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James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 336 pp. “We have had a lot of governments here at _________, but none of them has ever done a damn thing for us: we think that government is a bad ide.” a This was the unsolicited response of a group of New Guinea highlanders to a query as to who might have burned down the government station. Highland Papua New Guinea people were among the first on earth to originate a regime of agricultural food- production, complete with irrigation, fertilization, and field management, and they did so about 9,000 years ago, with no help from the outside. At no time in the ensuing 9,000 years, until the colonial government arrived, did they have anything that even faintly resembled a centralized state structure or, for t - hat mat ter, a centralized anything. We have no solid evidence from anywhere in the world that food-produ ction economies (or even economic necessity, whatever that might mean) lead directly or even indirectly to centralized state structures, and most of the evidence we do have from state societies is projected backward from the present day. It is unlikely that any argument based on linear causality would be of any help in determining the origins of so complex a phenomenon. Scott deserves great credit for making the “emperor’s new clothes” argument in a field so rife with petty attempts at rationalization. There are no good arguments for how civilization itself (whatever that may mean) got started, and the ideologically tainted “social contract” litany is of no help in that respect either. — Roy Wagner doi 10.1215/0961754X-7899659 Mitchell Cohen, The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 477 pp. How should the history of political thought be written? The traditional answer to this question emphasized the analysis of texts by major thinkers, a canon that ran from Plato, through Machiavelli and Locke, to Tocqueville and beyond. More recently, the study of texts has been joined by that of political contexts, but a still broader approach is possible. It might be described as the social or cultur-al his tory of political thought, asking “whose thought?” and going beyond t- he clas sical texts to include minor ones, novels (studied in Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel), and paintings such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fresco in Siena Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/26/1/156a/777847/0260156b.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 16 June 2020 C OM MO N K N O W L E D G E 15 6
Common Knowledge – Duke University Press
Published: Jan 1, 2020
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