Dan Banik speaks with James C. Scott on how states must be distinguished from civilizations, the role of the state in economic development, why people flee from the state, the necessary conditions for the development of early states and why these states broke up, and the fight to restore democracy in Myanmar.
With many path-breaking books, James C. Scott has for long been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies, peasant politics and resistance studies. His hugely influential scholarship crosses disciplines, shaping political science, anthropology, and history.
In this conversation, we focus on a selection of Prof. Scott's books, including Seeing Like a State, which is a magisterial critique of top-down social planning, The Art of Not Being Governed, which highlights the crucial functions of “places of refuge from the state”, and his latest, Against the Grain – which provides a deep history of the earliest states. He is currently writing a new book on the Irrawaddy River – in which he argues that engineering and damming show how humans work, violate Nature’s traffic and how humans shape land.
James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology at Yale University where he also co-directs the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the recipient of the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honour, in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship.
(By Ingrid Ågren Høegh)
Banik Among all the brilliant scholars I've interacted with over with the years, you are the one I admire the most. It's a great honour to have you on my show. Welcome.
Scott My pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Banik Most scholars are thrilled to publish one influential book during the course of their careers. You have not just published one, but more than half a dozen influential books. Let me begin with a very broad question. I know you've been working a lot on what we should understand by the concept of the state, so let me ask you: What is a state and why is it important that we distinguish states from civilizations?
Scott That is a big question. I confronted this question in my last book, Against the Grain, which was about the earlier states in the Mesopotamian Valley. My argument there is that state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it's a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. So that in Mesopotamia for example, if we encounter a place with walls, with a little army, with systematic tax collection, and a class of non-working artisans, priests and rulers, then we have a fairly high degree of state-ness. But lots of places may have a ruler but no systematic taxation, no military capacity, and so there are a distribution of settlements all the way from things like pastoral nomadism on the one hand to things that look like at least a Medieval state in addition. The other aspect of your question, and maybe that's where you'd like me to go, is that the modern state of course is a completely complicated institution, in which there are many contradictory aspects. One fairly amusing example. I remember on the Paris metro, seeing a little advertisement in the car that said, "Daddy don't drink any more". It was a state campaign against alcoholism. And then there was, next to it, an advertisement for the state liquor monopolies. And then I thought this is a state that embodies many contradictions. So, the modern state is put together over time, has many different purposes, and in some cases, they are at cross-purposes.
Banik How does this square with Thomas Hobbes, who said that without a state one would have in society a war of all against all, and that the only alternative was to create an institution which resembled this metaphor of the great sea monster described in the Bible, so Jim, it is difficult today to imagine a life outside of the state, but in your insightful scholarship, you keep consistently arguing for the fact that people do not want political centralisation. That they often do their best to escape from the state. Some of my Stanford colleagues describing you as the un-Hobbes in many ways. So, before we dive into your critiques of states, Jim, do you see any virtues of having states?
Scott Yes. Let me go back briefly to Hobbes. Let's remember that Hobbes is writing in the period of the English civil war when everything has fallen apart, and he sees the need for a strong central government. The point is that, do I see a positive aspect to state-ness? The answer is yes. And this arises by and large with the French Revolution and Prussian statecraft. The one in France is the creation of a national citizenship, the emancipation of French citizens, and in the Prussian case, it was the first time in which a state began to assess the health and safety and longevity of its population. And began to think of the state as the guarantor of basic subsistence rights. Notice that this is the end of the 17th/18th century and it's very new. The point is that states, until the 1700s, were states that were more or less predatory vis-a-vis their populations. They did not see their job as improving the welfare of their population. If the welfare of their population was improved, that was fine, it made them more taxable. But they did not set out systematically to improve the welfare of their population. My argument would be that when the state has done something emancipatory, e.g. citizenship, it is almost always done with a pistol at its temple. That is to say it has created new rights when it was threatened in a vital way. The American Civil Rights movement is a fairly good example of that as well. So, I think, is the state capable of emancipatory moves? Yes, but only with popular mobilisation and a pistol at its temple.
Banik In recent years there has been this new wave of interest, right, in examining the role of the state, institutions, and there are various strands in this debate. There is a lot of talk about strong and weak states, fragile states, weak states. Political transformation and democratisation. All of this is happening. You offer a very different understanding of the nature of the state and society. How do you view these different understandings of the state that modernisation theory talks about, or institutional capacity people, and they try to explain how democratic states have evolved? How do you view these other understandings of state development?
