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3f4154d
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One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay "in shape" so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is "anarchist calisthenics." Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it's only jaywalking. Use your own head to jud..
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James C. Scott |
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809af8e
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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'.
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James C. Scott |
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5956cce
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A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward "central planning," language (especially its everyday s..
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James C. Scott |
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f92b2e6
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Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, th..
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James C. Scott |
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eaa1492
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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.
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James C. Scott |
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a97d92d
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Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, "the public peace--the sidewalk and street peace--of cities ... is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves...
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James C. Scott |
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0124ab1
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Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as "our living ancestors," "what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization." on the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-maki..
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James C. Scott |
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46513e6
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Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
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centralization
free-market
taxation
economics
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James C. Scott |
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4441342
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We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.
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James C. Scott |
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c9e858a
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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.
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James C. Scott |
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fbbe3b9
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New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labor or onto the plantation deplored crops that allowed a free peasantry to maintain its autonomy. Hacienda owners in Central America claimed that with cassava, all ..
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James C. Scott |
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5cc82e9
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Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them. Quite often such identities, particularly minority identities, are at first imagined by powerful states, as the Han imagined the Miao, the British colonists imagined the Karen and the Shan, the French the Jarai. Whether invented or imposed, such identities select, more or les..
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James C. Scott |
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bb87635
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The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of n..
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James C. Scott |
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023b596
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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.
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shatter-belt
statism
tribalism
taxes
ethnicity
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James C. Scott |
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5b9156f
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A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level. "To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the a..
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James C. Scott |
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e63c57f
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The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!
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archeology
garbage
civilization
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James C. Scott |
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601cfba
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Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation."
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nomadism
nomad
taxation
state
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James C. Scott |
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ff3198b
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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.
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James C. Scott |
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eb7a484
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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.
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freedom
work
life
petite-bourgeoise
trade-unions
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James C. Scott |
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eaab2d5
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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."
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James C. Scott |
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539d251
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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.
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freedom
work
life
petite-bourgeoise
private-sector
public-sector
trade-unions
bureaucracy
capitalism
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James C. Scott |
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4f8a808
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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.
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James C. Scott |
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2302074
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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.
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James C. Scott |
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808be9e
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Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.
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James C. Scott |
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0bff686
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Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip--and here I have in mind malicious gossip--be challenged, everyone can ..
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James C. Scott |
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fb65547
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modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission."
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James C. Scott |
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fb429d4
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Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.
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James C. Scott |
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8ca8533
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The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called metis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as "cunning," metis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances."
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James C. Scott |
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bca1c1f
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Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.
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James C. Scott |
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cad7f51
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One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behavior. To the extent that this simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules can actually supply crucial guidance and instruction. This, at any rate, is what I take to ..
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James C. Scott |
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3490d64
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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."
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James C. Scott |
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b85d291
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Changing the rules of regulations is simpler than eliciting the behavior that conforms to them.
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James C. Scott |