Marking the Death of James C. Scott on July 19, 2024
James C. Scott of Yale was one of the greatest social scientists of the turn-of-the-millennium era...
James C. Scott of Yale was one of the greatest social scientists of the turn-of-the-millennium era...
Robert Burns:
Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!... Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand or freeman fa', Let him follow me!... 1793
Alas! James C. Scott of Yale, one of the greatest social scientists of the turn-of-the-millennium era, died on July 19, 2024.
For those interested, my review of his Seeing Like a State:
There is a lot that is excellent in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998). On one level, it is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…
I should have more to say about Scott.
In my view, he saw the problems with large-scale human organizations very keenly. But his solution was that of affective-bond human associations using what people saw as time-honored skill-requiring small-scale technologies (but that were in actuality, since 1600, not really time-honored at all). That was essentially the Highland critique of corrupt imperial London made by the Scottish Enlightenment of the 1700s and by Scottish Romanticism in the 1800s. And that was not satisfactory.
More on that anon, someday, I hope.
References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 1999. "Seeing One's Intellectual Roots: A Review Essay on James Scott's Seeing Like a State." Review of Austrian Economics 12 (2): 245–255. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007872327340.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. <https://archive.org/details/seeinglikestate00jame>.
Got to "Seeing like a State" last summer on Delong's recommendation. One of the most insightful books I've ever read. Manages to trace a through-line from censuses thru forest management thru Le Corbusier thru Lenin and illuminating at every turn.
Yes, would be interested to hear more from you on Scott. Also his later book "Against the Grain." And the connection with Scottish Enlightenment. Though I think Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality has a lot of influence on this line of thought.