James Scott, the Yale political scientist who specialized in so many things, has died.

Jim was a scholar of peasant politics and societies, Southeast Asia, state planning, ecology, forestry, Balzac, and much else. He meant a great deal to a great many people, intellectually and personally, but there’s a small cohort of us, who came to Yale in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for whom he holds a special place in our hearts.

We had come to the political science department intending to study political theory, only to discover, upon our arrival, that the official political theorists on the faculty were neither political nor theoretical.

Though we tried to make it work as theorists, many of us in this cohort wound our way to working with Americanists like Rogers Smith, who bridged the divide between theory and empirical work, and/or Jim. If we were lucky, we wound up working with both of them. I was lucky.

In 1991-92, I got involved in the graduate worker union. By the summer of 1992, I was helping to lead it, and though I vowed with every semester that I’d step back from my union work, my involvement only increased with the years. For reasons that I can’t now remember, and against the advice and better judgment of my friends, I kept the department political theorists, along with Rogers, on my dissertation committee. But then in 1995-96, after I led a grade strike, the theorists—Steven Smith and Ian Shapiro—struck back. They revised their letters of recommendation for me, effectively blacklisting me from any future job in academia.

It was at that point that I retooled my entire dissertation committee. I made Rogers my main adviser, and I asked Jim to join my committee. I had taken a course with him on anarchism and always found him curious about ideas and up for an intellectual adventure. Unlike many of the faculty—who thought a dissertation on fear was somehow not really a topic of politics or theory (these were political scientists, mind you, but this was the 1990s, so that’s the way things were)—Jim loved my dissertation topic. And my approach: a combination of intellectual history (Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville) and revisionist reading of McCarthyism as a case study in political fear. Somewhere in my basement are his detailed comments—sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed—on each of my chapters. He was a big fan of my two chapters on Montesquieu, which were my favorites, too. He had good taste.

There’s a lot I could say about Jim as a scholar, but there are people far more well versed in his work and impact than I am, so I’ll leave that to them. And I could say a lot more about Jim as an adviser, but there are students upon whom he had far greater an influence, so I’ll leave that to them. I don’t mean that Jim wasn’t substantive; far from it. He affected multiple disciplines and is read by virtually everyone in the humanities and social sciences. And probably the natural sciences as well, since he was extraordinarily sensitive to questions of nature and the environment and the interaction between peoples, politics, and natural processes.

But it’s a testament to Jim as a person that despite being such an interested and invested adviser, and despite being such an intellectual heavyweight, he didn’t change my intellectual course or scholarship. “He wears his learning lightly” is a cliche among academics and scholars, but Jim really did. And his authority, too. He just let me do my thing, commenting and correcting, but never steering or directing.

Jim was that rare thing in academia: a genuine egalitarian. He was one of the most illustrious scholars of the social sciences, translated into multiple languages, recipient of every award, extraordinarily well read, yet he always treated me as if I were a conversation partner, as if my dissertation were a book, and he were just an interested reader.

From the get go, Jim was a firm supporter of the grad union. It’s fashionable now for academics to support academic unions—thank God—but this, again, was the early 90s. Jim was one of the very few members of the Yale faculty—Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, and David Montgomery were some of the others—whom we could count on for consistent support. In political science, he might have been the only member of the faculty to always support us.

It was 1993 or 1994, I can’t remember when, and the union had done some sort of action, I can’t remember what. I came to Jim to get him to sign some petition or something, I can’t remember for what. He immediately signed it but then said, sort of sideways, “I’m very cross with GESO.” I have no memory of what he was upset about, but here’s where his egalitarianism really kicked in. Despite his irritation, he never allowed it to be anything more than it was. He never played the part of the disappointed authority, the professor betrayed. He was just annoyed about something, he expressed his annoyance to me, and that was that. He was on one side of the power divide, I was on another, but in that moment of disagreement, which both of us knew would go no further than that, I got a glimpse of equality and respect.