There's nothing particularly wrong with the valley understanding of the agro-ecology, social organization, and mobility of the peoples who elude them. They've sorted these people, as it were, into the right bins. In addition to radically misunderstanding the historical sequence, however, they have got their labels wrong. If they merely substituted “state-subject” for “civilized” and “not-a-state-subject” for “uncivilized,” they'd have it just about right” (p. 337).
This is the last paragraph of James Scott's important book The Art of Not Being Governed. The paragraph is a bit immodest, but is also a bit disarming. It may lead us to think that the main theme of the book is to demonstrate that there are nonstate peoples who are “civilized,” or to rid us of the idea of “civilization,” or even more contestably, to hold that contrary to the conventional wisdom, civilization has been a disaster, and that humanity would have been better off had we not become civilized and maintained, per impossible, the condition of statelessness—anarchy.
Civilization, of course, derived from city, those urban centers that had an expanded division of labor—including manual laborers but also poets, priests, and philosophers—and were early or proto-states (“city-states”). It is no doubt widely assumed that civilization is much to be preferred and that it requires a state. Yet there have also been some dissenters from this view. Rousseau, usually misread, is one. In his wonderful 1754 Dissertation on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, he wrote that it was “society and the law” that
bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness.Footnote 1
Rousseau erred, to be sure, in his picture of the prestate condition. Scott makes considerable headway in drawing on the ethnographic literature of Southeast Asia to give us a persuasive picture of not the “prestate” but the nonstate condition. Prestate is just plain wrong since, as he insists, not only are there still nonstates (his area of concern is “Zomia”—a very large nonstate space in upland Southeast Asia),Footnote 2 but that until at least 1945, a nonstate condition was also a real option (p. 7). Indeed, his “hill people” are not “pristine stateless,” but “better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject; and perhaps even postliterate” (p. 337).
Scott certainly aims to undermine the “barbarian/civilized” dichotomy and, most critically, he agrees with Rousseau that there are three fundamental features of nonstate peoples that are of huge normative as well as historical relevance: Nonstate peoples do not alienate their sovereignty to a chief, king, or elected regime; in nonstates labor is not alienated, and the immediate producers maintain control of production; and, finally, in nonstates there is a relatively low degree of inequality.
These three features would figure heavily in any attempt to weigh the costs and benefits of the state and thus of civilization as we conventionally understand this. But if Scott may occasionally betray some nostalgia for the nonstate—it is hard to see how to entirely avoid this—nothing in the book suggests that whether or not to “opt for civilization” is a useful question.
These three features, of course, dominated a rich and until recently vital tradition of what may be termed “left-wing” anarchist theory, including much twentieth-century Marxist as well as non- and sometimes anti-Marxist political theory.Footnote 3 Rousseau, a precursor of this tradition, thought that there was a way out—a poststate condition consistent with civilization, in the best senses of this term. For Rousseau, the way out was the “social contract” as he understood it—a very strong form of democracy. Later, left-wing anarchists thought in terms of “smashing the state” and constructing from its remains highly civilized and radically democratic societies.
Scott's book is relevant to this broad tradition of political theory, a tradition well worth revisiting. But we need first to consider some of the details of his argument. And when we do, we will see that his analysis offers a bracing account of the forces that render such an anarchism impossible as a wholesale alternative to the state—at the same time that it profoundly supports the normative and aspirational aspects of the anarchist critique of the modern coercive state.
The State
Perhaps oddly, given the importance of the concept to his project, Scott simply takes for granted the idea of the state. He refers to all kinds of states—kingdoms, the classical state, the colonial state, the nation-state, the padi state—but, as far as I can see, he does not make any effort at a definition of the state as such. To be sure, the concept of the state is used by writers with varying theoretical predispositions, but if we are to be as clear as possible, even if we have a fuzzy concept with unavoidable imprecision, we need to make the effort to specify the concept of the state. For present needs, two features suffice: States are forms of political organization in which there are rulers and ruled, and the rulers seek to monopolize coercive power within a given territory, often unclearly defined; and, critically, rulers require legitimation if their roles are to be reproduced.
