alcohol warehouses plundered, collaborating officials assassinated, forest guard posts destroyed, rice stores seized, and at least one salt convoy attacked.”
“The Moral Economy of the Peasant” came out as political events were laying waste to the hopes that many had placed in Third World revolution. Post-colonial and socialist states founded in opposition to colonial oppression exhibited their own brutality and oppressiveness. One country after another employed fantastic schemes to improve general welfare, such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa campaign to resettle rural populations in Tanzania in planned villages. These efforts often required coerced labor and diminished democratic participation, and sometimes led to famine. When peasant rebellions appeared, they were crushed even in superficially democratic countries such as India, whose government violently suppressed the Naxalite uprisings in West Bengal. Later in life, Scott would confess to having become “disillusioned by the way in which revolutions produced a stronger state that was more oppressive than the one it replaced.”
Scott’s fourth book, the extraordinary “Weapons of the Weak,” from 1985, registers a growing disenchantment with revolutionary politics. In 1978, hoping to observe peasant struggle up close, he had moved with his wife, Louise, and their three children from Connecticut to a remote village in the state of Kedah, the rice bowl of Malaysia. In that country, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, revolutionary idealism was giving way to forms of state power that were sometimes as intrusive as the colonial regimes they had replaced. As part of the so-called Green Revolution, the Malaysian government had introduced new machinery and cash crops intended to boost agricultural productivity, restructuring the farming economy in ways that were greatly resented by the rural poor.
Scott went to Malaysia looking for rebellion. But, instead of open defiance, he found a series of half measures—“foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage.” Outward conformity and deference on the part of the poor masked quiet subterfuge: villagers were squatting on land that belonged to others, stealing food and money, refusing to work or working more slowly than usual, and secretly damaging farm machines. A man in Kedah told Scott that he knew exactly how to put barbed wire and nails into an auger to jam a combine harvester. He recounted watching as other villagers surrounded a harvester belonging to a Chinese syndicate, poured kerosene over the engine and the cab, and set it on fire. Scott defined these actions as “everyday resistance,” and argued that this was the most common form assumed by the fight against an oppressive society. Organized revolt was rare. But public servility masking private resentment was everywhere.
There is a certain doomed quality to the activity Scott describes in “Weapons of the Weak.” The peasants in Kedah knew that they had no way to win their campaign against the state; they hoped only to minimize or delay the threat to their livelihoods. Scott came to think, however, that such muted protests were in fact more common and more important than any other kind, and that these actions had the potential to bring down governments. In a later work, he named this sort of rebellion “infrapolitics”—politics outside the visible range. Throughout world history, he argued, people fought the encroachment of state power not by public protest—which under an authoritarian regime often meant death—but through a series of clandestine activities that amounted to protest nonetheless. In “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” from 1990, he told the story of how, as eighteenth-century European states began taking control of forests previously held in common, the peasantry in England and France continued to forage in them, and gather firewood and pasture animals, even after these activities had been outlawed. They considered it an injustice that their customary privileges had been abrogated by fiat, and they would fight, if quietly and subversively, rather than cede what they understood to be their rights.
Scott’s injunction to look for resistance where it does not immediately appear turns the familiar hierarchy of the visible and the invisible on its head. Don’t look only at the operations of power, at the crushing machinery of the state, at the apparent acquiescence of people to being ruled, he seems to say. Look, instead, at things that don’t seem worthy of comment at all. That is where the vast majority of resistance takes place. Look at rumors, gossip, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales—all the means by which subordinate groups disguise their opposition. This isn’t just another way of submitting to power; this is a way of maintaining safety, of living to fight another day. And, Scott believed, slipping from the worlds of his peasant subjects to something more universal, it is all around.
Scott’s sympathy for resistance to the state and his congenital skepticism of any project coming from on high constitute a political orientation that he eventually began to call anarchism. Unlike the late anthropologist David Graeber, one of the founding organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Scott wasn’t an anarchist activist: he had long ceased to be involved with social movements, and he offered no strategic considerations. But he shared with Graeber a theoretical viewpoint that didn’t take for granted that “civilization” was a natural good. Much of human history occurred outside the context of states, and a good deal of it, if you abstracted the objects of your gaze through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” took place in direct opposition to states. This meant that, when you looked at how states worked, even when they were trying to improve human welfare, you often found that they ignored the very things that people did on their own, without the help of government, to maintain their existence, or to live free of coercion.
