---
id: people/james-c-scott
about:
  label: James C. Scott
  depiction: people/james-c-scott.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'SOAS University of London, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.'
  description: >-
    Yale political scientist and anthropologist (1936 to 2024) whose Seeing Like
    a State studied how simplified views from above fail the places they
    reorder.
  tags:
    - legibility
    - agrarian studies
    - state
    - local knowledge
person:
  affiliation: Yale University
  role: political scientist and anthropologist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: James C. Scott - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott'
    - title: 'James Scott | Department of Political Science, Yale'
      url: 'https://politicalscience.yale.edu/people/james-scott'
    - title: >-
        James C. Scott passed peacefully in his home in Durham, CT on July 19,
        2024 (Yale Department of Political Science)
      url: >-
        https://politicalscience.yale.edu/news/james-c-scott-passed-peacefully-his-home-durham-ct-july-19-2024
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
James Campbell Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist, born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on 2 December 1936 and died at his home in Durham, Connecticut, on 19 July 2024.[^1,3] He studied at Williams College and took his PhD in political science at Yale in 1967.[^1,2] He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science, a professor of anthropology and the founding director of the Agrarian Studies programme.[^1,3]

His work was on peasant societies, state power and resistance.[^1] For Weapons of the Weak (1985) he spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia, then returned to hear the villagers' views of his draft and revised the book after their criticisms.[^1] His later books include Seeing Like a State (1998), The Art of Not Being Governed (2008), Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) and Against the Grain (2017).[^2] He received the Social Science Research Council's Albert O. Hirschman Prize in 2020.[^3]

He is the author of [Seeing Like a State](/media/seeing-like-a-state/), his study of large schemes that made places legible from above and left out local, practical knowledge.