Historically, the foundation of state power and legitimacy has varied, along with the forms and extent of bureaucracy, the degree of centralization, and the ability of rulers to sustain or extend territorial dominance. Indeed, two of the most successful achievements of the modern democratic state are its ability to mask power and to act so as to monumentally affect the everyday life of its residents with an authority that is almost never questioned.Footnote 4 This was not always the case. Indeed, as John Dewey remarked in a similar context, “for long periods of human history … the state is hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood by remote personages…. It rules but does not regulate.”Footnote 5
What Scott calls “the pre-colonial state” others have called the “complex” or “paramount state” or “the archaic state.”Footnote 6 So understood, the padi state is simply the Southeast Asian version of the archaic state centered on a rice-based political economy. Scott seems also to think of chiefdoms as states. Other writers, while recognizing that chiefdoms are stratified and that the king or chief has authority, distinguish chiefdoms and early states.Footnote 7
Applying a distinction between chiefdoms and early states is even more essential when we recognize that such political structures are imitative “in the sense that while they may have all the trappings of and rhetoric of a monarchy, they lack the substance: a taxpaying subject population or direct control over their constituent units, let alone a standing army” (p. 22). Similarly, a headman or chief may be someone without power or authority: No one accepts his decisions or “commands” (p. 213). This is surely the test of a nonstate. Clifford Geertz extends this idea, arguing that “what was high centralization representationally was enormous dispersion institutionally,”Footnote 8 to which Scott correctly adds, “as if symbolic centralization could serve as a counterweight to the limits of ‘hard’ power” (p. 308).Footnote 9 Of course, this is true of all states, democratic or otherwise—something to which I will return.
Scott's Metatheory
By metatheory, I mean an approach to inquiry, including assumptions about epistemology, the role of theory, and the nature of evidence—the “ontology” of society, how it is to be conceived, whether is has a sui-generic existence or has, rather, a virtual existence, incarnate in the actions of persons. A metatheory also includes assumptions in the “philosophy” of history—whether, for example, history is filled with contingencies or whether things are pretty much “determined”—and, lastly, assumptions about how explanation is conceived.Footnote 10 Most social scientists, to be sure, are not particularly self-conscious about such matters, but I would nonetheless insist that any social scientific practice presupposes a metatheory that guides inquiry.
Scott is clearer on such matters than most. He is, first of all, very much agency oriented: For him, everything that happens in “society” and history, including the genesis, reproduction, and transformation of beliefs, practices, and institutions, is the consequence—sometimes intended but mostly unintended—of persons acting and interacting. Moreover, agents always have choices, but these are constrained and enabled by their situations, both “objectively” and as perceived. This grounds his interdisciplinary approach and his radical social constructionist view of politics. And since agents may be mistaken about the conditions and consequences of what they are doing, it also grounds the possibility of ideology and the critique of ideology.
The importance of these assumptions runs throughout the book. A few examples must here suffice:
Once we entertain the possibility that the “barbarians” are not just “there” as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy, the standard civilization story of social evolution collapses utterly (p. 8).
Usually, forms of subsistence and kinship are taken as given, as ecologically and culturally determined. By analyzing various forms of cultivation, particular crops, certain social structures, and physical mobility patterns for their escape value, I treat such givens as political choices (p. xi).
In a similar vein, Scott also takes issue with current sympathizers of nonstate peoples, who often see them as having no choices: “The tale is one of unjust victimization” (p. 172). His account consistently and resolutely underscores the agency and responsibility of the peoples he studies; indeed, in some ways his analysis offers a heroic narrative of resistance to the encroachment of state authority.
History and the Disciplines of the Social Sciences
Scott offers that, for better or for worse, in the course of his research for this book he became “a kind of historian” (p. xi). I thus take the opportunity here briefly to consider what his work teaches us about the “disciplines” of the human sciences.
