Comparative Political Corruption

Politics & Social Sciences

James C. Scott

Politics & Government

PRENTICE/HALL

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics―the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not―and cannot―be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

History

World

Yale University Press

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics (Asia's Transformations/Critical Asian Scholarship)

Routledge

Everyday Forms Of Peasant Resistance In South-east Asia

Benedict J. Kerkvliet

Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet

JAMES AND BENEDICT KERKVILET SCOTT

Taylor & Francis Group

An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative 
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family - all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. 
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.

Against the Grain

Ancient Civilizations

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Die Mühlen der Zivilisation

Suhrkamp Verlag

Seeing Like A State:How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Chinese Edition)

Social Science Academic Press

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have field the projects of the organised state societies that surround them slavery, conscription, taxes, corvee labour, epidemics and warfare. Significantly, writes James C.Scott in this iconoclastic study, these people are not innocent who have yet to benefit from all that civilization has to offer; they have assessed state-based civilizations and have made a conscious choice to avoid them. The book is essentially an anarchist history , the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making that evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agriculture practices that enhance mobiliy; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. The Art of Not Being Governed challenges us with a radically different approach to history that views events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of internal colonialism. In contrast to the Western ideal of the social contract as fundamental to state-making Scott finds the disturbing mechanism of subjugation to be more in line with the historical facts in mainland area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-bushmen. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. Along the way he redefines our views on Asian politics, history, and demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization.

Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Asia

Orient Blackswan

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Books by James C. Scott