The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
I figure part of my job around here is to call attention to new books that relate in
some way to the libertarian tradition, that is, to the history of libertarian thought.
One such book was first published a little over a year ago, in September 2009, by Yale
University Press.
It has only just now, in November 2010, been brought out in a paperback edition at about
a 30% reduction in price.
It's the work of James C. Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale,
and its title is The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
Except for one highly intelligent review earlier this year in Reason, this book seems to have
attracted no attention at all from libertarians.
Yet this is a book libertarians with an enthusiasm for history will find very, very interesting
indeed, though probably not so much for its extremely illuminating discussion of Southeast
in Human History, as for its even more illuminating observations on the place of the state in
human history generally.
Until shortly before the Common Era, Scott writes, which is to say the last 2,000 years,
the very last 1% of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary self-governing
and kinship units that might occasionally cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing,
trading and peacemaking.
It did not contain anything one could call a state.
In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition.
According to Scott, world history may be divided into four eras.
1. A stateless era, by far the longest. 2. An era of small-scale states encircled by
vast and easily reached stateless peripheries. 3. A period in which such peripheries are
shrunken and beleaguered by the expansion of state power. And finally, 4. An era in
which virtually the entire globe is administered space, and the periphery is not much more
more than a folkloric remnant.
The progression from one era to the next has been very uneven geographically, China and
Europe being more precocious than, say, Southeast Asia and Africa, and temporally, with peripheries
growing and shrinking depending on the vagaries of state-making.
But about the long-run trend, there can be not a shred of doubt.
Not surprisingly, Scott thinks the state's importance is usually exaggerated by historians.
The very earliest states in China and Egypt, he writes, and later Chandragupta India, Classical
Greece and Republican Rome, were, in demographic terms, insignificant.
They occupied a miniscule portion of the world's landscape, and their subjects were no more
than a rounding error in the world's population figures.
In mainland Southeast Asia, where the first states appear only around the middle of the
first millennium of the Common Era, which is to say around 1500 years ago, their mark
on the landscape and its peoples is relatively trivial when compared with their oversized
place in the history books.
Small, moated and walled centres together with their tributary villages, these little
All nodes of hierarchy and power were both unstable and geographically confined.
To an eye not yet hypnotized by archaeological remains and state-centric histories, the landscape
would have seemed virtually all periphery and no centers.
Nearly all the population and territory were outside their ambit.
Each of these early states, according to Scott, was an in-gathering of previously stateless
Some subjects were no doubt attracted to the possibilities for trade, wealth and status available at the court centers,
while others, almost certainly the majority, were captives and slaves seized in warfare or purchased from slave raiders.
The vast barbarian periphery of these small states was the source of hundreds of important trade goods and forest products
Products, Necessary to the Prosperity of the State, as well as the most important trade
good in circulation, the human captives who formed the working capital of any successful
state.
What we know of the classical states such as Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as the
early Khmer, Thai and Burmese states, suggests that most of their subjects were formally
and Unfree, Slaves, Captives and Their Descendants.
That vast barbarian periphery that encircled each of these early states was also a place
to which victims of the state could flee in search of greater freedom.
As Scott notes, the non-state space beyond the frontier operated as a rough-and-ready
homeostatic device.
The more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had.
The frontier underwrote popular freedom.
Scott uses the term non-state space to refer to locations where, owing largely to geographical
obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority.
Historically, Scott maintains, it is difficult or inaccessible terrain, regardless of elevation,
presents great obstacles to state control, and it is thus in difficult or inaccessible terrain
that non-state space has been most often found. And as Scott emphasizes, such places have often
served as havens of refuge for peoples resisting or fleeing the state. Scott observes that since 1945
and in some cases before then, the power of the state to deploy distance demolishing technology
Studies, Railroads, All Weather Roads, Telephone, Telegraph, Air Power, Helicopters, and now
Information Technology, so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples
and nation states, so diminished the friction of terrain that my analysis largely ceases
to be useful.
But he stresses that avoiding the state was, until the past few centuries, a real option.
A thousand years ago, most people lived outside state structures, under loose-knit empires
or in situations of fragmented sovereignty.
Today, it is an option that is fast vanishing.
Of course, states work to discourage their subjects from fleeing to the hinterlands where
state reach was impaired by difficult terrain.
One method they used was propaganda.
As Scott writes, the official story most civilizations tell about themselves almost invariably concerns
a backward, naive and perhaps barbaric people that is gradually incorporated into an advanced,
superior and more prosperous society and culture.
