Editorial Note: On James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed

The tendency of physicists is to judge the theory and praxis of other natural sciences to be inexact and unexacting in comparison with their own, and mathematical physicists appear to regard their experimentalist colleagues as basically engineers. Natural scientists, in general, tend to include the social sciences with the humanities under the rubric of “fuzzy studies.” Meanwhile, within each of the social sciences there are struggles in progress between those who make the case for qualitative work and those who find any nonquantitatively based methodology fuzzy.

The present suite of reviews was arranged in response to manifestations of anarchism arising globally, but also in acknowledgment that scholars in the humanities have paid inadequate attention to the unruly though strenuous efforts, over the past dozen years, toward humanization of the social sciences. James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) is an “anarchist history” in the sense that it tells a story about anarchism in “Zomia” (fig. 1), but also in the sense that the various norms its author breaks while telling the story make his book seem, to most orthodox political scientists, almost the act of an anarchist.

Scott, who codirects the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale, is a leading member of the movement in American political science that commenced in 2000 with an e-mail message signed “Mr. Perestroika” and sent to seventeen academics, who forwarded it to numerous others. By 2001 there was sufficient impetus to call a “Perestroika movement” conference, and in 2005 to publish a reader: Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe. Among the contributors to that collection of manifestos and essays is Sanford Schram, who emphasizes there that the movement is multivocal and pluralist. Some Perestroikans, he explains, “focus on the overly abstract nature of much of the research done today, some on the lack of nuance in decontextualized, large-sample empirical studies, others on the inhumaneness of thinking about social relations in causal terms, and still others on the ways in which contemporary social science all too often fails to produce the kind of knowledge that can meaningfully inform social life.”

Figure 1.

Map of “Zomia,” a 2.5–million square km. massif in South and Southeast Asia, comprising various “hill peoples” historically beyond the control of governments

At the same time that Perestroika was developing in American political science departments, a parallel movement in economics was emerging in France. A few students in Paris circulated a petition in 2000, calling for pluralism in the economics curriculum, such that neoclassical and rational-expectations theory would no longer be taught “as if this were THE economic truth,” and mathematical modeling no longer learned as if it were the only respectable way of doing economics. A number of economics instructors, throughout France, replied by organizing a reform movement that gained renown under the name of “non-autistic” or “post-autistic” economics. The movement spread swiftly to Britain, where the Independent newspaper translated the message from France: “If there is a daily prayer for the global economy, it should be, ‘Deliver us from abstraction.’ ” By 2001 students of economics from seventeen countries had met in Kansas City and composed an “international open letter” encouraging “a broader conception of human behavior” among economists, along with a “recognition of culture,” “consideration of history,” “a new theory of knowledge” (not based on the fact-value distinction), “empirical grounding,” “expanded methods,” and “interdisciplinary dialogue.”

Today, there is a Post-Autistic Economics Network with its own website (www.paecon.net) and newsletter, the Real World Economics Review, claiming more than 17,000 subscribers in over 150 countries. Real World Economics: A Post-Autistic Economics Reader, edited by Edward Fullbrook, appeared in 2007. An editorial in the Real World Economics Review, published in 2010, called for major economics organizations to censure economists who “through their teachings, pronouncements and policy recommendations facilitated the global financial collapse.” The editorial went on to characterize the current moment “within the...