How James Scott Changed the Way I Thought about Everything from B-29s to Orcs

We have been remiss in failing to comment about the life and career of the late, great James Scott. For those not familiar with him the New York Times obit is pretty good. Henry Farrell also has much to say about Scott’s influence, as does Meredith Weiss. Here I’ll try briefly to explain why Scott was important to me and my career, something that many would consider odd given that Scott was a comparativist/political theorist and I’m quite firmly in the international relations/security studies subfield.

Weapons of the Weak didn’t precisely transform how I thought about resistance, partially because I think its central lessons quickly became ambient and thus part of the background of accounts of power and resistance. Seeing Like a State, on the other hand, absolutely transformed how I thought about what the modern state is and how the state functions. It had a significant influence on my first book, Grounded, and I think that there’s still plenty of room for the security studies community to dig into its insights; military organizations are nothing if not exercises in high modernist state-building. For that matter, I think that the security studies community could also learn a lot from Weapons of the Weak, especially with respect to the development and practice of nodes of resistance within large organizations.

The Art of Not Being Governed hasn’t really affected my academic work, but it has certainly transformed how I think about states, statebuilding projects, and geography. Although Scott’s focus in Southeast Asia, it’s not at all difficult to import his observations in Appalachia or the American West. Ancient history is also a hobby/fixation of mine (I am one of those dudes who does literally think about the Roman Empire many times per day) and The Art of Not Being Governed gave me a much better understanding of how and why ancient states functioned. The biggest (and weirdest) impact of the Art of Not Being Governed on my life has, however, been on how I think about Dungeons and Dragons. It didn’t just give me a sense of how to get better at world-building (although it certainly helped with that), but it also helped me work out a better understanding of how the classic D&D races fit together in a political and social environment. “This book will change how you think about orcs” would probably have sounded to Scott like a very strange recommendation, but it really did transform how I thought about orcs. To give the briefest example… in the classic vision of D&D, the half-orc most typically results from the rape of a human female by a rampaging orcish raider (this is more or less explicitly suggested in early D&D manuals). Once you read Scott, you come to grasp that much of the contact between humans and orcs would come from humans fleeing sedentary agricultural settlements into the spaces (mountains, deserts) where orcs live, which opens entire new vistas for both races and makes half-orcs a helluva lot more interesting. You also get a sense of why orcs (who when they’re not raiding are almost certainly slash and burn agriculturalists) come into conflict so often with elves, who have a completely different understanding of the management of forest environments. Consider this, from Scott:

A Chin story, collected at the turn of the century, blames Burmese deceit for the group’s illiteracy. The Chin were, like other races, born from 101 eggs. As the last born, the Chin were most loved, but the earth was already apportioned, and they were given the remaining mountains and its animals. The Burmese guardian appointed over them cheated them of elephants (a royal symbol) and showed them the blank back side of a writing slate so that they never learned even a single letter.

And this from Roger Moore, Dragon Magazine 62, 1982 (no, not that Roger Moore)

In the beginning all the gods met and drew lots for the parts of the world in which their representative races would dwell. The human gods drew the lot that allowed humans to dwell where they pleased, in any environment. The elven gods drew the green forests, the dwarven gods drew the high mountains, the gnomish gods the rocky, sunlit hills, and the halfling gods picked the lot that gave them the fields and meadows. Then the assembled gods turned to the orcish gods and laughed loud and long. “All the lots are taken!” they said tauntingly. “Where will your people dwell, OneEye? There is no place left!” There was silence upon the world then, as Gruumsh One-Eye lifted his great iron spear and stretched it forth over the world. The shaft blotted out the sun over a great part of the lands as he spoke: “No. You lie. You have rigged the drawing of the lots, hoping to cheat me and my followers. But One-Eye never sleeps; One-Eye sees all. There is a place for orcs to dwell . . . here!” With that, Gruumsh struck the forests with his spear, and a part of them withered with rot. “And here!” he bellowed, and his spear pierced the mountains, opening mighty rifts and chasms. “And here!” and the spearhead split the hills and made them shake and covered them in dust. “And here!” and the black spear gouged the meadows, and made them barren. “There!” roared He- Who-Watches triumphantly, and his voice carried to the ends of the world. “There is where the orcs shall dwell! There they shall survive, and multiply, and grow stronger, and a day shall come when they cover the world, and shall slay all of your collected peoples! Orcs shall inherit the world you sought to cheat me of!

Anyway. Good social science (and good writing) touches us in ways that we don’t always expect.

A final note… Scott himself recognized that he no longer had much of a home in political science in a biographical essay he wrote shortly before his passing:

I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me. I am honored even to be seen as a specialist, and probably as much to be embraced by anthropology and history.

Political science in the way that James Scott practiced the discipline is effectively dead. Back when I first read Scott in graduate school it seemed as if there was still a fight to be fought about whether the future of the discipline would be qualitative or quantitative, data driven or interpretive, etc. In retrospect this kind of thinking was a category error; the direction of the discipline was being driven by technology, in particular the wide availability of computers and software that were powerful enough to run and manage large datasets. We could debate King, Keohane, and Verba until the orcs came home but the qualitative political science was a dead end as soon as everyone could run big regressions on their home laptop. Not much in political science today changes the way that you think about politics; the discipline has become, in important but identifiable ways, smaller. James Scott thought big thoughts about big things, and political science unfortunately no longer seems to be capable of thinking big.