Undeniably, one of the rare characteristics of James C. Scott's scholarship is that his analytical insights are widely recognized in many fields beyond political science and Asian studies. Scott's contributions to the vast literatures of agrarian and environmental studies, the theory of hegemony and resistance, development studies, postcolonial studies, state formation, and anarchism, to name just a few, are recognized by scholars of diverse disciplines as new standards that challenge widely accepted assumptions and theories and reveal underappreciated aspects and untold narratives of social history—particularly for those who, under normal conditions, do not raise their voice and did not have letters to leave records.
While Scott's academic career has been long and widely celebrated, my task in this essay is rather short and limited. This essay appreciates Scott's scholarship from a perspective of political economy. For many followers of Scott's work, the most obvious place to start in discussing political economy is The Moral Economy of the Peasant.Footnote 1 In that book, the economics of subsistence is placed center stage in understanding the dynamics of agrarian politics. Scott's focus on subsistence allows him to carefully situate actors in social relations and ecological contexts. This perspective has been consistently present in his other works as well. Scott has established his fame as the foremost social scientist of agrarian politics, patron-client relationships,Footnote 2 and theories of domination and resistance.Footnote 3 What might not be as widely recognized is Scott's highly original approach to political economy: the incorporation of social relations and ecological contexts into the analysis of political economy. Throughout his prolific and celebrated academic life—most notably in The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State,Footnote 4 and Against the Grain,Footnote 5 he has paid exceptionally close attention to how actors’ social relations and ecological contexts inform their decisions and behavior.
Before plunging in, however, it is worth describing the context of Scott's early education, gap-year experiences in Southeast Asia and Europe, and choice of discipline in graduate school, which, taken together, nurtured the formative context of his scholarship. Scott received a liberal arts education at Williams College, where he was a political economy honors student and wrote his senior thesis on Burmese economic development. Upon graduation, he spent a year in Burma on a Rotary Club International scholarship. While there, Scott applied to the Yale economics department and was accepted, but he had a chance to study for a year in Paris, funded by the National Student Association. He again postponed his graduate work at Yale when he was elected international vice president of the National Student Association for a year. Toward the end of that year, he was given a chance to join a youth trade union delegation on a trip through North Africa. Yale's economics department, however, wanted him to spend the summer taking advanced calculus before entering. Scott appealed to the department to let him take the calculus along with his coursework. They refused. He appealed again. But they refused again. So, he had to choose. He asked the economics department to send his papers over to the political science department to see whether they would accept him. They did.
What follows is divided into four sections. First, I underscore Scott's wholly original way of bringing social and ecological contexts into political economy analysis. His approach, firmly grounded in agrarian political economy, marks a significant departure from classical political economy. Second, I examine two distinctive features of Scott's political economy—actors’ relations and positionality in social relations and ecological contexts. Third, I discuss what it takes to incorporate Scott's insight into political economy. I argue that the perspective of close and astute observation of social and ecological contexts is required to grasp the complexity of the interwoven social-ecological contexts in which human and nonhuman actors organize life and make worlds. Lastly, I explain why political economists need to keep James Scott (perhaps against his will) in their field.
The Political Economy Debate
To appreciate the originality of Scott's political economy approach is to understand how radically it departs from the conventional wisdom about one of the long-standing questions—how human beings organize life—which has been prominently articulated by classical political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. Their worldview, both essentialist and utilitarian, analytically sets economy free from social and ecological relations and constraints, virtually renders individuals’ interests identifiable and calculable, and foregrounds individuals’ self-interests or rational propensity as the universal principle of human behavior. With such assumptions, classical political economy explains causal effects by pairing interests, behavior, and outcomes through deductive reasoning. While it may identify causal effects and outcomes among selected variables, classical political economy leaves out complex multilevel interactions among variables and brackets any contingent, informal, or particular interests, relations, and situations from the analytical models. It is in this regard that Karl Polanyi provides a critical perspective on classical political economy.
