James C. Scott
Political scientist and anthropologist of agrarian societies, known for work on state legibility and local practical knowledge.
PersonSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Identity, Yale career, agrarian studies, and death in July 2024.
- Yale — Remembering James C. Scott
Identity, Yale career, agrarian studies, and death in July 2024.
- Wikidata entity identity and cross-references
The entity identity and its recorded authority identifiers; not an independent authority-register validation.
What this check doesn’t establish
- The previously listed ORCID was not corroborated against an accessible registry record and has been removed.
- Interpretations of legibility, metis and anarchism require reading the cited works.
- VIAF/ROR values were cross-checked against the Wikidata entity; the external authority registry itself was not independently inspected.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
American political scientist and anthropologist, for most of his career at Yale, where he taught political science and directed the agrarian studies programme. His fieldwork was principally in Southeast Asia.
The terms this collection draws from him, legibility and mētis, were developed in that context, as descriptions of the relationship between states and agrarian populations, before being applied more widely.
Scott described his own position as anarchist. The critical argument of Seeing Like a State is considerably more developed than its prescriptive one, a point he addressed in the later Two Cheers for Anarchism.
Sources
- Seeing Like a State
Works
Ideas
- Legibility
Introduced
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/people/james-c-scott.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25