Statist Just-So Stories: New at Reason

For more than 40 years, James Scott has written about those who resist being incorporated into political-economic systems. Initially focused on Southeast Asia, he later expanded his field of vision to large-scale bureaucratic institutions around the world. He has consistently emphasized the ways that such structures try to transform the populations they govern into well-behaved, easily supervisable units—laborers, taxpayers, soldiers—but also the ways those populations work around and subvert the aimed-for transformations.

In a provocative new book, Against the Grain, Scott now challenges us to rethink legends about the state and its origins. Populations ruled by states tell stories about their emergence into civilization, stories that cast the non-state peoples around them as primitives and barbarians. These stories are familiar from the era of European imperialism and from early modern philosophers like Locke and Rousseau, but they’re common to state-governed populations around the world and throughout history. Scott calls them into deep doubt, writes Jacob Levy in his review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott.

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