Plainly, the book is historical in that it draws on a wealth of data regarding specific, concrete, historical societies. But in one important sense, Scott's account is strikingly ahistorical, for it offers no history of any of the societies he discusses, including the minority populations of Zomia. Such a history would require a chronological narrative of the genesis of such a population and an account at least of the key events and structures that comprise its evolution and constitute its history. Such an account of “uncivilized” and nonliterate societies would surely be difficult, and probably not worth Scott's efforts. For while he draws on history, his book is better conceived as a work of historical sociology. And, like all useful historical sociology, its interdisciplinary character is its most outstanding feature.
Scott seems to have immersed himself in the literature of nonstate societies, to have seen some important patterns, and to have developed some anthropological, sociological, and political-economic hypotheses. These enabled him to construct a model of nonstate society that the archeological and ethnographic evidence supports. The model does not seek to explain events—as most good historical accounts purport to do. Rather, it provides an understanding of nonstate societies, which also promotes our understanding of the many historical forms of states. This is solid comparative and historical social science.Footnote 11 Scott remarks, modestly, that “there is nothing original here” and that what he has done is “to see a kind of immanent order or argument in a good many of the sources I canvassed and to draw the argument out to see how far it would take me” (p. xi). And if he is mostly right (and he makes a convincing case), it is not just the history of Southeast Asia that needs revision: Every history of any state will need to reckon with his analysis.
Some Critical Features of the Model
“The permanent association of the state and sedentary agriculture is the center of this story,” Scott asserts (p. 9). This much is widely agreed to. But questions of causality may be raised.Footnote 12 He continues: “Fixed field grain agriculture has been promoted by the state and has been, historically, the foundation of its power. In turn, sedentary agriculture leads to property rights in land, the patriarchal family enterprise, and an emphasis, also encouraged by the state, on large families” (p. 9).Footnote 13 Scott is not clear here, but a resolution of causal questions is available if agents are seen as causes Thus, the material or cultural conditions—or both taken together—do not determine outcomes. Rather, they enable and constrain action. For example, instead of saying that sedentary agriculture “leads to” property rights in land, we should say that it enables property rights in land. That is, agents can use these materials to transform the condition in which they find themselves—or they may not. The outcome of the process can be both very slow and at least partly unintended. And it may altogether fail—a point emphasized by Scott. This, of course, is what makes historical change contingent!Footnote 14
There is a causal priority suggested by Scott's reference to “the foundation” of the power of the state, however. State formation and reproduction is powerfully constrained in the absence of sedentary agriculture as, of course, it is promoted when agents have property rights and when existing practices include stratification, a written language, and large families. Put in other terms, none of these “factors” are necessary or sufficient conditions of outcomes. Action is always constrained and enabled by the complex concrete situation faced by actors. And, of course, not only do their acts have unintended consequences but they may also be motivated “irrationally” as well as “rationally.”Footnote 15
One strange omission requires some comment here. Scott makes no attempt to confront the arguments regarding patriarchy made by Gerda Lerner.Footnote 16 Since she held that sedentary agriculture enabled the creation of patriarchy as an unintended consequence, the problem is not so much whether patriarchy precedes sedentary agriculture and the state but concerns her argument that the critical move is the shift from women's reproductive capacity as a “tribal” resource to a property relation. This leads to her claim that “the oppression of women antedates slavery and makes it possible” (Lerner Reference Lerner1986, p. 77). Scott's correct emphasis on the role of slavery in solving the problem of manpower shortages makes this omission all the more surprising.
The concept of “state effect” is critical to Scott's model. Not only is the relation of nonstate peoples to state peoples “symbiotic” (p. 26), but hill people are also “barbarians by design.” “They continue to conduct a brisk and mutually advantageous trade with lowland centers while steering clear of being politically captured” (p. 8). Indeed:
Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples—their location at the margins, their physical mobility, their swidden agriculture, their flexible social structure, their religious heterodoxy, their egalitarianism and even their nonliterate, oral cultures—far from being the mark of primitives left behind in civilization, are better seen on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation. They are, in other words, political adaptations of nonstate peoples in a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening (p. 9).