In fact, he points out, barbarian was another word states used to describe any self-governing
non-subject people.
In fact, however, many of these ungoverned barbarians had, at one time or another, elected
as a political choice to take their distance from the state, and to live instead in a stateless
society in which their subsistence routines, their social organization, and many elements
of their culture are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby
by States and to minimize the likelihood that state-like concentrations of power will arise
among them.
State evasion and state prevention permeate their practices, and often their ideology
as well.
Another way of saying this might be that densely populated prosperous trading centers where
civilization exists in its most advanced form are usually taken over by a state of some
The State is the price of civilization, not as the statists believe, because the state
is necessary to safeguard or protect civilization, but rather because it is civilization the
The State fastens upon like a leech or a tapeworm, because the most civilized societies are
the wealthiest and thus the most profitable to loot.
If you want to live in a civilized place, you'll probably have to put up with the State.
Faced with that dilemma, there have been a lot of people who have chosen to walk away
from civilization and thereby escape the State, rather than stay in civilization and attempt
to Reform or Abolish the State.
Of course, as Scott notes in the early state's propaganda counseling against any such walking
away from civilization, the linkage between being civilized and being a subject of the
state is taken for granted, and countless generations of historians have followed the
lead of the early state's court intellectuals and cheerfully confounded civilization with
with what was, in fact, state-making.
As a result, Scott argues, we find ourselves today with a huge literature on state-making,
contemporary and historic, that pays virtually no attention to its obverse, the history of
deliberate and reactive statelessness.
This is the history of those who got away.
Scott understands that a reader in 21st century America may well regard his argument with
The State seems pervasive and inescapable, he writes, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state, or in an intermediate zone, was a choice, one that might be revised as the circumstances warranted.
A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population that found its advantages rewarding.
Reporting.
Still, it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was
unfree.
They were subjects under duress, and it was very common for state subjects to run away.
For living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée
labor, that is, forced unpaid short-term labor, such as being required to work a day or two
to Unpaid on a Road Repair Crew, and, for most, a condition of servitude.
Thus the early state extruded populations as readily as it absorbed them, and when,
as was often the case, it collapsed altogether as the result of war, drought, epidemic, or
civil strife over succession, its populations were disgorged.
States were by no means a once and for all creation.
Innumerable archaeological finds of state centers that briefly flourished and were then
eclipsed by warfare, epidemics, famine or ecological collapse, depict a long history
of state formation and collapse rather than permanence.
For long periods people moved in and out of states, and stateness was itself often cyclical
and Reversible.
Of course, it wasn't only famine, epidemics or internal struggles for political power that
brought down these fragile early states.
At least as often, it was greed.
As Scott observes, one might have expected statecraft to consist in sailing as close to
the wind as they could, that is, in extracting resources just short of the point at which
they would provoke flight or rebellion.
This would be the most reasonable strategy.
But it wasn't the strategy most of these early states actually pursued.
For example, the early rulers in Southeast Asia knew that the fiscal capacity of the
population varied widely, as it would in any agrarian economy from season to season, depending
on harvest fluctuations due to weather, pests and crop diseases.
Even theft and banditry could be a factor here.
above-ground grain crops were just as big a temptation to gangs of thieves, rebels or rival kingdoms as they were to the state.
Allowing for the great variation in the cultivator's capacity to pay year by year would have required the Crown to sacrifice its own fiscal demands for the welfare of its peasantry.
All the evidence suggests that, quite to the contrary, the pre-colonial and colonial states tried to guarantee themselves a steady take at the expense of their subjects.
For given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator, but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state,
and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose
the former every time.
The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the
overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
As long as even the most successful states were adjacent to areas they couldn't control,
However, the oppressed people at least had somewhere else to go.
Until at least the early 19th century, Scott writes, the difficulties of transportation,
the state of military technology and, above all, demographic realities, placed sharp limits
on the reach of even the most ambitious states.
In Southeast Asia, for example, in 1600, the population density was only 5.5 persons per
per square kilometer, compared with roughly 35 for India and China, so that any rulers
subjects in Southeast Asia had relatively easy access to a vast land-rich frontier.
And just beyond that frontier lay the uplands, the highlands, the hills, an area roughly
the size of Europe, which Scott, in common with increasing numbers of historians and
and Social Scientists, calls ZOMIA.
