Was James C. Scott an Anarchist?

Yale University academic James C. Scott, who died last week, has been much celebrated by some anarchists due to his authorship of books elaborating on popular resistance to state structures over much of Southeast Asia. It certainly didn't hurt that he subtitled one of his books An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, and Two Cheers for Anarchism is a book-length engagement with some implications of anarchist political philosophy, which certainly seems like a lot of energy to expend on the subject.

In the preface to Two Cheers, Scott distances himself from right libertarian "anarcho"-capitalism. He also distances himself from unilateral condemnation of the state:

Unlike many anarchist thinkers, I do not believe that the state is everywhere and always the enemy of freedom. Americans need only recall the scene of the federalized National Guard leading black children to school through a menacing crowd of angry whites in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to realize that the state can, in some circumstances, play an emancipatory role. I believe that even this possibility has arisen only as a result of the establishment of democratic citizenship and popular suffrage by the French Revolution, subsequently extended to women, domestics, and minorities. 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. The conditions under which such possibilities are occasionally realized, I believe, occur only when massive extra-institutional disruption from below threatens the whole political edifice. Even this achievement is fraught with melancholy, inasmuch as the French Revolution also marked the moment when the state won direct, unmediated access to the citizen and when universal conscription and total warfare became possible as well.

Near the end of the preface, he describes the book as "a series of aperçus that seem to me to add up to an endorsement of much that anarchist thinkers have had to say about the state, about revolution, and about equality." Importantly, this seems to stop short of claiming an anarchist identity for oneself. Those who take self-identification as the final word on political identity will likely need to seek elsewhere for a definitive answer.

Scott's work for the CIA in the 1960s (scroll down to "Realignment and Legitimacy" for the relevant citation) has also made the question of his [non-]anarchism a contentious one. The interview in which he mentioned this was done in 2018; if he ever regretted, apologized for, or attempted to counteract his work for the U.S. intelligence apparatus, evidence of such is yet to be uncovered.

While there does seem to be some awareness "out there" about the professor's interest in anarchism and government employment, there seems to be much less widespread knowledge about his thousands of dollars of donations to Democratic Party election campaigns. These include presidential campaigns for Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as parliamentary campaigns for Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison, and other similarly downtrodden underdogs.

For some readers, the question "Was James C. Scott an Anarchist?" is likely tied to other questions they have a deeper investment in, such as "Should Everyone Read James C. Scott's Books?", "Why Would Anyone Dislike James C. Scott?", "Where Should Anarchists Get Ideas and Inspiration From?", and more. Does not self-identifying as an anarchist, working for the CIA, and paying to get Democrats into office disqualify you from being an anarchist? What about owning a 46-acre colonial farm on stolen indigenous land? According to the just-linked New York Times article, he self-identified as a “crude Marxist” while arguing states can only be reined in, not eliminated, which many—including this writer—will interpret as a conclusive "not anarchist" with the additional weight of the issues already discussed. Some might still fiercely defend Scott's anarchistic tendencies, for reasons sure to be elaborated on in a comments section or social media post just a few taps away. Some might give a different answer for James C. Scott than they would for others in similar positions. Whatever your opinion, surely we can all agree on at least one point: now he's dead.