Scott Let me begin by saying that I wrote a book called Two Cheers for Anarchism, not three cheers, I don't believe that we're going to get rid of the Westphalian state. I think the state is with us as a ruling institution for the foreseeable future. The question is, can we domesticate that state, or will it domesticate us? It seems to be that Denmark would be an example of social democracy in which the state has been reasonably domesticated. You've got to have a social democratic state, but it's not as if this is the natural vocation of the state. It was pushed into the form that it has now. The other thing that the Westphalian state has done, so let's go back to the French Revolution. It brought the idea of equal citizenship of adult men, of course, as an emancipatory move and replaced the aristocrats and feudal lords. however, notice also that the Napoleonic state, having universal citizenship, was also the first state to institute universal conscription and the invasion of Russia, the invasion of the rest of Europe, Spain and so on, was the first time you had universal conscription and warfare of this kind of enormously mobilising capacity of the state. So, in that sense, the French Revolution is an ambiguous achievement. Not without its pessimistic side. The other thing that the state has done, historically the technology at the disposal of the state was not so much greater than the technology at the disposal of ordinary citizens in their villages and towns. That's why we had a lot of city states. However, the state acquired over time, a set of techniques that allow it a kind of granular control over its population by modern things, the state not only has the informational technology and here I'm talking about the 19th century state, but it also has an asymmetrical command of the use of force. Forms of prisons, martial law and so on that allow it to dominate a population, should it choose to do so. In operation today, all we must do is look at the Burmese military and their response to the election. And the way in which they have repressed the outpouring of non-violent resistance with execution-style repression. That is a kind of asymmetrical power that the state did not have three centuries ago that it has now.
Banik We'll return to Burma slightly later. To continue in terms of the argument in Seeing Like a State, you argue that in order to control society in the manner in which Hobbes imagined, in doing so, in making everything legible and standardised, the attributes of states are in fact oppression, slavery, hierarchy, disease, all the bad things, so in trying to establish control, states have an understanding of what is control, the information they require from society, or the territory that they occupy. In the book you make the argument that states often launch many projects that can be disastrous and you provide these examples of collectivisation experiments in the Soviet Union, compulsory villagization in Tanzania, sometimes less dramatic but more common, huge and ineffective agricultural schemes, or designing new cities that are not used. My question is, how does this legibility of a society that gives states the capacity for large-scale social engineering, when does this kind of attempt at high modernism become counter-productive. Are these large-scale social engineering projects doomed from the start?
Scott No, I don’t think they are. I think that the project of legibility has two aspects. One is that one of the objectives of the state is to stop movement, the state has always been the enemy of people who move around, gipsies, wandering Jews, pastoralists, and so the effort to fix residences and have people settle in legible settlements with an address, this goes also to property relationships, I would extend this effort to restrict movement to what states have done to rivers, in many cases, states have taken very complicated systems of forestry, agriculture and rivers and tried to reduce them to a single function, and therefore violate many of the ecological rules that we don't understand entirely and are unable to control and that's one of the reasons for the surprising effects that were not intended but have often destroyed those schemes. The legibility capacity of the state ought to be a capacity that is in many cases neutral. If for example the Danish or Norwegian state which would have a high capacity for understanding their population, let's imagine that everyone who is blind in one eye, there was a new technology that allowed people to have an operation that would restore their vision, the government could specify the address and location, identity card number of all those people missing an eye, and would them be able to provide them with medical help. In the same way, it turned out that in the Dutch case before the war, the Dutch had such a minute mapping of surnames and addresses in Amsterdam that one could identify exactly those blocks where there was a Jewish population. And under the occupation, the Germans, and their collaborators among the Dutch, were able them to surround precisely those blocks were most of the Jews lived and send them to the death camps. Now, that knowledge, could theoretically have been used to help all of the Jews escape to the boats and take them to Denmark and Sweden, so it was a capacity that in this case was used to destroy the Jewish community, but it could have been used to rescue them as well. So, this legibility capacity is a capacity that can be used for good or evil. The thing to remember is that when we're dealing with the engineering of natural systems like rivers and agriculture and forestry, the effort in a sense to turn them into what I call single-commodity institutions, is likely to violate the ecological processes by which they operate and to end up having terrible side effects that we didn't intend. Now, what I call muscular high-modernism, that tends to happen when you have a society that has either as a result of war, is destroyed in many respects, in which you have an authoritarian elite, and is able to impose its will without pushback from the population. That's when you get things like the Great Leap Forward that took 35 million lives in China, that's where you get the collectivisation in 1930s Russia that - there is a debate about how many people died - but we're talking at least 15-20 million people as well, so it's only in special circumstances where you have power of an authoritarian kind and this idea that there is a single administrative scientific answer to every human power.
