Two Cheers for Anarchism
Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play is Scott's most explicitly political book — and, deliberately, his most tentative. The subtitle's 'two cheers' (rather than three) signals the ambivalence: Scott is not arguing for the abolition of the state, not advocating a stateless society, not defending the anarchist tradition against its liberal and Marxist critics. He is articulating what he calls the anarchist squint — a habit of perception that refuses to take institutional self-descriptions at face value, that looks at any arrangement of power from the standpoint of those subject to it, and that asks whether the claims of service match the reality of the served. The book distills into accessible form the political sensibility that had been implicit in Scott's academic work for four decades.
In the AI Story
The book consists of six 'fragments' — short essays or collections of observations — organized loosely around themes of autonomy, state evasion, informal practice, and the politics of small gestures. The style is deliberately aphoristic and personal. Scott includes anecdotes from his own life, observations from his fieldwork, reflections on institutions ranging from academia to highway construction to German crosswalk signals. The informality is not incidental. It reflects Scott's skepticism that the political sensibility he is describing can be adequately captured in systematic theoretical form.
The book's central methodological contribution is the anarchist squint itself. Scott is clear that the squint is not the ideology of anarchism. It is a corrective — a way of counteracting the tendency of all institutions, including the ones Scott himself inhabited, to treat their own perspective as authoritative. The squint is useful for socialists, liberals, conservatives, and anarchists alike, because all of them will at various times find themselves in positions of institutional power and will be tempted to mistake that position's view for the whole view.
Two Cheers is the book that most directly articulates Scott's positive program — or, rather, his refusal to offer a positive program. The book argues against comprehensive plans not because all plans are bad but because the comprehensive plan is the institutional form most vulnerable to the pathologies Scott had spent his career documenting. The alternative is not a different kind of plan but a different posture — starting small, observing effects, preferring reversible interventions, tolerating messiness, trusting the practical knowledge of those closest to the ground.
Applied to AI governance, the book's framework suggests that the comprehensive strategies now being drafted in governments, corporations, and universities are likely to reproduce the characteristic failures of comprehensive planning — and that the governance that works will look less like a strategy and more like a distributed experiment, conducted by practitioners who possess the local knowledge to calibrate their interventions to specific conditions, connected by channels that allow successful experiments to propagate and failed experiments to be abandoned.
Origin
Two Cheers grew out of lectures Scott delivered in the early 2000s as he was synthesizing the political implications of his academic work. Much of the material had appeared in earlier forms — essays, talks, shorter pieces — that Scott revised and organized into the book's six fragments. The book was deliberately aimed at a broader audience than Scott's academic monographs, though it remained densely allusive and presupposed familiarity with the theoretical traditions it engaged.
Key Ideas
The anarchist squint. A habit of perception, not an ideology. The discipline of looking at institutions from the standpoint of those subject to them and asking whether the self-descriptions match the experience.
Two cheers, not three. The title's restraint is deliberate. Scott is not a partisan of anarchism as a political program. He is recommending a corrective, a perspective, a counterweight to the institutional tendency to mistake the view from above for the whole view.
Fragments, not system. The book's structure reflects its argument. The political sensibility Scott describes cannot be systematized without losing what makes it valuable.
Small-scale experimentation. The positive alternative to the comprehensive plan is not a different plan but a different approach: start small, observe, adjust, prefer reversible interventions, tolerate the messiness that specific conditions produce.
Debates & Critiques
The book has been criticized from the left for being politically insufficient — for refusing to endorse any positive program that might actually change structural conditions. It has been criticized from the right for underestimating the genuine benefits of state capacity and institutional order. Scott's response to both criticisms was consistent with the book's overall argument: he was not trying to win a theoretical debate but to cultivate a perceptual discipline that he believed would improve political judgment across ideological positions. Applied to AI governance, the book's approach has been extended by scholars who argue that distributed, practitioner-led governance is more likely to succeed than comprehensive regulatory frameworks — a claim that remains empirically contested.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012)
- James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009)
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
- Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (1973)