Polanyi's perspective is distinguished from classical political economy by its incorporation of social-ecological contexts into political economy analysis. In The Great Transformation, this is succinctly summarized as follows: “economic motives spring from the context of social life.”Footnote 6 Polanyi's use of Bronisław Malinowski's anthropological research is a case in point. In a tribal society in the Trobriand Islands of western Melanesia, self-interest was rarely paramount because social institutions—based on reciprocity and redistribution—were arranged so as to keep all members from starvation. In such a situation, Polanyi maintains, the maintenance of social ties was crucial. Disregarding differences in social-ecological contexts, classical political economists assume that all people are inherently “economic man.” Polanyi rejects this tenuous assumption, which renders the difference between the capitalist propensity and other proclivities of human behavior a matter of time lags—that is, people in a tribal society were yet to develop a capitalist propensity. This does not mean that economic motivations were absent in tribal communities, but simply that they were submerged in social relations. Instead of time lags, Polanyi reveals the consistent pattern of humans’ propensity for survival in “societies of all times and places; and the necessary preconditions of the survival of human society appear to be immutably the same,” thus people “value material goods only in so far as they serve this end.”Footnote 7
Scott's political economy approach echoes Polanyi's; both are rooted in the integrated view of economy embedded in society and environment. One of the key advantages of Scott's political economy over classical political economy is that it captures the wholeness rather than limiting the analytical scope and relying on deductive reasoning; it describes in detail the complexity of social and ecological contexts/relations culminating in actual events under contingent and uncertain conditions. This advantage is gained by calling into question two widely accepted assumptions in classical political economy. First, Scott rejects the modernist assumption that the pursuit of self-interests is innate in humans whose search for freedom leads society toward progress or civilization. Instead of seeing interests as given, Scott examines how actors’ positionality in the power relations and ecological niches they occupy shapes the formation of preferences. Second, instead of seeing the economic sphere as autonomous from the social sphere, Scott pays close attention to social and ecological contexts that could threaten the survival of actors whose livelihoods are dependent on their relations to power holders (e.g., the state, local elites, and landlords) and natural environments (e.g., extreme weather patterns that could cause floods, droughts, and crop diseases). In other words, actors organize life in social and ecological contexts over which they have little control. Taken together, Scott's political economy, firmly grounded in agrarian political economy, maintains that actors’ interests and practice of acting on them are not paired as causal effects but rather are contingent on interactions among social relations, cultural values, and natural environments in which they organize their life.Footnote 8
Incorporating Social and Ecological Contexts into Political Economy
Scott's political economy is distinctively original. It captures actors’ relations with society and ecology as a whole. Two features are crucial. First, Scott's political economy pays close attention to the social and ecological contexts in which actors organize life. In Scott's work, subsistence receives abundant attention. Subsistence entails human efforts to form social relations and to modify the environment to secure and meet basic needs. It interweaves social and ecological contexts to form a complex reality in which humans organize life. In this sense, the focus on subsistence successfully places the interactions between society and ecology in the formation of social norms and cultural values that help establish social institutions of securing subsistence.
In Moral Economy, Scott skillfully connects peasants to social structures/relations and their natural environments while capturing the relations and dynamics between peasants, natural landscapes, markets, and the state. By employing rich ethnographic and historical accounts, Scott ably shows that subsistence is at the core of economic and ecological dilemmas that decisively shape peasants’ political and social life. The peasant who shares “a common existential dilemma”—low income, little land, large family, highly variable yields, and few outside opportunities—adopts a safety-first principle that prioritizes “the need for a reliable subsistence as the primordial goal of the peasant cultivator” and then examines “his relationships to his neighbors, to elites, and to the state in terms of whether they aid or hinder him in meeting that need.”Footnote 9 The economics of subsistence suggests that it is not the peasant's level of material well-being but his perception of the problem—i.e., the violation of the norm of reciprocity and the right to subsistence—that may cause peasant rebellions.
The focus on social and ecological contexts puts the self-interest principle and the civilizational narrative in a new perspective. In Against the Grain, Scott calls into question the superiority and attractiveness of sedentary life growing a few grains in fixed fields over mobile forms of subsistence—hunting, foraging, and pastoralizing. If hunters and foragers were economic man whose interests centered on the production of surplus crops, they would have chosen a settled agriculture way of life as soon as domesticated crops and animals first appeared. In history, however, hunters and foragers did not immediately abandon their modes of subsistence; there is a breathtaking four-thousand-year gap between the first appearance of domesticated crops and animals and the coalescing of agro-pastoral societies.Footnote 10 This gap begs explanation. As Scott argues, the fact that multiple subsistence options were available to hunters and foragers meant that they did not need to risk making a quick transition to settled agriculture; they most likely experimented with early sedentism while maintaining multiple subsistence options. “Rather than relying on only a small bandwidth of food resources,” writes Scott, “they seem to have been opportunistic generalists with a large portfolio of subsistence options spread across several food webs.”Footnote 11 Here, what secures subsistence, calculated in consideration of contingency and uncertainty in natural environments, lies at the heart of the decision-making principle.
Second, Scott's political economy highlights actors’ positionality in social and ecological contexts. This means that actors’ interests and practice of acting on them are formed and shaped by the social relations, institutions, and ecological contexts in which actors are embedded. The contexts in which certain actors come to form certain social relations (e.g., patron-client relations) and occupy ecological niches (e.g., wetlands, uplands, or valleys) provide important information and clues as to how and why these actors have certain cultural values, social norms, and expectations about the behaviors of others.
In Moral Economy, peasants’ efforts to meet basic needs have led to the creation of various technical and social arrangements—for example, the local tradition of seed varieties, planting techniques, reciprocity, forced generosity, communal land, and work sharing—that are intended to solve the problem of starvation. Crucially, these arrangements develop along with supportive social norms and cultural values in historically and culturally specific contexts. The goal of meeting subsistence needs is always embedded in social and ecological contexts in which the peasant is guided not by self-interests but by “a fund of moral values, a set of concrete social relationships, a pattern of expectations about the behavior of others, and a sense of how those in his culture have proceeded to similar goals in the past.”Footnote 12 The subsistence ethic, then, is “a shared moral universe, a common notion of what is just.”Footnote 13 The cause of peasant rebellions is not so much unequal exchange or exploitation but the violation of the norms of reciprocity and the right to subsistence that hold together a community despite the presence of unequal exchange and exploitation.
