Charles Tilly's Poetry, and the Use of Models in the Social Sciences

In a 1991 review essay discussing several books by James C. Scott, the late Charles Tilly gets cranky with rationalistic explanations of behaviour, in verse ("somehow I find the point easier to make in verse"):

Rationalists  imagine  life  as lightning chess, 

each  individual respecting well-known  rules, 

instantly sketching alternative scenarios 

that start from possible  moves,  comparing 

their merits, and choosing  the wisest means 

to  maximize the  probability of  victory, 

only to see  that the  opponent  is playing 

the selfsame  game. In such  a  caricature, 

few of  us  can  recognize  the  improvisations 

of  our  cluttered lives. Are  we  inadequate? 

Let's find  a betaphore,  a better metaphore, 

for the  expedients  by which we  rush through 

the  traps and troubles of  an ordinary day. 

We  resemble  kayakers, knowing the  long stream 

in which we  ride, more  or  less,  but never sure 

when  its course will bend, speed  up,  narrow, 

or thrust us upon  rocks and splintered trees 

savage storms have hurled into  the streambed. 

In fast white water we  often  cannot  tell 

whether we will founder, flip over,  crash 

into  the  bank, or  hurtle against obstacles 

within the  current. When  the  river slows, 

we  become  sentient  driftwood, silently gliding 

at the  pace  of swans. Or we  dig our  paddles 

into  the  depth -  one  side,  then the  other 

in order to  propel  our own  course  past fish, 

past tributary brooks, past fields of  flowers. 

The  riverbanks exist, our boat  exists, we  exist, 

the  current's force  exists, the  boulders  exist, 

and yet we  improvise, combining these  elements 

in  quick inventions, and sometimes  run aground. 

Still, life  as a surging kayak ignores the  fact 

that makes the  race worth  running: the sociability 

that ties  us to  other  humans and their poor  proxies 

dogs,  cats,  and faded  photographs - in strands 

of  gold,  or silk, or steel,  or yet  barbed wire. 

Metaphor  gives way to  metonymy, for our true model 

could  be walking through crowds, alone  or  in pairs, 

silent  or  in  earnest  conversation, at once  scanning 

faces  and facades, feet  moving in two-four beats, 

signaling our  approach with glances  and swaggers, 

knifing between  oncomers  who seem  separate or separable. 

We  follow  those  pioneers  who  find an  open  path 

across the  traffic, follow  even  when  another path 

would  be shorter, or faster, or  easier on  the  feet. 

We  spot  a penny on  the sidewalk, a  gown  in  a window, 

or  a broken hydrant while  the  interior monologue  hums, 

the  exterior dialogue swirls, the  frantic tinkering 

of  every day continues. A  cameraman above shoots  film 

and charts human beings  as molecules  in a  channel, 

lawfully accelerating and slowing according to  density, 

flowing symmetrically around those  talkers who stop 

precisely in midpath, walkers miming viscous  fluids 

whose  laws they do  not  know. Meanwhile we  pedestrians

dream, improvise, weave, stumble,  curse, above  all, hope.  

("Domination, Resistance, Compliance... Discourse," Sociological Forum 6(3), p. 602). To which my first reaction was: WTF? Also: is this the only use of a poem to make an argument in sociology or political science? Are there others? (James C. Scott apparently promised a poem in "his next review" of Tilly's work - does anybody know if the promise was kept?).

I don't have a lot to say about the quality of the poem - let's say it's better than some, but it's no Dante. (I like the  "strands of  gold,  or silk, or steel,  or yet  barbed wire" image, for what it's worth - it brings to mind other "strands of gold" images in ancient poetry and nicely reframes them). As for the points Tilly is making - roughly, that most problems of everyday life are computationally intractable, so we "satisfice," and that our intrinsic sociality affects the patterns of social action that we observe - they strike me as unobjectionable in the abstract. But I get the feeling Tilly misunderstands the purpose of models in the social sciences. (I say this with some trepidation - it is far more likely that I am wrong about this than that Tilly misunderstood anything).

As Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo have argued in a recent book (and article) models are maps of phenomena. (David Schmidtz has made a similar claim with respect to theories of justice, and I think both draw on the work of the philosopher Ronald Giere). And the most accurate maps are not always the most useful, though it is important that maps be sufficiently similar in some relevant respect to the phenomenon they image for them to be useful. To this I would add that models are also toys ("toy models") and analogies ("metaphors" - Tilly alludes to this in the poem above). They enable certain kinds of rule-constrained "inferential play" (as toys) and disclose or conceal connections to other phenomena (as analogies or metaphors). (They are rhetoric too, qua metaphors, and hence serve persuasive purposes). But let's stick with the map imagery right now. Consider, to use an analogy Clarke and Primo point to, two maps of the London Underground:

From Knightsbridge.net

From A Welsh View

Is any of them more "correct"? They are certainly useful for different purposes: they provide different forms of orientation with respect to the tube, and each of them has characteristic failure modes when used for other purposes (to which they may not be well suited). The first map is useful for people who are actually using the train - it helps you visualize the transfers you will need to make, as well as the approximate number of stops left until your destination. But it is not a very good guide to actual distances, and it does not provide any information regarding the urban or natural context of the stations. The second map, while being a more accurate description of the physical organization of the underground and of the urban and topographical context of each station, is much less useful to commuters, who are likely to find it too "busy." Neither of them, it is worth stressing, is a perfectly "accurate" representation of the tube, though both are "similar" to it in some significant respect, enough so that we can speak of them as "representations" of the underground.

Similarly with social science models: economists and (some) political scientists tend to prefer more "abstracted" maps of particular social contexts (like the first map above), since they tend to use such maps for purposes that would not be served by the more apparently "accurate" models that may be favored by sociologists or anthropologists or (other) political scientists (like the second map below). The major methodological disputes in the social sciences thus tend to be (sometimes covertly) about the legitimacy of the purposes for which these maps are used (and only secondarily about whether any particular map does serve any given purpose, though that sort of debate does happen too).

In the poem above, for example, Tilly seems to be saying that the "chess" map of the rationalists (which would surely include economists) is not a good map for making sense of social action because we are not like that. (It is interesting that Tilly also seems to allude to the physicist's map, which depicts social action on the analogy with fluid dynamics, whose laws the fluid particles do not understand but which also makes no reference to individual psychologies, unlike the economist's map). But the "chess" model - the model of rational agents - is not generally a description of our psychology, though it does describe a psychology that is in some respects similar to our actual psychology and in other respects dissimilar. To the extent that rationalistic models of human life are useful (and they may not be, certainly not for every conceivable explanatory purpose) they are not useful because they describe our psychology accurately (though they will be more useful the more the similarities to our psychology in the model are relevant to the explanatory purposes to which it is put), but because they may provide insight into how human action can aggregate into larger patterns (e.g., how markets can sometimes produce efficient outcomes, or how conventions can be self-enforcing), or make certain kinds of predictions (e.g., about when certain norms break down), or identify potential puzzles about social action, or even simply to point to  long-term forces pushing social systems in certain directions rather than others. The resulting picture of human action will tend to look (to the anthropologist or the sociologist) like a stick-figure drawing, but that is precisely the point, at least so long as the stick-figure drawing tells us something about human action that is difficult to see in the hyperrealistic map of the anthropologist or the somewhat broader frame of the sociologist.

Social explanation at its best is the art of selecting the right map for orienting ourselves towards some question. In some cases, that map better be quite detailed; if I am interested in getting a real feel for how people distant from me live, or how they can be motivated to rebel against injustice, I am often better off consulting the anthropologists' map than the economist's map. But in other cases, the thickly descriptive map just gets in the way of the particular type of understanding I may be seeking. Even given a certain kind of question, however, some maps will still be better than others. (Some maps give bad directions, or have inconvenient lacunae). In economics, for example, it seems that maps with explicit microfoundations are worse for predictive or policy purposes than maps without such microfoundations, though "microfounded" maps are not thereby useless. In political science, detailed understanding of the politics of particular countries is not necessarily very useful for predictive purposes, though it is certainly very useful for many other purposes. And further problems arise, of course, because fights about methods are also fights about resources and status. The  theoretical pluralism of "multiple maps for multiple purposes" tends to break down when certain mapmakers are marginalized, or when there is a perception that particular kinds of maps are being used for purposes to which they are not well suited while serving to attack the status of makers of alternative maps. Somehow I find it easier to make this point in haiku:

maps are different

but mapmakers are prickly

and love their maps best

(Ok, not a very good haiku. I'm sure you can do better.) 

