Reality checks help. It is almost always a useful exercise
to step back from and examine our largely unquestioned assumptions
about how the world is and how it works. And it is in this spirit
that David C. Scott casts a critical eye on the emergence of our
global system of nation states over the past half millennium.
Today we take for granted that the
world is divided, or should be, into contiguous nation states with
well defined borders that have, or should have, a monopoly on the
tools of the political craft, especially on the means of violence.
This, we think, is not only how the world is but how it ought
to be.
Obviously, though, this is not how
things have always been. Nor, many increasingly suggest, is this how
it should or must be. This is not a fate and we do have degrees of
freedom that are real though far from evident. In our own time we see
a good deal of supercession of national powers, particularly those of
weaker, mostly southern nation states, by international (though more
often than not hegemonic northern) institutions. The IMF and World
Bank are of course paradigm exemplars of this. But so too are those
that impose hegemony within groupings of wealthier nation states,
such as the European Union and NAFTA.
Of course this hardly represents the raising of the black flag. In three works published over the last
quarter century, The Art of Not Being Governed, Seeing Like a
State and Two Cheers
for Anarchy, Scott examines
historical spaces of a much more levelling resistance to state
formation and hegemony. He suggests that the synoptic view from the
“commanding heights,” to use Lenin's term, is one of a need to
impose an institutionally self-interested order on locally evolved
folkways which do not lend themselves to the ordering, control and
extraction on which the institutional apparatus of the state, of whatever political stripe, depends.
And he demonstrates how we might today begin to think about and to
carve out spaces for the local, non-state and even anarchistic that
while understandably threatening to those viewing from the heights,
far better serve those on the ground, who are much more subject to
the tender mercies of the apparatus of the state, no matter how
seemingly benign.
The particular value of this work is that Scott, a political scientist and
anthropologist, is able to connect state theory, particularly ideas in ascendency since Hobbes, that is in fact far
from as self-evident as we might imagine with solid ethnographic
evidence of alternatives both past and present. And in doing so, he
shows us that there are real alternatives to engaging with and living
our lives entirely within the confines of the institutionalized norms
and structures maintained and reinforced by the sovereign. Indeed, the
view from the bottom toward
the commanding heights suggests that governments, whatever their
claims or seeming inclinations, inevitably serve and reinforce the
interests of the already powerful. They are not
the 99%. As none other than Conrad Black has argued so convincingly
in his biography of Roosevelt, progressive efforts by government are
almost inevitably undertaken in the long-term interests of preserving the
status-quo and not because of an abiding love of the powerless, a
lesson often bitterly learned.
As
such, Scott's work serves as a powerful reminder that working within
accepted channels inevitably co-opts far more than it changes. The
famous and well intentioned long march through the institutions begun
by privileged progressives in the 1960s always seemed to end in a
suburban enclave or gentrified urban setting where those they claimed
to serve were seldom welcome to visit. More than half a century ago,
well before the disappointments of Clinton and Obama, Philip Selznik,
in his history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, insisted that
“power co-opts and
absolute power co-opts absolutly.”
Scott's
work serves to remind us that there is another way.
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