James C. Scott, one of the world’s most widely read social scientists, whose studies on why top-down government schemes of betterment often fail and how marginalized groups subtly undermine authority led to his embrace of anarchism as a political philosophy, died on July 19 at his home in Durham, Conn. He was 87.

His death was announced by Yale University, where Dr. Scott was Sterling professor emeritus of political science and where he also taught in the department of anthropology and the school of forestry and environmental studies before retiring in 2022.

The author of a shelf of disparate, iconoclastic books, several of them regarded as classics, Dr. Scott was “one of the great intellectuals of our time,” Louis Warren, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a 2021 oral history of Yale’s agrarian studies program, which Dr. Scott co-founded.

Dr. Scott’s wide-ranging scholarship was approachable to nonscholars. It won him a readership that was both broad and politically diverse, including the free-market libertarians of the Cato Institute and the lefty theorists of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

His study of rural ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, and the theories about resistance to power that he extrapolated, led to a new view of supposedly primitive peoples and to a new academic field, resistance studies.

He was a big-picture scholar harking back to the likes of the German sociologist Max Weber, a rare breed today in the social sciences, which became increasingly reliant on statistics and what Dr. Scott disparaged as “fourth-order abstraction.”

The New York Times