## Metadata - Author: [[James C. Scott]] - Full Title: Two Cheers for Anarchism - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.” ([Location 90](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=90)) - What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy. One thing that heaves into view, I believe, is what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had in mind when he first used the term “anarchism,” namely, mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule. Another is the anarchist tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity. ([Location 93](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=93)) - This means that I reject the major stream of utopian scientism that dominated much of anarchist thought around the turn of the twentieth century. ([Location 104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=104)) - As men became more rational and knowledgeable, science would tell us how we should live, and politics would no longer be necessary. ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=108)) - material plenty, far from banishing politics, creates new spheres of political struggle but also that statist socialism was less “the administration of” things than the trade union of the ruling class protecting its privileges. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=114)) - That means that of the roughly five-thousand-year history of states, only in the last two centuries or so has even the possibility arisen that states might occasionally enlarge the realm of human freedom. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=120)) - Nor do I believe that the state is the only institution that endangers freedom. To assert so would be to ignore a long and deep history of pre-state slavery, property in women, warfare, and bondage. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=125)) - Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people. Only occasionally do they embody implicit or explicit opposition to state law and institutions. Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization, let alone hierarchy. In other words, the experience of anarchistic mutuality is ubiquitous. As Colin Ward notes, “far from being a speculative vision of a future society, it is a description of a mode of human experience of everyday life, which operates side-by-side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.”4 The big question, and one to which I do not have a definitive answer, is whether the existence, power, and reach of the state over the past several centuries have sapped the independent, self-organizing power of individuals and small communities. So many functions that were once accomplished by mutuality among equals and informal coordination are now state organized or state supervised. ([Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=216)) - To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=224)) - To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=226)) - I am suggesting that two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification. ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=238)) - The populist tendency of anarchist thought, with its belief in the possibilities of autonomy, self-organization, and cooperation, recognized, among other things, that peasants, artisans, and workers were themselves political thinkers. They had their own purposes, values, and practices, which any political system ignored at its peril. That basic respect for the agency of nonelites seems to have been betrayed not only by states but also by the practice of social science. It is common to ascribe to elites particular values, a sense of history, aesthetic tastes, even rudiments of a political philosophy. The political analysis of nonelites, by contrast, is often conducted, as it were, behind their backs. Their “politics” is read off their statistical profile: from such “facts” as their income, occupation, years of schooling, property holding, residence, race, ethnicity, and religion. This is a practice that most social scientists would never judge remotely adequate to the study of elites. It is curiously akin both to state routines and to left-wing authoritarianism in treating the nonelite public and “masses” as ciphers of their socioeconomic characteristics, most of whose needs and worldview can be understood as a vector sum of incoming calories, cash, work routines, consumption patterns, and past voting behavior. It is not that such factors are not germane. What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves. Again, it is not that such self-explanations are transparent and nor are they without strategic omissions and ulterior motives—they are no more transparent that the self-explanations of elites. ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=239)) - The populist tendency of anarchist thought, with its belief in the possibilities of autonomy, self-organization, and cooperation, recognized, among other things, that peasants, artisans, and workers were themselves political thinkers. They had their own purposes, values, and practices, which any political system ignored at its peril. That basic respect for the agency of nonelites seems to have been betrayed not only by states but also by the practice of social science. It is common to ascribe to elites particular values, a sense of history, aesthetic tastes, even rudiments of a political philosophy. The political analysis of nonelites, by contrast, is often conducted, as it were, behind their backs. Their “politics” is read off their statistical profile: from such “facts” as their income, occupation, years of schooling, property holding, residence, race, ethnicity, and religion. This is a practice that most social scientists would never judge remotely adequate to the study of elites. It is curiously akin both to state routines and to left-wing authoritarianism