Banik Particularly lethal combination would be legibility, high modernism, an authoritarian state, and a civil society that doesn't have the ability to resist any of these plans. Is that correct?
Scott Yes, and the other thing to add here I think is the confusion between visual order and working order. I think one of the mistakes of modernism is to imagine that visual order is the same as efficient and working order. For example, people who are town planners, they build little models like toys that we can look down on and our view of these towns is then the same view as someone in a helicopter. The fact is that most people don't experience the city from a helicopter, they experience it on the sidewalk or their apartment. So, already, the magic of architecture is to give you this view of visual order and the same is true in West Africa when the British in their colonies in West Africa, the traditional form of agriculture in West Africa was often relay cropping, two or three different crops on the field at the same time of different maturities. It looked like a mess to the British who were used to single crops in rows, so they replaced this messy visual agriculture with an agriculture that visually looked more orderly. It turned out 20 years later when they came to running the actual empirical analysis of their productivity, that this was a far less productive form of agriculture than the traditional agriculture and the traditional agriculture enriched the soil more effectively than the modern forms of agriculture at this latitude in West Africa. The point is that what was rather than doing scientific research and being truly rational about it, the British confused visual order with working order and the two can never be assumed to be the same unless empirical and research examination shows it to be the same.
Banik In another important book on the state, The Art of Not Being Governed, you highlight the crucial functions of places of refuge from the state. Countries like Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, how they were historically divided into core areas controlled by the state and peripheries that were largely outside the state's control. These peripheries were more ethnically diverse, right? Culturally distinct. Poorer. Maybe often in conflict with the state. While one way of viewing these would be that they are backward places simply waiting to be integrated, you argue that is wrong. We should understand these as places as refuge from the state. Why do people want to flee from the state? Is it because states are coercive entities, they are taxing, regulating, conscripting people and that the normal situation is that people oppose the state?
Scott Again, the argument in The Art of Not Being Governed, I try to make explicit that after roughly 1950, this argument no longer makes much sense in much of Southeast Asia, because the state, thanks to road building is able to extend its reach to the boarder so that there are exceptions to this. But the state is more effective in controlling the entire territory and the state also realised that there are lots of valuable resources that can be extracted from these areas. My argument is meant to be a historical argument from the last 2000 years, rather than an argument of contemporary Southeast Asia. Now, remember that the states that we are dealing with are not the Danish welfare state in this period, but patty-states where usually along the river and near the coast there is a large population growing rice, that can be appropriated by an elite. All these areas had the problem of maintaining their population. The problem they had arose from many different factors, some of which were natural and did not have to do with mis-governance. These early states were completely unparalleled concentrations of people and domesticated animals in a single place. The point is that this concentration of people and domesticated animals had the result of promoting for the first time, new diseases, of which of course Covid-19 is one. The point is that these were perfect epidemiological storms so that periodically there were epidemics that wiped out these places. A kingdom would disappear almost overnight, and it was probably because people were killed by infectious diseases or an infectious disease broke out and everybody scattered into the countryside. The early states, of course, were systematic collectors of taxes. They were subject to conscription. You have a set of state-oppressions that often cause the populations to flee. So, the major trade item in SEA was slaves. My argument is that we should understand that the hills are largely populated over 2000 years not by the so-called barbarians that were not civilised, but by people who ran away from states due to disease, conscription, taxes, etc. And it just happened repeatedly over time. The result is what you pointed to in the hills, which is a complicated linguistic and cultural mosaic that one finds in the hills, and that is the result of people coming over time, fleeing from one regime, from different places.
Banik I find it fascinating that hill-valley binary because we're talking about two different ecological systems, right? What I also find fascinating in that book is that these hills and valleys, they're not mutually exclusive right? They are interdependent, with regular movement between them.
Scott That is an important observation. In fact, the narrative of civilisation, even in Mesopotamia, is this idea that once you have towns and cities and states, everyone is flocking to them, and what they miss is that they are just as frequently dispersing from them. So that you have this movement back and forth over time. It's very important. The people in the "state space" tend to regard the people in the hills as always and ever different and having always been there, when in fact people are moving back and forth over time in quite substantial numbers.
Banik In terms of the core propositions in book, one aspect where there is considerable agreement is that the state is a coercive apparatus organised around war and slavery. A lot of people have been talking about that. The other aspect of your book, the attraction of escaping from the state, unlike this state as a coercive apparatus, this second aspect of escape has not really received much attention. Why is that the case?