The Potato, Food of Anarchists

A fascinating bit from The Art of Not Being Governed that I never got around to blogging when I first read it:

In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal  as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxmen wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one. Plagued by crop failures and confiscatory procurement prices for the cultivars recommended by the Burmese military government in the 1980s, many peasants secretly planted sweet potatoes, a crop specifically prohibited. They shifted to sweet potatoes because the crop was easier to conceal and nearly impossible to appropriate. The Irish in the early nineteenth century grew potatoes not only because they provided many calories from the small plots to which farmers were confined but also because they could not be confiscated or burned and, because the were grown in small mounds, an [English!] horseman risked breaking his mount’s leg galloping through the field. Alas for the Irish, they had only a minuscule selection of the genetic diversity of new world potatoes and had come to rely almost exclusively on potatoes and milk for subsistence.

A reliance on root crops, and in particular the potato, can insulate states as well as stateless peoples against the predations of war and appropriation. William McNeill credits the early-eighteenth-century rise of Prussia to the potato. Enemy armies might seize or destroy grain fields, livestock, and aboveground fodder crops, but they were powerless against the lowly potato, a cultivar which Frederick William and Frederick II after him had vigorously promoted. It was the potato that gave Prussia its unique invulnerability to foreign invasion. While a grain-growing population whose granaries and crops were confiscated or destroyed had no choice but to scatter or starve, a tuber-growing peasantry could move back immediately after the military danger had passed and dig up their staple, one meal at a time (pp. 195-196).

Planting potatoes is, for Scott, part of an arsenal of agricultural techniques used by certain peoples for “repelling” the state, including planting a large variety of cultivars (which makes the output of agriculturists less “legible” to the state), cultivating “crops that will grow on marginal land and at high altitudes” (like maize), require little attention and/or mature quickly, blend into surrounding vegetation, and are easily dispersed. "Real-existing" anarchists (at least the kind that decides to retain some form of agriculture) have been potato eaters, apparently.

Clearly planting potatoes does not work on its own to repel the state, however. Prussian peasants were dependent on potatoes, but they certainly did not escape the state (but did they escape it more than similarly situated peasants? Or did social structures in Prussia produce peasant subordination by other mechanisms, not necessarily via state violence? Perhaps the land was too flat?). And Scott does not mention this, but the staple crop in the Inca empire was also the potato (and they also grew other crops, like maize, that are state-repelling in Scott’s view, and happened to be situated in the highlands rather than the lowlands; the Inca empire seems to be a big counterexample to Scott’s general argument). So this sort of claim calls out for testing and further investigation: are peoples with the sort of agriculture that Scott describes less likely to have had states (at least in the past) than peoples that did not, beyond Southeast Asia? Why did the Incas manage to create a state in ecological conditions that seem very unfavourable to it, at least in Scott's view? I suppose that it could be the case that there was less “stateness” in Inca lands than we think, but still, a bit puzzling. 

Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought).

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia pointed me in the direction of thinking about the place of “hills” and “valleys,” state spaces and stateless places, in political theory. Scott claims that both Southeast Asian and Western political thought have stigmatized those hill-dwellers who have no permanent residence (p. 101), and identified civilization with the settled states of the valleys (pp. 100-101), though he also pays homage to Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqaddimah (p. 20), a work which does not stigmatize the stateless (at least so far as I remember; it’s been a while). He even notes that Aristotle famously argued that human beings were political animals, i.e., animals that live in poleis or cities, a characterization that suggests that people who do not live in cities are not fully human (p. 101 – though Scott fails to note that for Aristotle such people can be both above and below the level of humanity). I cannot speak about Southeast Asian political theory, but it seems to me that at least with respect to Western political theory the picture is a bit more complicated, even if Scott is correct overall.