in treating the nonelite public and “masses” as ciphers of their socioeconomic characteristics, most of whose needs and worldview can be understood as a vector sum of incoming calories, cash, work routines, consumption patterns, and past voting behavior. It is not that such factors are not germane. What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves. Again, it is not that such self-explanations are transparent and nor are they without strategic omissions and ulterior motives—they are no more transparent than the self-explanations of elites. ([Location 241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=241)) - If we wish to understand other people and propose to claim that we have in fact done so, it is both imprudent and rude not to attend to what they say…. What we cannot properly do is to claim to know that we understand him [an agent] or his action better than he does himself without access to the best descriptions which he is able to offer.6 Anything else amounts to committing a social science crime behind the backs of history’s actors. ([Location 258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=258)) - What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.” ([Location 335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=335)) - Acts of disobedience are of interest to us when they are exemplary, and especially when, as examples, they set off a chain reaction, prompting others to emulate them. Then we are in the presence less of an individual act of cowardice or conscience—perhaps both—than of a social phenomenon that can have massive political effects. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=371)) - Desertion is quite different from an open mutiny that directly challenges military commanders. It makes no public claims, it issues no manifestos; it is exit rather than voice. ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=410)) - desertion is a lower-risk alternative to mutiny, squatting a lower-risk alternative to a land invasion, poaching a lower-risk alternative to the open assertion of rights to timber, game, or fish. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=431)) - More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=455)) - tacit coordination and lawbreaking can mimic the effects of collective action without its inconveniences and dangers, ([Location 458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=458)) - “shortcuts” in walking paths often end up becoming paved walkways. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=473)) - The great policy shifts represented by the institution of unemployment compensation, massive public works projects, social security aid, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were, to be sure, abetted by the emergency of the world depression. But the way in which the economic emergency made its political weight felt was not through statistics on income and unemployment but through rampant strikes, looting, rent boycotts, quasi-violent sieges of relief offices, and riots that put what my mother would have called “the fear of God” in business and political elites. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=500)) - An astute colleague of mine once observed that liberal democracies in the West were generally run for the benefit of the top, say, 20 percent of the wealth and income distribution. The trick, he added, to keeping this scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially at election time, the next 30 to 35 percent of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20 percent. The relative success of this scheme can be judged by the persistence of income inequality—and its recent sharpening—over more than a half century. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=518)) - it is no exaggeration to say that organized interests of this kind are parasitic on the spontaneous defiance of those whose interests they presume to represent. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=545)) - Virtually all the great emancipatory movements of the past three centuries have initially confronted a legal order, not to mention police power, arrayed against them. They would scarcely have prevailed had not a handful of brave souls been willing to breach those laws and customs (e.g., through sit-ins, demonstrations, and mass violations of passed laws). ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=565)) - immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate a more just legal order. ([Location 569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=569)) - charisma is a relationship; it depends absolutely on an audience and on culture. ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=575)) - The vernacular observation, it turns out, is closely correlated with ground temperature, which governs oak leafing. ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=711)) - It is based on a close observation of the sequence of spring events that are always sequential but may be early or delayed, drawn out or rushed, whereas the almanac relies on a universal calendrical and lunar system. ([Location 712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=712)) - The order, rationality, abstractness, and synoptic legibility of certain kinds of schemes of naming, landscape, architecture, and work processes lend themselves to hierarchical power. I think of them as “landscapes of control and appropriation.” ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=715)) - permanent patronymic naming did not exist anywhere in the world before states found it useful for identification. It has spread along with taxes, courts, landed property, conscription, and police work—that is, along with the development of the state. It has now been superseded by identification numbers, photography, fingerprints, and DNA testing, but it was invented as a means of supervision and control. