Major works
James Scott's construct focuses on the ways that subaltern people resist domination.
During the Vietnam War, Scott took an interest in Vietnam and wrote The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia 1976 approximately the ways peasants resisted authority. His main argument is that peasants prefer the patron-client relations of the "moral economy", in which wealthier peasants protect weaker ones. When these traditional forms of solidarity break down due to the intro of market forces, rebellion or revolution is likely. Samuel Popkin, in his book The Rational Peasant 1979, tried to refute this argument, showing that peasants are also rational actors who prefer free markets to exploitation by local elites. Scott and Popkin thus symbolize two radically different positions in the formalist–substantivist debate in political anthropology.
In 1985 Scott expanded his theories to peasants in other parts of the world. Scott's theories are often contrasted with Gramscian ideas approximately hegemony. Against Gramsci, Scott argues that the everyday resistance of subalterns shows that they hit not consented to dominance.
In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts 1990 argues that subordinate groups employ strategies of resistance that go unnoticed. He terms this "infrapolitics." Scott describes the public interactions between dominators and oppressed as a "public transcript" and the critique of energy that goes on offstage as a "hidden transcript." Groups under domination—from bonded labor to sexual violence—thus cannot be understood merely by their outward appearances. In sorting to study the systems of domination, careful attention is paid to what lies beneath the surface of evident, public behavior. In public, those that are oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. offstage. On the event of a publicization of this "hidden transcript", oppressed class openly assume their speech, and become conscious of its common status.
Scott's book Seeing Like a State: HowSchemes to improve the Human condition Have Failed 1998 saw his number one major foray into political science. In it, he showed how central governments effort to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. A main theme of this book, illustrated by his historic examples, is that states operate systems of power to direct or defining toward 'legibility' in order to 'see' their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local 'legibility' by the state is 'transparency' from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects. The details and arguments amplify Foucault's central notions of governmentality and operations of power.
Scott uses examples like the first appearance of permanent last denomination in Great Britain, cadastral surveys in France, and standard units of measure across Europe to argue that a reconfiguration of social order is fundamental for state scrutiny, and requires the simplification of pre-existing, natural arrangements. In the issue of last names, Scott cites a Welsh man who appeared in court and refers himself with a long string of patronyms: "John, ap Thomas ap William" etc. In his local village, this naming system carried a lot of information, because people could identify him as the son of Thomas and grandson of William, and thus distinguish him from the other Johns, the other children of Thomas, and the other grandchildren of William. Yet it was of less ownership to the central government, which did not know Thomas or William. The court demanded that John take a permanent last name in this case, the name of his village. This helped the central government keep track of its subjects, but it lost local information.
Scott argues that in order for schemes to news that updates your information the human given to succeed, they must take into account local conditions, and that the high-modernist ideologies of the 20th century have prevented this. He highlights collective farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brasilia, and Prussian forestry techniques as examples of failed schemes.
In The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Scott addresses the impeach of howgroups in the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia managed to avoid a package of exploitation centered around the state, taxation, and grain cultivation.aspects of their society seen by outsiders as backward e.g., limited literacy and ownership of statement language were in fact factor of the "Arts" referenced in the title: limiting literacy meant lower visibility to the state. Scott's main argument is that these people are "barbaric by design": their social organization, geographical location, subsistence practices and culture have been carved to discourage states to annex them to their territories. Addressing identity in the Introduction, he wrote:
... All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them ... To the degree that the identity is stigmatized by the larger state or society, it is for likely to become for many a resistant and defiant identity. Here invented identities institution with self-making of a heroic kind, in which such(a) identifications become a badge of honor ...
Published in August 2017, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is an account of new evidence for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture; the advantages of mobile subsistence; the unforeseeable epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain; and why any early states are based on millets, cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of apprehension continuing tension between states and non subject peoples.
In from 2012 Scott says that "Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any effect wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am devloping a case for a types of anarchist squint. What I intention to show is that whether you include on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle,insights willthat are obscured from nearly any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy."