Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T17:55:56.721Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

State, Power, Anarchism

A Discussion of The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Peter Manicas
Peter Manicas
Affiliation:
University of Hawai‘i at Mãnoa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Type
Review Symposium: State, Power, Anarchism
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 92 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Clastres, Pierre. 1977. Society Against the State. New York: Urizen Books.Google Scholar
Dewey, John. [1927] 1954.The Public and Its Problems. Chicago: Swallow.Google Scholar
Diamond, Jared. 1977. Guns, Germs and Steel. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Fried, Morton. 1975. The Notion of Tribe. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kroeber, A. L. 1955. “Nature of the Land-Holding Group.” Ethnohistory 2 (4): 303–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Manicas, Peter T. 1974. The Death of the State. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Manicas, Peter T. 1989. War and Democracy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Manicas, Peter T. 2003. “Mao and Utopianism.” Journal of Comparative Asian Development 2 (2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manicas, Peter T. 2006. A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manicas, Peter T. 2008. Rescuing Dewey: Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nozik, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1754. Dissertation on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, The Second Part. http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq_04.htm (accessed November 12, 2010).Google Scholar