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=717)) - It turned out that the first rotation had apparently profited from the accumulated soil capital of the mixed forest it had replaced without replenishment. The single-species forest was above all a veritable feast for the pests, rusts, scales, and blights that specialized in attacking the Scotch pine or the Norway spruce. A forest of trees all the same age was also far more susceptible to catastrophic storm and wind damage. In an effort to simplify the forest as a one-commodity machine, scientific forestry had radically reduced its diversity. ([Location 760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=760)) - Henry Ford started with what his experts judged to be the best rubber tree and then tried to reshape the environment to suit it. Compare this logic to its mirror image: starting with the environmental givens and then selecting the cultivars that best fit a given niche. Customary practices of potato cultivation in the Andes represent a fine example of vernacular, artisanal farming. A high-altitude Andean potato farmer might cultivate as many as fifteen small parcels, some on a rotating basis. Each parcel is distinct in terms of its soil, altitude, orientation to sun and wind, moisture, slope, and history of cultivation. ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=781)) - There is no “standard field.” Choosing from among a large number of locally developed landraces, each with different and well-known characteristics, the farmer makes a series of prudent bets, planting anywhere from one cultivar to as many as a dozen in a single field. Each season is the occasion for a new round of trials, with last season’s results in terms of yield, disease, prices, and response to changed plot conditions carefully weighed. These farms are market-oriented experiment stations with good yields, great adaptability, and reliability. At least as important, they are not merely producing crops; they are reproducing farmers and communities with plant-breeding skills, flexible strategies, ecological knowledge, and considerable self-confidence and autonomy. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=785)) - As one might expect, each new “ideal” cultivar usually fails within three or four years as pests and diseases gain on it, to be replaced in turn with a newer ideal potato and the cycle begins again. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=796)) - Human nature as well seems to shun a narrow uniformity in favor of variety and diversity. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=802)) - There was one problem. People tended to hate such cities and shunned them when they could. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=814)) - Jacobs understood three things that these modernist planners were utterly blind to. First, she identified the fatal assumption that in any such activity there is only one thing going on, and the objective of planning is to maximize the efficiency of its delivery. Unlike the planners whose algorithms depended on stipulated efficiencies—how long it took to get to work from home, how efficiently food could be delivered to the city—she understood there were a great many human purposes embedded in any human activity. Mothers or fathers pushing baby carriages may simultaneously be talking to friends, doing errands, getting a bite to eat, and looking for a book. An office worker may find lunch or a beer with co-workers the most satisfying part of the day. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=826)) - Second, Jacobs grasped that it was for this reason, as well as for the sheer pleasure of navigating in an animated, stimulating, and varied environment, that complex, mixed-use districts of the city were often the most desirable locations. Successful urban neighborhoods—ones that were safe, pleasant, amenity-rich, and economically viable—tended to be dense, mixed-use areas, with virtually all the urban functions concentrated and mixed higgledy-piggledy. Moreover, they were also dynamic over time. The effort to specify and freeze functions by planning fiat Jacobs termed “social taxidermy.” ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=831)) - Finally, she explained that if one started from the “lived,” vernacular city, it became clear that the effort by urban planners to turn cities into disciplined works of art of geometric, visual order was not just fundamentally misguided, it was an attack on the actual, functioning vernacular order of a successful urban neighborhood. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=836)) - The presumptive ground-level experience of real pedestrians—window-shoppers, errand-runners, aimlessly strolling lovers—is left entirely out of the urban-planning equation. ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=843)) - Mankind has a long history of miniaturization as a form of play, control, and manipulation. It can be seen in toy soldiers, model tanks, trucks, cars, warships and planes, dollhouses, model railroads, and so on. Such toys serve the entirely admirable purpose of letting us play with representations when the real thing is inaccessible or dangerous, or both. But miniaturization is very much a game for grown-ups, presidents, and generals as well. When the effort to transform a recalcitrant and intractable world is frustrated, elites are often tempted to retreat to miniatures, some of them quite grandiose. The effect of this retreat is to create small, relatively self-contained utopian spaces where the desired perfection might be more nearly realized. Model villages, model cities, military colonies, show projects, and demonstration farms offer politicians, administrators, and specialists a chance to create a sharply defined experimental terrain where the number of rogue variables and unknowns is minimized. The limiting case, where control is maximized but impact on the external world is minimized, is the museum or theme park. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=848)) - The insistence on a rigid visual aesthetic at the core of the capital city tends to produce a penumbra of settlements and slums teeming with squatters, people who, as often as not, sweep the floors, cook the meals, and tend the children of the elites who work at the decorous, planned center. ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=859)) - The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist, informal processes that the formal order cannot alone create and maintain. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=864)) - Like the city official peering down at the architect’s proposed model of a new development site, we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder. It is a natural and, I believe, grave mistake, and one strongly associated with modernism. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=887)) - The disappearance of some vernaculars need hardly be mourned. If the standardized model of the French citizen bequeathed to us by the Revolution replaced vernacular forms of patriarchal servitude in provincial France, then surely this was an emancipatory gain. If technical improvements like matches and washing machines replaced flint and tinder and washboards, it surely meant less drudgery. One would not want to spring to the defense of all vernaculars against all universals. The powerful agencies of homogenization, however, are not so discriminating. They have tended to replace virtually all vernaculars with what they represent as universal, but let us recall again that in most cases it is a North Atlantic cross-dressed vernacular masquerading as a universal. The result is a massive diminution in cultural, political, and economic diversity, a massive homogenization in languages, cultures, property systems, political forms, and above all modes of sensibility and the lifeworlds that sustain them. One can look anxiously ahead to a time, not so far away, when the North Atlantic businessman can step off a plane anywhere in the world and find an institutional order—laws, commercial codes, ministries, traffic systems, property forms, land tenure—thoroughly familiar. And why not? The forms are essentially his own. Only the cuisine, the music, the dances, and native costumes will remain exotic and folkloric … and thoroughly commercialized as a commodity as well. ([Location 978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=978)) - Finally, given any reasonably generous definition of its class boundaries, the petite bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world. If we include not only the iconic shopkeepers but also smallholding peasants, artisans, peddlers, small independent professionals, and small traders whose only property might be a pushcart or a rowboat and a few tools, the class balloons. If we include the periphery of the class, say, tenant farmers, ploughmen with a draft animal, rag pickers, and itinerant market women, where autonomy is more severely constrained and the property small indeed, the class grows even larger. What they all have in common, however, and what distinguishes them from both the clerk and the factory worker is that they are largely in control of their working day and work with little or no supervision. One may legitimately view this as a very dubious autonomy when it means, as a practical matter, working eighteen hours a day for a remuneration that may only provide a bare subsistence. And yet it is clear, as we shall see, that the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world’s population. ([Location 1339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=1339)) - A citation index is not merely an observation; it is a force in the world, capable of generating its own observations. Social theorists have been so struck by this colonization that they have attempted to give it a lawlike formulation in Goodhart’s law, which holds that “when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.”2 And Matthew Light clarifies: “An authority sets some quantitative standard to measure a particular achievement; those responsible for meeting that standard, do so, but not in the way which was intended.” ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=1733)) - Let’s just say that with respect to education, the SAT is not just the tail that wags the dog. It has reshaped the dog’s breed, its appetite, its surroundings, and the lives of all those who care for it and feed it. It’s a striking example of colonization. A set of powerful quantitative observations, once again, create something of a social Heisenberg Principle in which the scramble to make the grade utterly transforms the observational field. “Quantitative technologies work best,” Porter reminds us, “if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their own image.”3 It’s a fancy way of saying that the SAT has so reshaped education after its monochromatic image that what it observes is largely the effect of what it has itself conjured up. ([Location 1747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=1747)) - McNamara had created an infernal audit system that not only produced a mere simulacrum—a “command performance,” as it were—of legible progress but also blocked a wider-ranging dialogue about what might, under these circumstances, represent progress. They might have heeded a real scientist’s words, Einstein’s: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts.” ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=1779)) - gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity—their actual line of conduct—and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical action, not its parent. ([Location 1946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0091XBYWK&location=1946))