Scott I think because our standard civilisation narrative is a one-way narrative. The hills and valleys are economically dependent on each other. Because they exist in different ecologies and different zones, climatically in terms of altitude etc. they are natural trading partners and need each other in terms of the goods they can exchange. In Europe, the Celtic settlements on the fringe of the Roman Empire that tried to control trade to the Roman Empire. So the Celts were a culture without a state, that is to say their trading towns were meant to dominate trade into the Roman Empire, and the Celts never had an empire for themselves, they were shadow empires, parasitic on the Roman Empire, and made the best of trade that went both ways. Similar examples are found in Latin America.
Banik I was wondering in relation to your latest book, Against the Grain, maybe one reason why some of the other theories don't seem to give much importance to these strategies of fleeing the state is because the role of the state is typically exaggerated because we rely on written documents that are invariably state-centric. Tax records. That non-state history is often overlooked. Would you agree?
Scott I would agree enthusiastically. Somehow, because we work in literate societies where writing and publishing are given pride of place. There is this inclination to always downgrade oral sources over written sources. When in fact the written sources were produced at a particular point in time for particular reasons, often a very narrow set of purposes to justify monarchical genealogy that was itself largely invented perhaps to make a claim politically against another competing state and so on. And we take oral epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, we take them much less seriously and of course we only take these because they are taught as written texts, but we should take oral traditions - they are no less credible and just as credible as the written sources that the state produces in its documents. Let's not forget, in Mesopotamia, for 500 years, writing was essentially a tax-collecting technology and only after 500 years was the form changed enough so that it could represent spoken speech. But a long time when it was just tax collecting technology to keep records.
Banik In relation to Against he Grain, I was particularly fascinated with your argument about how in the contemporary discourse on climate change, much of the discussion on our footprint on the earth's environment is focused on the fossil fuel era, but as you point out, this bit is only the last quarter of a percent of our species' history. And there are many good reasons to insist on the global economic impact that goes much deeper into history. What did you find in terms of the 'when' question? When should we start our understanding of the Anthropocene clock?
Scott I know that the International Society of Geologists are concerned with, since they insist on a worldwide strata that is detectable scientifically, they want to find the Anthropocene with the beginning of the nuclear tests in the 1940s because there is a layer of - whatever the fallouts of the tests were - that can be detected worldwide in this period. I know that in a sense the fossil fuel era is often called the great acceleration. It coincides as well, let's not forget, with a huge increase in population. So, in the year 1750, which is not very long ago, the total world population was 3/4 of a billion. 750 million. It is now almost 8 billion. So, in a sense, this great acceleration is both of population and fossil fuels and forms of nuclear energy. What I do, partly because in that book I'm dealing with early agriculture, I identify the era in which humans begin to use fire, and that is even before homo sapiens, and then the agricultural revolution. But it's a slow process over time. The population of homo sapiens was so small, that even using these technologies, it didn't have outsized impact on the earth. So, I call this the thin-Anthropocene, as to be compared with the thick-Anthropocene that begins somewhere around the time of the Industrial Revolution. It seems to me that exactly when you want to start the clock, it may be a fun or power game, but I think those quarrels are rather stupid shall I say.
Banik Even in this book, you challenge the dominant narrative of the state's rise, including the belief that the domestication of plants led to a more sedentary life, fixed field agriculture led to the development of the state, you question this dominant narrative that hunter-gatherers led a miserable life that once they were settled and producing their own food, their lives improved. What were the benefits, if we could start with the hunters and gatherers, what were the benefits of their way of life? Was it a healthier lifestyle?
Scott I don't want to go to the paleo-corner here, that is to say there were lots of parasites, there were lots of injuries, life expectancy was small, huge infant mortality, which there was also in the early states as well, but I do not want to over romanticise, and there was a lot of violence as well. But the things that ought to be said about hunting and gathering and foraging, were that our mistake I think was to imagine a hunter/gatherer getting up in the morning and going out into the forest to try to find something to eat. One day away from starvation. And trying to trap something that will get the calories to get through the day. That's a completely mistaken view of hunting/gathering. The way to think about hunting/gathering for people who haven't done it, which includes me, is that to think of the salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. That is for two or three weeks, when the salmon are running up the river on their migration, and if you can control the bottleneck along one of these rivers, you can gather, in a very short period of time, the protein that will last you for the rest of the year. In Mesopotamia, there were gazelle migrations, annual gazelle migrations, and so by moving and creating an artificial funnel, they could create a killing area where they could get enough meat that they could dry for he rest of the year. The point is that by timing their interventions with the natural migrations of game and pray, they were able to work relatively little. In Mesopotamia, we forget that 6000 years ago, the sea level was 300 feet higher than today and this was a wetland. There was seasonal grass on which animals could be pastured and when the rains came... So, you had in a sense a rich bio-system that was very abundant and required very little work. Even today, people who study hunters and gatherers realise, hunters/gatherers today only work less than 50% of the time to fulfil their subsistence needs.