ZOMIA, he writes, is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly 300
meters, all the way from the central highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India, and traversing
five southeast Asian nations, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma, and four provinces
of China.
It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometers, containing about 100 million peoples at the
periphery of nine states.
Zomia is, Scott tells us, one of the largest remaining non-state spaces in the world, if
not the largest.
In fact, Scott says, the signal distinguishing trait of Zomia is that it is relatively stateless.
Historically, of course, there have been states in the hills, but while state-making projects have abounded there, it is fair to say that few have come to fruition, and those would-be kingdoms that did manage to defy the odds did so only for a relatively brief, crisis-strewn period.
The human settlements that make up Zomia, Scott maintains, are best understood as runaway,
fugitive communities, who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression
of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics,
and warfare.
And it should surprise no one, he writes, that virtually everything about these people's
Social organizations, ideologies, and even their largely oral cultures can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm's length, to avoid incorporation into states, and to prevent states from springing up among them.
For example, the residents of Zomia typically practice what Scott calls escape agriculture,
forms of cultivation designed to thwart state appropriation.
And their social structure could fairly be called escape social structure,
inasmuch as it was designed to aid dispersal and autonomy and ward off political subordination.
If we want to understand the folkways, mores and behavior of these people,
Scott insists, we must begin by acknowledging that the inhabitants of this zone have come,
or remained here, largely because it lies beyond the reach of the state.
This does not mean, of course, that their decentralized societies lack any coherent order.
Scott writes, in fact, of his desire to attempt an account of the elementary units of
Political Order in Mainland Southeast Asia and then comments I emphasize the term political order
to avoid conveying the mistaken impression that outside the realm of the state lay mere disorder
and interestingly one of the chief points he makes about the elementary units of political
order that he has found among the people of upland southeast asia is that and these are his words
Their political structures are, with extremely rare exceptions, imitative, in the sense that while they may have the trappings and rhetoric of monarchy, they lack the substance, a tax-paying subject population, or direct control over their constituent units, let alone a standing army.
A simpler way of saying this would be to say, employing Albert J. Nock's terminology,
that the people of upland Southeast Asia have government, but not the state.
As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, Nock wrote in 1935,
it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization.
The difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely
marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher. They are commonly so taken,
but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus,
to classify both under the generic name of government, though this also, until very
Lately has always been done and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.
The origin of government, Nock argued, is in the common understanding and common agreement
of society.
Government implements the common desire of society, first for freedom and second for
security.
Beyond this, it does not go.
It contemplates no positive intervention upon the individual, but only a negative intervention.
Nock believed that the code of government should be that of the legendary King Poesol,
who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, hurt no man, and the second,
then, do as you please.
And the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that
But This Code Is Carried Out
By contrast, Nock argued, the state did not originate in the common understanding and
agreement of society.
It originated in conquest and confiscation.
Its intention, far from contemplating freedom and security, contemplated nothing of the
kind.
It contemplated primarily the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another,
and it concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was consistent with
this primary intention, and this was, in fact, very little.
Its primary function or exercise was not by way of purely negative interventions upon
the individual, but by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions, all
of which were for the purpose of maintaining the stratification of society into an owning
Building and Exploiting Class and a Propertyless Dependent Class.
The order of interest that it reflected was not social, but purely anti-social, and those
who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics or even the common standard
of law as applied to private persons, were indistinguishable from a professional criminal
class.
That James C. Scott, not only in his discussion of the refugees from the state who live in
Zomia, but also in his more general remarks about the history of the state in human society,
makes no distinction between government and the state.
About half the time he refers to the Zomians and to their counterparts in other parts of
the world and in other eras of world history as ungoverned.
The other half of the time he refers to these same groups of individuals as self-governing
peoples.
But of course, if they are truly self-governing, they are not un-governed.
They are governing themselves.
They are not practicing the art of not being governed.
They are practicing the art of not being ruled.
This may seem to be mere quibbling, but, like Nock, I think it's an important distinction.
A distinction that, if not taken into account, will lead to confusion and misunderstanding.
If Scott can excoriate most of his fellow historians for confounding civilization with
statemaking, he himself can be excoriated for confounding statelessness with lack of
government, particularly when it is clear from his own text that he does grasp the difference
and the difference it makes.
That text, by the way, is The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia by James C. Scott, published in hardcover and now in paperback by Yale University Press.
Despite its flaws, it's a superb and magnificently thoughtful piece of work.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
www.fieggen.com