ABSTRACT
Given the range and variety of debates and scholarship inspired by the urge to emulate or criticize James Scott’s contributions, I eschew two temptations in this chapter and, thus, hopefully avoid the inevitable defeat of efforts to be comprehensive in their treatment. First, I will not try to summarize the arguments of each of the four major books by James Scott that I have already discussed in the editorial introduction. Second, I will not try to review all the work done in critical engagement with them. Rather, I will try to map a tour through Scott’s writing that takes into account some of the key ideas that appear as central pillars and beams in the architecture of Scott’s work, reaching from moral economy to resistance and power to his critiques of high modernism and the working of modern states across the world. Inasmuch as the elucidation of power, hegemony, and resistance as one of the main conceptual pillars, I will also direct most of my attention to that cluster of concepts, focusing on how they are worked out in Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985) and some seminal essays.