For example, Aristotle’s famous pronouncement about the polis-nature of human beings is complicated by the fact that the polis was most certainly not an agrarian state – the “statelessness” of the polis is well known, though some of the larger poleis did eventually develop something like police forces and other aspects of statehood – and that Aristotle did not define the polis in contrast to nomadic life and in terms of settled habitation, but in contrast to the family and in terms of its purpose. Indeed, he takes pains to distinguish the polis both from the great empires of his time (which were true extractive agrarian states of the sort that Scott discusses in his book) and from mere settlements (whose focus on “mere life” did not qualify them for civilization). The barbarian empires were “uncivilized” despite their possession of large and powerful states, and the city-less are low less because they are scattered than because they have no “clan” and are “lovers of war,” i.e., because they are insufficiently social.

Thus, though Aristotle does seem to indicate that nomadic peoples are “primitive” (the Cyclops, who are traditionally represented as a nonsedentary people, appear as an instance of the “old ways” of political organization), there is no clear indication that sedentary existence per se is necessary to the polis, or that it is in itself valuable. In this Aristotle is in keeping with what I take to be the traditional Greek way of thinking, where not the physical location but the citizens constituted the city: “For the men, not the walls nor the empty galleys, are the city,” and so “Wherever you settle, you will be a polis” as Nikias tells his soldiers in a speech Thucydides either invented or recreated for his History of the Peloponnesian War. To be sure, this is still consistent with the story that Scott tells about the importance of men, rather than land, in the construction of states; but it ought to put a wrinkle in the “stigma” thesis.

But it is in Plato that we find an explicit consideration of the valence of “hills and valleys” in the sense that Scott is really concerned with. In book III of his long dialogue Laws, Plato develops the contrast between the hills and the valleys through a speculative history which he uses to isolate those factors that gave rise to politeiai (political organization) and laws, both of which are associated with the cities of the plain and the states they controlled. (Ancient speculative histories are fascinating. I suspect they functioned among ancient thinkers much as economists’ or political scientists’ models function today: as interesting simplifications with some explanatory value that isolate general reasons for action operating in particular contexts.).

The narrative is more or less as follows. The Athenian Stranger (the leading character in the dialogue) asks his interlocutors to imagine a situation where, thanks to some massive flood, the states of the plains were destroyed, leaving only a slight remnant of pastoralists high up in the hills (677a-b). This catastrophe not only radically simplified technology (most arts and sciences are lost), but also greatly reduced exposure to the various forms of greed and morally dubious competition prevalent in cities (677b-c). In fact, the catastrophe destroyed the memory of cities and politeiai and laws: the hill peoples are clearly stateless in a radical sense (678a). But laws and political life are not necessarily good; the Athenian stresses that with laws and political life properly speaking you can get both virtue and vice (and more often the latter than the former, especially in the form of warfare). By contrast, the hill peoples are naïve or artless (εὐήθεις; literally having “good habits”), not educated (or mis-educated) by urban artifice, and rather peaceful.

Indeed, war is presented in the story as an artefact of civilization (678d-e); so long as land is abundant, and the memory of catastrophe is recent (the “fear of the plain”), the hill peoples do not fight (and at any rate they do not have much of the technology and arts of war, so their fighting is not, the Athenian speculates, highly destructive). On the contrary, they welcome each other (679a) and have pleasure in each other’s company (given low population densities, they do not meet each other that often), and because their societies are less unequal than urban societies (with less of both poverty and wealth, as well as less hierarchy and subordination), they develop in an environment that ultimately makes them more courageous, moderate and just than urban peoples (679d-e). It’s an idyllic picture (and not a terribly bad description of forager/pastoralist societies in the absence of states, either, though idealized in some respects). How do laws emerge, then? What are they for?

