“The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.” — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it.… — James C. Scott Copy Share
I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the… — James C. Scott Copy Share
It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.” — James C. Scott Copy Share
“First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were… — James C. Scott Copy Share
It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism,… — James C. Scott Copy Share
“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated… — James C. Scott Copy Share
I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my… — James C. Scott Copy Share
Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote… — James C. Scott Copy Share
