James C. Scott

James Campbell Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative politics and was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies. Trained as a political scientist, his scholarship examined peasant societies, state power, and political resistance, and from 1968 to 1985 he wrote influentially on agrarian politics in peninsular Malaysia; his later work, while retaining a lifelong interest in Southeast Asia and peasantries, ranged across quiet forms of political resistance, the failures of state-led social transformation, the techniques non-state societies use to avoid state control, everyday uses of anarchist principles, and the rise of early agricultural states. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he held the title of Sterling Professor of Political Science and, from 1991, directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies; at his death, the New York Times described him as among the most widely read social scientists.