That is, the ideal form.

See note on Hobbes, above.

Germany had been divided into West and East after the end of World War II, with the Eastern half becoming an authoritarian socialist republic allied with the Soviet Union. Until 1989, the famous "Wall" between East and West Berlin symbolized the division. The two nations reunited in 1990.

Title of another book by James C. Scott

This ties into another interest of Scott's -- he's fascinated by how much history is made by people who leave little or no traces behind for historians. Elsewhere, he calls this "the hidden transcript."

Reminds me of Bruno Latour's saying that "'power' is the illusion people get from being obeyed."

So, just at the beginning of Dr. King's famous work as a civil rights campaigner

See the Wikipedia entry on "charismatic authority"

This reminds me of how the de facto speed limit on the highway I take to school is 70 mph even though the official limit is 55 the entire way...

The politics of oppressed people

A reference to a famous essay in sociology that described the options of people unhappy with the policy of an organization they are part of as either "loyalty" (sticking with the organization), "exit" (leaving the org), or "voice" (speaking out against the org's policy).

lying

Other political theorists from history. (Peter Kropotkin, one of the most famous theorists of anarchism, was a Russian prince by birth; he left his position and homeland behind to foment revolution in the West.)

Famous scholars who study the social movements organized by poor people.

The relevant entry in the Oxford English Dictionary defines "scientism" as "The belief that only knowledge obtained from scientific research is valid, and that notions or beliefs deriving from other sources, such as religion, should be discounted; extreme or excessive faith in science or scientists. Also: the view that the methodology used in the natural and physical sciences can be applied to other disciplines, such as philosophy and the social sciences."

While most anarchists share with Marx and Lenin the goal of a communist economy, they have rejected Marx's and Lenin's insistence on the need for a supposedly temporary "dictatorship of the proletariat" to accomplish the revolution. Anarchists argue that any such "temporary" government will simply make itself permanent, imposing a new form of domination -- as it did in the case of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.

In the US, "libertarianism" is the name of a political ideology which favors a very small government, massive privatization of public goods, and extreme "free market" policies. Further on, Scott dubs this ideology a kind of "market fundamentalism." Most anarchists reject this and endorse instead a kind of communism without the State,

Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" sarcastically proposes that to relieve hunger in Ireland, babies should be eaten -- a protest against cruel English economic policies imposed on the Irish. For Scott, it seems, the real-life practice of organ harvesting from the Third World for the benefit of the rich in the developed countries is just as grotesque a "solution" to the problem of Third World poverty.

Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher, the author of the famous book Leviathan, in which he argues that a powerful sovereign is necessary for society because the "state of nature" is just a state of continuous warfare. (Life in the state of nature, he says, is "nasty, brutish, and short" because everyone is out to get everyone else.) This is not a set of assumptions that Scott shares.

A "squint" = a way of seeing things, a perspective or lens. An "anarchist squint" = "seeing like an anarchist," i.e., nearly the opposite of what he described in his famous 1998 book Seeing Like a State. Scott proposes that even if you don't fully agree with anarchism -- he doesn't, either -- you can still learn a lot about the world by using this "anarchist squint" to look at things.

In other words, (mainly) the US and Western Europe.

The "of course" here indicates that he's anticipating a reader who knows a thing or two about these places and events he refers to. We might not recognize all or even some of these, but readers who are at all familiar with the history of the so-called Third World in the 1960s would nod their heads in recognition.

The Preface is worth reading for an account of why Scott is writing this particular book. It gets into some weighty discussions of theory, though, and it isn't totally necessary to read it before you read other chapters (the book is fairly modular -- that is, it's composed of parts that can be read out of order and still make sense).