Scott pursues this, his main thesis, throughout the book. I focus here only on physical mobility and swidden agriculture.
Sedentary agriculture exploits a suitable geography. The lowlands of Zomia fit the bill. As is hardly contestable, if people seek to evade the state, they will go to areas that are difficult to reach and to dominate: in Zomia, the hills. But sedentary agriculture requires a relatively permanent location, and a large manpower engaged in backbreaking work: hence, stratification—including slavery. Wet-rice production also made possible a concentrated density of both population and grain, “placing a relatively stable and dense population at the doorstep of the tax man and the military press gang” (p. 74). So nonstate peoples choose nonsedentary forms of agriculture—in Zomia, swidden agriculture (slash and burn).
There is then also the question of surplus. It is certainly the case that states—even the earliest of them—require massive surpluses. This is a straightforward consequence of the expanded division of labor in states: The administrators, priests, philosophers, and poets must after all eat. It is also often argued that wet-rice agriculture is more “efficient” than shifting cultivation. But, as Scott argues, much depends on what one means by efficiency. Wet-rice cultivation is more productive per unit of land, but is less productive, generally, per unit of labor. But in any case, this misses the main point: The decision whether or not to institutionalize sedentary agriculture and to produce a surplus is political, not economic.Footnote 17
Many writers have also assumed that nonstate societies have no surplus and, hence, that their members live constantly at minimum levels of subsistence. The evidence suggests otherwise. As Scott writes: “Hill societies do produce a surplus, but they do not use that surplus to support kings and monks” (p. 21). Indeed, the analytic point is that where production is social but appropriation is private, the immediate producers must lose control over their product.Footnote 18
States, “Tribes,” and “Nations”
All three of these “realities” are social constructions whose reality depends upon the beliefs of agents in the practices of their everyday lives. But they are different in that for tribes (and nations), “there is no objective genealogical, genetic, linguistic, or cultural formula that will unambiguously distinguish one ‘tribe’ from another” (p. 243).
This suggests also that all three concepts may have ideological roles. Thus, it is by now recognized that “tribes” are constructed and that their genesis owes mostly to the needs of state actors. With reference to Native Americans, A. L. Kroeber long ago had this to say:
The more we review aboriginal America, the less certain does any consistently recurring phenomenon become that matches with our usual conventional concept of tribe; and the more largely does this concept appear to be a White man's creation of convenience for talking about Indians, negotiating with them, administering them—and finally impressed upon their own thinking by our sheer weight.”Footnote 19
As Scott argues, once constructed, tribes have a life of their own, on the side of both colonizers and the colonized, both state and nonstate actors. Indeed, like the constructed concept of “nation,” the idea of “tribe” becomes a weapon in the effort to claim autonomy, resources, and the preservation of a “tribal” group's distinct—and valuable to them, at least—genealogy and culture.
If the construction of identity is a “political project” (p. 259), it is easy to see that it may serve many purposes, including the legitimation of power and the existing or promised social order. This involves what Scott terms, “a kind of genealogical and historical legerdemain” (p. 266). With reference to Zomia, he writes:
While the political realities of competition, usurpation, rebellion, migration, social fission, and fluctuating, plural identities were dizzyingly complex and in constant motion, what Marxists would call the ideological superstructure maintained the appearance of a well-ordered, historically coherent descent group. The formal roles of succession, descent, and precedence were saved by a kind of genealogical and historical legerdemain (pp. 265–66).
Indeed, he continues, “[anthropologist Edmund] Leach makes it abundantly clear that a genealogy can be devised to throw the mantle of legitimacy over virtually any set of actual power relations” (p. 267).
To genealogical legerdemain, however, one must add cultural and historical legerdemain. To be sure, as in Max Weber's scheme, while all states require legitimacy, in the premodern state, a constructed—and manipulated—“tradition” would suffice. In the modern state, the legerdemain will involve myths about “the nation,” consent, popular sovereignty, and even democracy.