In sum, capturing the wholeness—that is, actors’ relations and positionality in social and ecological contexts—is the distinctive feature of Scott's political economy.
The Art of Life- and World-Making
How can political economy be the practice of science that is concerned with capturing the wholeness of actors’ relations to and positionality in social and ecological contexts rather than simplifying the complexity? How can young scholars develop an integrated analytical framework that incorporates not only interests but also the contingent and uncertain nature of human behavior?
It seems to be crucial to abandon human-centric views that give greater privilege to social actors. Scott's work revisits the human-centric views that the ability and intention of actors and the state to modify the environment to their liking,Footnote 14 and that civilization is associated exclusively with sedentary agricultural way of life governed by the state.Footnote 15 Political economy that excludes nonhuman factors—that is, natural environments, including nonhuman species—considers itself to be “a human science; it should deal with that which was natural to man, not to Nature.”Footnote 16 This represents a human conceit; “Progress is embedded . . . in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human.”Footnote 17 Indeed, intention not only hides miserable failures of the state's administrative ordering of society and nature according to abstract knowledge—for example, such projects as villagization and scientific forestryFootnote 18—but also fails us to recognize the wholeness of relations in life- and world-making.
There is, I think, a humble and sensible understanding of social and ecological contexts that underpins Scott's political economy. The subsistence focus suggests that human efforts to make lives interweave complex relations by forming, modifying, and rearranging social and ecological contexts. In doing so, human actors form, modify, and rearrange social and ecological contexts. Yet humans’ life- and world-making efforts are not the only plan for making worlds. As Anna Tsing argues, “World-making projects emerge from practical activities of making lives,” including precivilizational and preindustrial modes of subsistence.Footnote 19 Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, foragers, and shifting cultivators, Scott writes, are not “subspecies of Homo sapiens, with each marking a stage of human progress” but are “better understood as defining a spectrum of subsistence activities, not separate peoples.”Footnote 20 Human agency is not based solely on rational calculation but derives from humans' interactions with other humans and nonhumans, including fauna and flora, nature, science, and technology. As Timothy Mitchell wrote, “As one unravels these interwoven forces, human agency appears less as a calculating intelligence directing social outcomes and more as the product of a series of alliances in which the human element is never wholly in control.”Footnote 21 In the process of making lives and worlds, individual interests are often not a good guide for predicting how people will behave. Because of the complex and interwoven nature of social-ecological contexts, the outcomes of social interventions defy the expected outcomes calculated from interests, intentions, and plans. An integrated framework of political economy analysis ought to grasp in detail the complexity of social and ecological contexts and process in which relations lead to real events.
In accordance with Scott,Footnote 22 the state logic of planning disentangles, reduces, and abstracts complex relations of diverse local realities through centralization, simplification, and standardization. By contrast, the art of life- and world-making is skilled at noticing the complexity of interwoven social-ecological contexts in which human and nonhuman actors organize life and make worlds. Recognizing existential threats and living so close to subsistence levels prepare them to be astute observers of their social and ecological contexts in a particular locality. Local knowledge that safeguards minimum living standards are firmly grounded in the context of particular places in which actors organize life. Social-ecological diversity and redundancy that defy the forces of simplification and standardization are the guiding principle in the art of life- and world-making.
Conclusion
Political economy ought not to be a human science but an integrated science of practice. This requires a perspective of close and astute observation of social and ecological contexts. The complex and interwoven nature of social and ecological contexts in which actors operate not only imposes limits and threats on human and nonhuman actors but also allows them to operate in a certain manner. Therefore, it is crucial to grasp the wholeness of relations in the contexts. For young scholars, this means while abstraction and universality might be attractive qualities for a science of politics, it is far more important to develop contextual knowledge that can only be gleaned from the close and astute observation of one local reality. Contextual knowledge is then an analytical method that is adaptive to changing environments and enables us to capture the wholeness of relations.
In the end, I suspect, Scott might not wish to be called a “political economist.” Yet, perhaps more than this, it might be the case that political economists need to keep Scott in their field because, regardless of one's stance on the ideological continuum from Marxism to liberalism, his insights cut across the differences and bring together all kinds of political economists. For that, he certainly deserves the title.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Association for Asian Studies panel “Power and Agency: James C. Scott's Contributions to Asian Studies” and to write this piece for the JAS. I thank Meredith Weiss, Pamela McElwee, Eric Tagliacozzo, Ronald Herring, Shafqat Hussain, Shaila Seshia Galvin, Vinayak Chaturvedi, and the two anonymous reviewers for the JAS. I am also grateful to James Scott for his seminal scholarship and inspiration for this piece.
