james scott and austrian economics

Brayden

Brad DeLong provides a masterly review of James Scott’s (1998) book, Seeing Like a State. Scott, the political scientist/anthropologist is required reading for most graduate students taking a course in political sociology. In fact, in my first year as a Master’s student I read his excellent The Moral Economy of the Peasant. My first year as a PhD student I read Seeing Like a State in a state and policy course. So Scott figured prominently in my early graduate education. Yet, through all of the discussions we had of Scott, I can’t remember anyone bringing up the similarity of Scott’s argument to those of the Austrian economists. DeLong makes it apparent why we should have made this connection.

No one can finish reading Scott without believing–as Austrians have argued for three-quarters of a century–that centrally-planned social-engineering is not an appropriate mechanism for building a better society.

But on a second level, it is an act of displacement. Friedrich Hayek, after all, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for making many of Scott’s key arguments: that the bureaucratic planner with a map does not know best, and can not move humans and their lives around the territory as if on a chessboard to create utopia; that the local, practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot is important; that the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation; that any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space for those on the spot to use their local, practical knowledge (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility). These key arguments are well known: they are the core of the Austrian economists’ critique of central planning….

The key fault of what Scott calls “high modernism” is its belief that details don’t matter–that planners decree from on high, people obey, and utopia results. Note that Scott’s conclusion is not just that attempts at high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering have failed. It is–as von Mises argued 70 years ago–they are always overwhelmingly likely to fail.

Sociology students love this book, and yet for the most part they despise or simply refuse to listen to Hayek and the other Austrians. Why? DeLong offers that while Scott clearly saw the problems with centralized coordination, he also felt that as many problems existed with “market driven standardization.” Perhaps what Scott fears (although it’s not clear to me) is that turning over all control to the market is de facto giving powers of control to another centralized source of planning – the corporation. The latter could be just as devastating a force as the utopian statists.

My sense is that although Scott and most sociologists who love this book may share with the Austrians a distrust of the state, their dividing interests are rooted in their distinct views of the market. Scott does not see the market as a viable solution to centralized planning. It’s just centralization in another organizational form. So what is the solution if it’s neither market nor state? Scott and the other folks on the left are much more likely to embrace community-minded control and planning. Community planning prioritizes the “metis,” or local knowledge and practices, that enables more personalized and context-sensitive problem solving. Local action and practical skills are valued over standardized formulas or routines as a means to accomplishing ends. In this sense, I think Scott has much more in common with organizational scholars like Paul Adler, who see “communities of practice” as more capable of managing knowledge than centralized hierarchies. Like Powell’s “network forms of organization,” communities of practice value trust over prices or routines, and it is trust that enables detailed coordination in knowledge-sensitive domains. Given Scott’s fear that the state is destroying this local knowledge through attempts to standardize everything, a potentially viable solution would be to give communities more self-governance and decentralize planning in both states and corporations.

In sum, the difference between Scott and the Austrians has more to do with the solution than with the problem. Both sides can agree that the state stinks, but they certainly don’t agree about the best ways to decentralize.