The first step towards law and political life is made possible, in this speculative story, by the very naïveté or artlessness of the hill peoples. Because they did not have the cunning and scepticism of urban peoples (who are experienced about deception, both as agents and subjects of it), they believed any old story that they were told about “gods and men” (679c), and adopted these stories as the basis of their customs. (Note the dig here towards all mythical stories of founding and legitimation; most of these stories are simply nonsense, in the Athenian’s view). These customs were not yet laws; their orality disqualified them from this status. (The hill peoples are illiterate, 680a). But they did not need to be laws in order to regulate their social life, which was still quite self-contained.

Their self-containment could be interpreted as a form of “savagery” (680b-d), or perhaps more accurately a lack of “domestication,” as the Athenian notes by comparing such hill peoples to the mythical Cyclops described in Homer. Yet he does not himself endorse the comparison, which seems at any rate inconsistent with his previous praise of the justice and moderation of the hill peoples; the one who proposes it is Megillos, the representative of the slave-holding valley state par excellence, Sparta (680d3), which was also known for its "savagery" (cf. 666e, where the Athenian calls the Spartan system "savage"). To be civilized, for Megillos, is to become domesticated; but the metaphor of domestication is not altogether unambiguous in Plato (sheep and pigs are also domesticated, after all).

But this self-containment cannot last. As the memory of the initial cataclysm fades (perhaps an echo of a collective memory of an old fear of the cities of the plain? Fears of slave-raiding, for example, as Scott suggests in his discussion of the stories of hill peoples from Thailand and Burma? Not that Plato mentions such fears), hill peoples move down, and some turn to farming and a sedentary life (681a), coming in contact with other recent transplants from the hills. But now they need to coordinate regarding which of their various and incompatible customs (based on the random stories mentioned earlier) is to regulate their common life; and here we have the origins of legislation properly speaking (681b-d).

From here the Athenian shifts from speculating about the origin of valley states to recounting the history of the first Greek valley states, in particular the Dorian states (Sparta, Argos, and Messene), a history that would have been familiar to his two interlocutors (the Spartan Megillos and the Cretan Kleinias). This narrative is then put to use in order to understand why in some states (Sparta) the rulers were more constrained by laws than in others (Argos and Messene), despite their various similarities. This is perhaps the first systematic empirical comparison in political science, using a “most similar cases” design, but the Athenian no longer mentions hill peoples, so I shall not summarize the rest here.

This speculative history is notable in two ways. First, it marks a contrast between the natural but “naïve” or “artless” goodness of the peoples of the hills and the potential for both virtue and corruption of the cities. The hill peoples do not need “technical” or "artificial" virtue to live well; their natural virtue is enough. But cities do need such “artificial” virtue (or rather, they need real knowledge), and it is not obvious that this is not a curse, since such knowledge is exceedingly scarce. As the Athenian notes in the “historical” part of his narrative, life in most valley states seems to end in some form or another or tyranny due to a lack of knowledge and virtue; the hill peoples had it better in that respect.

But second, the narrative suggests that short of a major cataclysm, there is no going back to hill life. Indeed, the point of the Athenian’s political theory in this part of the dialogue is to find a way to realistically mitigate the evils of life in settled valley societies; and for this, he will introduce for the first time a systematic theory of the “mixed constitution” - the ancient predecessor of our theories of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” (though the theory is in many ways quite different from our modern equivalents; more in a future post, probably). It is precisely the possession of something like a “mixed constitution” that enabled Sparta to become a relatively law-governed state, in contrast to the situation in Argos and Messene, which degenerated, in the Athenian’s telling, into more arbitrary regimes. But this did not make Sparta perfect; on the contrary, he had criticized it earlier as an “armed camp” more than a city (666e).

One could note that the Athenian’s narrative is still valley-centric; there is no mention of flight into the hills, for example, and certainly the background fact of slavery as a requirement of the valley states is kept deep in the background. At any rate, it seems that, from the point of view of a fourth century Greek like Plato, the hill frontier had more or less closed, or had become an unrealistic option (or perhaps it was all only a thought experiment to begin with). And the full flourishing of human life does seem to go through urban life, but in Plato (in contrast, perhaps, to Aristotle’s more optimistic take later on) this is a road that is almost certain to lead to disappointment. The hill peoples had it better.