The subject of how government worked or failed to work was the focus of “Seeing Like a State,” a series of case studies of high-modernist social-engineering projects undertaken mostly in the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps the book’s most familiar example, for Americans, is that of the large-scale city planning to which the urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs objected. But Scott also looked at German scientific forestry; collective farming in the Soviet Union and Tanzania; utopian city planning in Chandigarh, India, and in Brasília; and Vladimir Lenin’s theories about the formation of revolutionary parties.
Despite ideological differences, many twentieth-century intellectuals, politicians, and planners were united in their belief that the state had a special capacity to make vast improvements in human lives through wide-reaching social transformations. To accomplish such improvements, modern states had to reorder society in a way that was legible to them by bringing their subjects under centralized administrative control. How can the government collect taxes, for instance, or conscript soldiers or enforce the law, if people do not have last names? Better assign some. In a footnote drawn from a historical document, Scott unearths the example of a sixteenth-century Welshman who was chastised by an English judge for giving his name, “in the Welsh fashion,” as “Thomas Ap”—son of—“William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan.” Afterward, the man “called himself Moston, according to the name of his principal house, and left that name to his posteritie.”
“Seeing Like a State” radiates with Scott’s fondness for reversing hierarchies of knowledge. He insists that high-modernist projects of social reform, however sophisticated their proponents, were less complex, not more, than the local societies and forms of knowledge they attempted to reorder. (How much more detailed knowledge is concentrated in “Thomas Ap William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan” than in “Thomas Moston.”) The vision that a planner and his state bureaucracy projected onto an agricultural area or a neighborhood was far more rigid and simplified than what already existed. Scott called the practical knowledge accumulated by locals “metis,” after the ancient Greek word for “skill” or “wisdom”—distinct from “gnosis,” the word related to our “knowledge” and “insight.” Metis was “common sense, experience, a knack” or “savoir faire.” It was the way, for example, that certain Indigenous Americans taught Colonial settlers to plant corn “when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear,” a folkloric aphorism that contained within it years of observation of the sequence of seasonal change. But metis was also the informal system of “eyes on the street” that Jane Jacobs observed as having developed over the years in dense urban neighborhoods, and which no project planned from on high could replicate. Metis was also the warren of narrow city streets, perhaps built over old cow paths, that both represented and generated a thick network of intimate and practical neighborly relationships. High modernism, on the other hand, was the grid—easier to survey, tax, and police.
“Seeing Like a State” was published in 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of socialism, and after the United States had lost its taste for New Deal-style economic planning. Perhaps as a result, the book appeared more conservative than Scott meant it to be. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama gave it an approving notice in Foreign Affairs, and, a year after it was published, the head of the libertarian Cato Institute invited Scott to address its annual convention, much to his dismay. Many on the left concurred with their libertarian colleagues that Scott had made, however inadvertently, a pro-market case against state power. In a review, the liberal economist Brad DeLong noted the striking similarities in argument between Scott’s brief against planning and the libertarian Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s praise of the “spontaneous order” of market economies. Scott, unlike Hayek, was an avowed skeptic of free markets; in “Seeing Like a State,” he had argued, albeit briefly, that “market-driven standardization” was susceptible to many of the flaws of modern social engineering. But his critics on the left weren’t wrong to compare his arguments to Hayek’s: so intently and thoroughly did Scott make his case against the modern state that, once you’ve read “Seeing Like a State,” it’s difficult to imagine the virtue of any state action, even of the incremental and meliorist variety. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Years later, it’s possible to look at Scott’s book less as an isolated broadside against the state and more as a way of seeing, through extreme examples, the extent to which planning ignores local knowledge at its peril. Still, even in those instances, Scott offers equivocal lessons. When it comes to contemporary debates on how best to solve our nationwide housing crisis, for instance, he can be read as an ally to movements attempting to protect neighborhoods against large-scale development. He asks planners to “prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move.” He makes special pleas for “context and particularity.” At the same time, he asks to make room for “human inventiveness” and “surprises,” which might suggest removing constraints to development—for example, restrictive zoning—that stifle initiative and drive. If you need room to build, better for the state to get out of the way. Both stances are conceivable within the capacious framework of the book, and that is perhaps why radicals and conservatives alike have found support for their arguments in its pages.