Banik In this latest book, of course, one of the many interesting questions who try to address is how early states managed to assemble, hold, and augment their subject populations. It would be perfectly natural for me at this stage to ask what you think were the necessary conditions for the development of these early states?
Scott They all had the problem of epidemics, as I pointed out, and they had the problem of crop failures. Epidemics were not confined to human beings, it was confined to flocks of sheep and goats as well, and cattle. By grouping them together you also create an epidemiological perfect storm and by concentrating on one grain or two grains of wheat and barley, you had many more crop diseases because the diet was narrowed compared to the hunter/gatherer diet. You had crop diseases, flock diseases, and human diseases that could cause people to die or flee. The result of this was that there was a leaking of population away, and if the crops failed. All these early states had a population problem and they all solved it by wars of capture. Almost all the wars in classical period were wars of capture, rather than of territorial aggrandizement. The idea was to grab people and bring them back and settle them down in a place where they could produce. The population problem was solved by capture, especially of women and children, 70% of the population of Athens were slaves, many of them we don’t see because they are in the silver mines which are the source of wealth, but we see lots of women who were incorporated into Athenian society. So that the wars were designed largely to solve the population problem.
Banik It is fascinating, this role of coercion, bondage, slavery. You term these early states as population machines designed to control labour, domesticating them. But one of the many fascinating things is how these early states relied on a staple that could be taxed. Wheat, barley, maize, rice... So, communities that relied on root vegetables could avoid taxation and the wrath of the state.
Scott Correct. And the point that I want to make is that for people who want to keep the state at a distance, the choice of subsistence is one crucial political choice that they can make that minimize the chances of them being attractive to the state for appropriation. If they are pastoralists they move frequently. If they are hunter/gatherers, there is no way to tax them unless you have a tax man follow them every day.
Banik An interesting question that you address in the book is of course why early states broke up. You don't like the word collapse, but maybe break up. You mention extrinsic causes such as drought, but you also argue that more intrinsic causes tell us more about the self-limiting aspects of early states. I was wondering if you could help us better understand these intrinsic causes.
Scott These early states in Mesopotamia, you could walk across them from one end to the other in one day. These are not large states. We're talking at the largest 30-40,000 and that is at their height. The reason is because the mode of transportation limits the transportation for which food can be brought. You can't bring food any further. There are self-limiting transportation obstacles, but then there are also the likelihood of crop failures, areas that are irrigated are over time likely to become more and more saline, so Mesopotamia has a shift from wheat to more and more barley, it becomes a barley state towards end. And it's because barley is more tolerant of salty water, slightly salty water than is wheat. The early state is self-limiting because the population is leaking away because of oppression and disease, crop epidemics, human epidemics, and oppressions like civil wars and taxes that cause people to flee.
Banik I know Burma is very close to your heart and we are currently witnessing one of the most massive non-violent struggles for democracy that we've seen in decades. you've recently written an open letter to the dictator of Myanmar. What is your take on what's going on? How do you see this panning out in the near future?
Scott First I want to emphasise what you said that even compared to Hong Kong, this is the most massive non-violent democratic movement, against brutal execution by military force, lasting now more than two months. It's extraordinary and I wish the international community were more cognisant of the fact that this is quite an exceptional democratic movement and it comes after only less than a decade of a relatively open Burma, with media and so on. I'm rather pessimistic about how this turns out because the regime has more bullets than the population has bodies if it comes to that. I worry that it will be successfully repressed, although one of the results is that this will then be a regime and a military that has lost every shred of legitimacy. It is hated pretty much universally by the entire population. It will be a regime that will have to rule a totally opposed population that holds it in contempt by simple brute force. I want to also mention by the way, on your podcast, that a number of us in effort to strengthen the strike of public sector workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, we have a website where we raise money to give them subsistence support so that they can continue the strike. The website is: www.mutualaidmyanmar.org. We've already sent something like 200,000 dollars to help support the strikers in Burma who are also thinking of. It will also be important to find refuge for scholars who are in hiding or running away to Thailand, to find a place to continue their work and activity in a safe place until it's possible for them to go back to a freer society.
Banik I've learnt so much from you and I'm extremely grateful for your friendship and thank you so much for everything you've done for me and for coming on my show today.
Scott I haven't done very much for you and I've learned a lot from your own work as a brilliant extension of Amartya Sen's work and following it meticulously. I treasure our friendship as well and hope that it will be possible to meet in the not so distant future in person.
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Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banik from the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment@gmail.com.