Now, it is possible that canonical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were not representative of the tenor of Greek political thought on the question of the valence of hills and valleys. One probably would have to scour a much larger sample of writings, and our sources are often fragmentary and biased. And though the “anarchism” of the early Stoics and Cynics is reasonably well attested, as well as the antipolitical attitudes of the Epicureans (or at least as well attested as the meagre fragments of their texts that survive allow), these attitudes clearly soften in later thinkers identified with these schools (and more from these later people survive). Moreover, the evidence of etymology supports the “stigma” thesis; the word asteios, for example, which originally meant something like “urban” in a neutral sense, eventually came to mean something like “good.” At any rate, canonical thinkers like Plato clearly tend to be unrepresentative; that is part of the reason why their thought can be continuously re-appropriated by later generations, and why it remains interesting beyond the narrow context in which it emerged. But still, in general it seems that there was more ambivalence about the identification of states and civilization in Greek political theory than Scott suggests, and this ambivalence does not simply die off. Beyond Plato to Augustine to Rousseau there is a strand of Western political theory that is willing to call most states “bands of robbers” and has difficulty making its peace with them; and as with Rousseau, this strand sometimes comes close to saying that a stateless existence would be better, even if they also acknowledge its impossibility in a world where the valley states are dominant.

Footnotes on things I've been reading: James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. All I can say is, what are you waiting for? Go read it! It’s great!

Scott starts from a couple of observations that are obvious when you think about them but are illuminating when stated explicitly and applied systematically. First, the vast majority of the subjects of pre-modern states (in all parts of the world, not just Southeast Asia) have been unfree – slaves, bondsmen, serfs, etc. In fact, the pre-modern state (a problematic term, but let’s let that pass for the moment) was basically a technology for coercively extracting surpluses from sedentary agricultural laborers. Second, for most of human history the geographical reach of any state was sharply limited by the characteristics of the terrain, especially elevation (moving grain by oxcart quickly becomes prohibitively expensive over relatively long distances or as the elevation increases, for example).

Going up (or into swamps or other inaccessible terrain) thus meant going out of what Scott nicely calls “state space.” It is worth stressing that stateless spaces do not imply a lack of sociality, or a horrendous Hobbesian "state of nature." Stateless societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, small, mobile, and based more on gift exchanges than on the coercive extraction of resources – just like the forager bands that dominated human history for most of the 100,000 years or so since Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as a distinct species of primate. In comparison to many pre-modern states, the stateless hill societies Scott describes had a more varied diet and more leisure, and in general they could be said to be far “freer” (less hierarchy and subordination, not to speak of taxes, corvée labor, strict gender roles, and the like). Leaving the state has not been a very bad thing for most people for most of human history, pace Hobbes.

Thus, so long as terrain imposes significant limits to state-building projects, you get a situation where many “subjects” of the state can and often do exercise their “exit” option: they can move to the hills. And state-makers, in turn, try to prevent them from moving, especially since under the typical conditions prevailing in most of human history (e.g., limited military specialization) manpower is identical with power. The primary project of pre-modern state-building has been to “sedentarize” people – to keep them near at hand to the ruler so that they can be mobilized for his purposes and his glory. (The “problem” posed by people leaving – for state-makers, not for the emigrants themselves - is not confined to pre-modern states; the communist regimes went to great lengths to try to prevent people from leaving as well, and like pre-modern states, they collapsed when they could not manage to keep them in.)

One might think that one way of preventing people from leaving would be to produce good government. And indeed, Scott notes how the desperate need for people of most Southeast Asian rulers produced a great deal of “social mobility” in what are otherwise highly hierarchical societies, and a certain amount of redistribution of material resources: slaves quickly became regular exploited peasants, for example, and there was lots of redistributive feasting. And there were some attractions to being near the culture of the court. But when there are always other petty tyrants busy trying to build their own tiny empires (full of "cosmologial bluster" about universal rule), there is a strong incentive for each of them to steal other people’s people. Pre-modern warfare (not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the Mediterranean world) is thus often indistinguishable from pure slave-raiding.