“Seeing Like a State” offers an even more complex (or blurry) lens through which to view the climate crisis. Scott’s study of how states reordered the natural world to generate maximum revenue may help to explain our own landscapes of fracking pads and pipelines. But it’s difficult to extract from the book a coherent strategy to fight climate change. To avoid the worst of the devastation from rising global temperatures will undoubtedly require not just state action but multistate coöperation on an unprecedented scale. Governments may need to override city and country alike to produce solar arrays and wind farms, shut down coal- and gas-fired power plants, unearth minerals for large-scale battery storage, and retrofit millions of houses, offices, and schools with electric cooling and heating systems. With Scott in mind, it’s possible to hope that states engaged in this collective project will overcome the blindness of the past. Still, if they—and we—are to succeed, Scott’s advice that planners pause before making their “next small move” will likely be discarded.
It’s an irony of Scott’s career that, though he pleaded for respecting local knowledge, his own writing began to take on imperial proportions in the later decades of his life. The last major works that he published before his death, “The Art of Not Being Governed” and “Against the Grain,” both cover centuries of history, confidently summing up many shelves’ worth of research and surveying wide tracts of geography. Scott examines how ancient states formed around sedentary agricultural practices—growing rice in medieval Southeast Asia, and wheat in ancient Mesopotamia—not because such farming had any intrinsic or inevitable value but because it was an important step in creating a “legible” and “manageable” state. Outside the rice “padi-state” and “grain states,” in Scott’s view, intrepid rebels engaged in more mobile, nomadic forms of agriculture, trying to escape taxation and forced labor.
Scott saw each step in the civilizing process, from farming cereals to working on an assembly line, as a loss of complexity, a diminishing of the “great diversity of natural rhythms” to which our ancestors were attuned. “It is no exaggeration to say,” he writes, before arguably risking just such an exaggeration, “that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.” From this perspective, a civilization’s collapse, rather than something to be lamented, might be experienced, at least by those at the edge of a state, as “an emancipation.” Scott acknowledged that so-called dark ages offer “fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits.” But he argued that “such ‘vacant’ periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.” Anarchic social orders erect no monuments, and leave no ruins to be bleached over the centuries in the desert sand. Instead they offer alternative visions of how society might have developed had states not formed, concentrating manpower and crops, homogenizing landscapes, and taming rivers.
Some critics have called Scott a romantic, in part for seeming to indulge the lawlessness of non-state peoples. In “Against the Grain” and “The Art of Not Being Governed,” there is an ineluctable charisma to the frontier nomads, with their state-repelling egalitarianism and their sense of freedom. “In Praise of Floods” extends the forms of resistance Scott celebrates to nonhuman subjects. Laboring to evoke the sheer variety of what gets lost when rivers are subjugated by humans, he devotes a questionable chapter to ventriloquizing the voices of riverine animals—mollusks, river dolphins, snow carp, Asian hairy-nosed otters—speaking out against human intervention. But his work, even at its most tendentious, speaks uncannily to our current political mood of gnawing anxiety, fleeting optimism, and partial resignation over the future of the human project. To read Scott is to feel the fatalistic sense that civilization may have been botched from the beginning. But it is also to be hopeful—that what seems to be a runaway ecological crisis and a global drift toward authoritarianism contains within it the potential for political transformation, if you look closely enough.
At Scott’s memorial service, last October, organizers handed out tote bags with the slogan “Become Ungovernable.” Disobedience was, in certain respects, the watchword of all his work. In “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” a short book published in 2012, he testifies, like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau, to insubordination as an animating principle of all social change. He describes the desertion of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War as potentially a key factor in the overthrow of slavery, and even lauds the Vietnam War-era practice of “fragging,” in which infantrymen supposedly used live grenades to eliminate their commanding officers. Authoritarianism, in Scott’s view, dies this way: not through “revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs” but through “the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people.” Just as “millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he writes, “so do thousands upon thousands of acts of insubordination and evasion create an economic or political barrier reef of their own.” ♦
