Against the Myopic Study of Politics

Picture: New Mandala

In an article by New Mandala, Olle Törnquist writes about the late James C. Scott.

Jim, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was of course influenced by his family’s community of Quakers with godly “inner light”, compassion, and an aversion to hierarchy. But he would soon also be influenced by new American superpower’s need to know something about the world it would dominate. In the late 1950’s, after college, he got scholarships and learned a lot from Burma to Paris, but felt obliged to share information with the CIA.

Yale University was so much better, especially its politics department. In the shadow of the Vietnam War and with giants such as the nestor of democracy research Robert Dahl in the faculty, there were resources as well as inspiration and academic independence. Here, Jim was able to address the big issues of the time—ideology and corruption – in his masters as well as PhD theses with a focus on Malaysia. As is customary in the United States, he then qualified as a teacher and researcher at another university, in Wisconsin, but returned to a tenured position at Yale and was able to publish his breakthrough book The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976). Its argument—which troubled all those who believed farmers longed for free markets—was that the subordinate clients of the landowning patrons only revolt when their relative security is disrupted, usually by market forces themselves.