Abstract:
Rousseau’s narrative about the origin of the State was recovered in the last centuries by several traditions, being noticed in the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment and in the works of Engels. James Scott, in his recent book Against the Grain of 2017, echoes some of Rousseau’s theses. Among many points of convergence, three stand out and will be analyzed in the course of this article: i) on the one hand, the variety of ways of being and relating to the nature of stateless peoples, the golden age of the barbarians; on the other, the stratification of peoples under the State, the impoverishment of cereal farmers; ii) the rare and very special ecological conditions favorable to the emergence of the State apparatus, as opposed to the difficulties of forming a State in regions of natural abundance, which imposes the necessity to establish the hypothesis of climate changes that alters the conditions of existence; iii) and, finally, the importance of grains for the civilizing process, that is, the affinity between the agrarian economy of cereals and the State.
Keywords:
James Scott; Rousseau; Grain; State