Just in time for this year’s festival of self-organisation on May 1st, International Workers’ Day, we’re pleased to present a book review symposium on James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism. Professor of Anthropology in Yale University’s Department of Political Science, James Scott will be well-know to many Antipode readers: The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) have established him as one of today’s most innovative, interesting and important writers on the nature of domination and resistance and forms of governance and alternatives to them.

Scott’s more recent book Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012) offers not a ‘comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy’ but, rather, an ‘anarchist squint’ or some ‘anarchist glasses’ through which to…