James Campbell Scott (December 2, 1936 – July 19, 2024) was an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies.
Trained as a political scientist, Scott’s scholarship discussed peasant societies, state power, and political resistance. From 1968 to 1985, Scott wrote influentially on agrarian politics in peninsular Malaysia. While he retained a lifelong interest in Southeast Asia and peasantries, his later works ranged across many topics: quiet forms of political resistance, the failures of state-led social transformation, techniques used by non-state societies to avoid state control, commonplace uses of anarchist principles, and the rise of early agricultural states.
Scott received his bachelor’s degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD in political science from Yale. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science. In 1991, he became director of Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies. At the time of his death, The New York Times described Scott as among the most widely read social scientists.
Books in order of publication:
The Moral Economy of the Peasant – 1976
Weapons of the Weak – 1985
Domination and the Arts of Resistance – 1990
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – 1998
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia – 2009
Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play – 2012
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States – 2017
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings -2025
Oak Lawn Library Friends 