Moreover, producing good government is often actually contrary to the interests of the ruler. The ruler is interested less in the total amount of production (GDP) than on the total amount of accessible resources – men and storable crops; and these were often (and are often) very different things. While the farmer might want to plant root crops (which are not easily visible to the state officials), practice less labor-intensive swidden (“slash and burn”) agriculture, and in general have a more varied diet and life, the ruler would prefer that he stick to planting rice, which is easily surveyed and seized. (This continues a theme of Scott’s other great book, Seeing like a State; state-making has been historically concerned above all with making things visible to state officials so that they can be more easily controlled and seized). Indeed, rice made states in Asia; no rice, no states. (I wonder if the fact that Australia is and has been pretty dry explains why it was, until extremely recently in historical time, basically a stateless area; concentrated agriculture of the kind that can make states was probably not worth the trouble, and so political entrepreneurs intent on creating durable hierarchies simply did not have the sorts of resources necessary for the task).

Thus, at least in Southeast Asia, people often had both the incentive and the opportunity to escape states. But the availability of exit didn’t necessarily produce “good government,” though it might have mitigated petty tyrannies occasionally, and it certainly produced states that where cultural assimilation was possible and often quick. Competition between state-builders did not produce good Tiebout effects but rather a lot of what Weber called “booty capitalism” (and, it seems, a lot of misery; the history he tells is at bottom a dismal chronicle). More importantly for Scott, this dynamic also led to the formation of hill societies that were extremely concerned with avoiding the state. I haven’t gotten this far yet, but from the earlier sections it seems clear that Scott argues that, far from being “primitive,” many features of these societies – their forms of agriculture, their social structures, even their orality – are basically designed to prevent their incorporation into valley states – to become less legible and less controllable. The culture of the hills is the art of not being governed.

Yet I suspect that Scott makes too much of the “primitive”/ “civilized” dichotomy; the art of not being governed seems suspiciously like the art of living like a forager band, even if the hill societies he is interested in are not necessarily foragers (they practice swidden – “slash and burn” – agriculture, for example).

A couple of things I was thinking as I was reading. First, how far could you go in refining and formalizing Scott’s implicit model of statemaking? Scott is a classical “thick description” scholar, distrustful of simplified models, but I’m an unreconstructed theorist, and would like to understand more about the parameters governing the significance of exit and voice in the development of tolerable or bearable states. Maybe “voice” (e.g., democracy) only becomes a significant possibility once the possibility of exit is foreclosed yet production technologies are such that states cannot simply survey and seize productive resources at will?

And what about the significance of different technologies? Scott argues that his analysis does not apply today, when “distance destroying technologies” – helicopters, all-weather roads, etc. – make extending state spaces easier than ever, but those who wish to avoid the state are not standing still either; one thinks of the many ways in which financial technologies serve to take production away from the reach of the state, even as at the same time newer military technologies make the state less dependent on manpower and so less intent on "fixing" people in place.

I was also thinking about the hill/valley relationship in political thought. Scott notes how Ibn Khaldoun’s great work, the Muqaddimah (which is great, by the way!), is basically concerned with the complex dialectical relationship between state and non-state spaces, the Bedouin and the “civilized;” but he basically claims that for the most part political thought has simply reiterated the basic dichotomy of hill and valley (or civilized and barbarian, “raw” and “cooked,” and so on), valuing the valleys and dismissing the hills. This may be true in the aggregate, yet I kept thinking of the speculative histories of the origin of the state in Plato, especially the Laws, with its complex and by no means one sided evaluation of the virtues of the hills and the vices of the cities. (More on this later).

Anyway, there’s much more to it (I’m not finished with it yet), and it’s well written to boot. (I love the term “cosmological bluster,” for example). I'm considering assigning it to my honours seminar in political theory, even though it's not really a political theory text; yet it really makes you think about the nature of states from a "universal history" perspective that is too often obscured in the usual texts and debates on power and the state in contemporary political theory.