The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the… — James C. Scott Anthropologists Copy Share Image
“Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.” — James C. Scott Plants and animals Copy Share Image
It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will… — James C. Scott Dialectics Copy Share Image
It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in… — James C. Scott Capitalism Copy Share Image
“As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft;… — James C. Scott Smallness Copy Share Image
I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about… — James C. Scott Always believe Copy Share Image
“What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a… — James C. Scott Habits Copy Share Image
“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend… — James C. Scott Big day Copy Share Image
“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms… — James C. Scott Long ago Copy Share Image
“A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a… — James C. Scott History Copy Share Image
“First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if… — James C. Scott Death Copy Share Image
“Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the… — James C. Scott Identity Copy Share Image
In a world of injustice there's going to be dreams of justice. — James C. Scott Dream Copy Share Image
“We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.” — James C. Scott State Theory Copy Share Image
“The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization,… — James C. Scott Aspiration Copy Share Image
Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career… — James C. Scott Agriculture Copy Share Image
The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly. — James C. Scott Freedom Copy Share Image
I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work… — James C. Scott Bored Copy Share Image
The world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives volume and amplitude… — James C. Scott Dream Copy Share Image
“immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate… — James C. Scott Law Copy Share Image
What's interesting to me is that in the late twentieth century it seems that there's scarcely a part of the world that… — James C. Scott Areas Copy Share Image
I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so… — James C. Scott Anthropologist Copy Share Image
“New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize… — James C. Scott Escape Crops Copy Share Image
“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is… — James C. Scott Social order Copy Share Image
“Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by… — James C. Scott Gossip Copy Share Image
