Obituary for James C. Scott

The WZB mourns the death of James C. Scott. The American political scientist died on July 19 at the age of 87. The WZB honored the political scientist and anthropologist with the A.SK Social Science Award 2021 for his lifelong research on self-organization and the resistance of local communities.

The American political scientist James C. Scott stands for creativity, curiosity, and an open mind. For generations of researchers, the political thinker was a source of inspiration. He was a brilliant scholar, and a mentor who often helped researchers take a more global view. Scott’s work transcends disciplinary boundaries and explores the limits of government intervention and economic policy based on his field research on rural communities in Southeast Asia.

At the core of James C. Scott’s attention lay the organization and self-organization of humans within a society. His account of the processes of domestication ran counter to conventional narratives. In his book “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)”, Scott described the emergence of states to be chiefly a cause of epidemics and slavery. His overall concern was with subjects’ resistance to dominion and with anarchy.

In 2021, James C. Scott received the A.SK Social Science Award at the WZB, one of the most highly endowed international prizes in the social sciences.The international jury, chaired by WZB Director Dorothea Kübler, called James C. Scott “one of the most important analysts of non-governance” who emphasizes the ability of people to organize themselves in their local communities. Scott pointed out the limits of state action and planning, for instance, in relation to urban development and the economy. His book “Seeing Like a State (1998)”, which depicts the narrowness of the planning state’s gaze through numerous case studies, is one of the most influential social science works of the past 50 years.

James C. Scott was born in New Jersey in 1936. He studied political economy in Massachusetts, Burma, and Paris, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, where he had been as a Sterling Professor of Political Science since 1976 and co-founded Yale’s Agricultural Studies Program. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of both the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Guggenheim Foundation.

24/7/24, kes