Obituaries

Jesse Walker | 7.23.2024 10:03 AM

James C. Scott, who died July 19 at age 87, was one of the most original and radical political theorists of the past century.

Beginning as a political scientist studying Southeast Asia and then expanding to other disciplines and to the rest of the globe, Scott wrote about the ways authority exerts itself, about the ways ordinary people resist or avoid that authority, and about the unmapped territories where that resistance often takes place. I mean unmapped both figuratively (as when he recounted how Malaysian farmers covertly evaded the Islamic government's tithes) and literally (as when he described the uncharted marshes and mountains where people could escape state power). Scott's wide-ranging studies took in everything from Br'er Rabbit tales in the Old South to urban planning in Brazil, from Stalin's war on the Russian peasantry to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, from the origins of grain farming to the origins of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The storyline that emerges from those explorations isn't a conventional account of grand states and empires. It isn't a romantic longing for a lost golden age before those states and empires either. It's a dynamic vision where the zones of centralized authority and the zones of relative liberty are constantly adjusting to one another, so........

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