From Yale University's Department of Political Science, July 23:
James C. Scott passed peacefully in his home in Durham, CT on July 19, 2024.
July 23, 2024James C. Scott, Sterling Professor Emeritus, Political Science; Acting Director, Agrarian Studies; Professor Emeritus, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Anthropology and Institute for Social and Policy Studies passed peacefully in his home in Durham, CT on Friday, July 19, 2024.
Jim, who returned to Yale in 1976, was at the time of his death the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science as well as a professor of Anthropology. He was the founding director of the Agrarian Studies Center at Yale University, an experimental, interdisciplinary effort to reshape how a new generation of scholars understands rural life and society. He was described in the 2012 New York Times article “The Professor Who Learns From Peasants” as the “unofficial founder of the field of “resistance studies,” in which his book “Weapons of the Weak” (1985), a study of peasant resistance based on fieldwork in a Malaysian village, is a kind of Bible”.
On August 27, 2021 the Berkeley Library Oral History Project at the University of California announced the release of the Yale Agrarian Studies Oral History Project, a two-part series featuring the life history of James C. Scott, and shorter interviews with over a dozen affiliates of the Yale Agrarian Studies Program. He was awarded the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honor. The Hirschman Price recognizes excellence in social and behavioral science in the tradition of Albert O. Hirschman’s pioneering research....
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Previously on Professor Scott:
October 2018Disease, Famine, Drudgery, Bondage: A Lively Look at the Birth of the Modern
Not that kind of bondage. Not that lively a look, sorry.
Refunds available at the entrance.
A first rate review of James Scott's "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by George Scialabba, contributing Editor at The Baffler.
Power Politics For Outsiders
Not being in government, I don't have the authoritarian type of authority so I tend toward Burkeian humble and lovable:
His unbiased opinion, his honest advice, and his best reasons."
—Edmund Burke (1791)*
And regarding the upcoming essay fragment, as with Vaclav Havel, a writer who went on to be Czechoslovakia's last president and after overseeing the split of the two countries, Czechia's first president in his essay "The Power of the Powerless" and Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals", what follows is some very high-level practical politics.
*Potential downside: Burke was described by Edward Gibbon (he of The...Decline and Fall...) as:"The most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew".From Yale Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology James C. Scott 's book "Two Cheers For Anarchy";
...Fragment 2: On the Importance of Insubordination
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And:March 23, 2023
Power Politics For Outsiders II