The Anarchist Tradition
Beginning with Rousseau, the left-wing anarchist tradition bought none of these myths. For them, the institutions of the state are inherently institutions of domination. The state is thus necessarily antidemocratic. In democracies, the people rule themselves, but because they are necessarily interdependent, decisions regarding the conditions of everyday life must be made collectively. I include in this “tradition” not only William Godwin, Prince Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Gustav Landauer, and Martin Buber but also the Marx of the Paris Commune and the Lenin of State and Revolution. But perhaps even more contestably, I include John Dewey, perhaps the most helpful of the antistate theorists.Footnote 20
The first question raised provocatively by Scott's work was perhaps first raised by Rousseau: What explains the relative ease by which most ordinary people accept the myths and ideologies that keep them, if not in chains, then at least in conditions that are manifestly unjust and irrational? Coercion is always available and it will be used, but even coercion presupposes “authority,” and this is all that is needed to secure the obedience of most people.
It is just this authority of the state that is radically undermined by nonstate peoples and by anarchist theory. The most obvious point of relevance of Scott's work to this body of theory is that there are countless real societies that have escaped this trap and that, in consequence, have realized the three fundamental features of nonstate peoples identified earlier. Scott establishes empirically the continuing existence of nonstate peoples who do not alienate their sovereignty to a chief, king, or elected regime, who maintain a condition in which the immediate producers maintain control of production, and who, finally, maintain a condition in which there is a relatively low degree of inequality.
While this provides solid evidence that the nonstate is possible, Scott's work also makes clear that the conditions that enabled the existence of nonstate peoples are gone,Footnote 21 and it is just not plausible to think that they could ever be restored. This may make the nonstate a utopian idea in the worst sense of “utopian.”Footnote 22 I say “worst sense” here to distinguish two possibilities: a vision that is consistent with what we know about humans and historically real human societies and a vision that is not possible to realize given what we know.Footnote 23 Scott's book shows us that there is nothing in human nature or in what we know of society as such that forbids the possibility of the nonstate. The only question, then, is whether there are some other conditions that would enable a revival of the nonstate. One such condition would seem to be the subversion of the idea that states are essential to human transactions with nature and with other humans. Here, critical social science, exemplified by Scott's work, has a positive role to play in demystifying long-standing political prejudices about states. Moreover, as he demonstrates, just as there is nothing inevitable about change in the past, there is nothing inevitable about the future, even while, to be sure, present tendencies favor some outcomes—all disastrous—over others.
It is here that the idea of human agency and of utopian thought has its greatest importance. First, just as what occurs today—like yesterday—is the mostly unintended product of human choices, so too different choices will engender different outcomes, even if we cannot foresee them in advance. Second, we need to distinguish utopias as “blueprints” from utopias as visions.
Utopian blueprints betray the contingency of change and history. But utopian thought at its best is visionary—anticipatory and aspirational—without offering blueprints. Such political thinking, centered on articulating abstract but realizable ideals that can guide practice, is indeed absolutely essential to human freedom. For example, if we believe in self-rule, we must see that the idea is made nonsensical by our current practices, which do little to encourage any sort of participation. Karl MannheimFootnote 24 was quite correct to insist that if there is any hope that we can shape history, then “reality-transcending” ideals are necessary. With Mannheim, we should be more than fearful of the belief, so taken for granted these days, that anarchism or socialism or even a strong form of democracy is utopian in the sense of being an impossible ideal. Such a view—and its corollaries, that “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal capitalist state and that we inhabit a “posthistorical” era—reproduces a visionless politics, whose only goal is to maintain a manifestly less-than-ideal status quo.Footnote 25 As he saw long ago, “the disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing.”Footnote 26
Scott's work shows that we are agents and that our conduct and our lives are more than mere effects of political instrumentalities. It thus keeps alive a vision of a more just world in which persons actively participate in making those decisions that determine the conditions of everyday life.
