James C. Scott Quotes

#1. 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.

James C. Scott

#2. The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

James C. Scott

#3. I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#5. 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.

James C. Scott

#6. 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.

James C. Scott

#7. I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind.

James C. Scott

#8. What's interesting to me is that in the late twentieth century it seems that there's scarcely a part of the world that doesn't have some capitalist return that can be realized providing that this area's made accessible and resources can be extracted from it.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#10. It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of the supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#12. 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.

James C. Scott

#13. 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.

James C. Scott

#14. 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.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#16. 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.

James C. Scott

#17. immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate a more just legal order. To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessors were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.

James C. Scott

#18. 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.

James C. Scott

#19. It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with us for as long as there's injustice, and that doesn't seem to be in short supply.

James C. Scott

#20. In a world of injustice there's going to be dreams of justice.

James C. Scott

#21. 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.

James C. Scott

#22. The world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives volume and amplitude to a rumor is that it satisfies people's dreams and expectations about the world.

James C. Scott

#23. 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.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#25. 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.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#27. 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.

James C. Scott

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

James C. Scott

#29. 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'.

James C. Scott