If you are reading this, you almost certainly live your life as the subject of a state. This state expects you to abide by its laws, pay its taxes, and contribute in one way or another to its military adventures. You may chafe at these demands, but you know there are limits to what you can do to escape them. You are not alone in this. As political scientist James C. Scott puts it, by the nineteenth century to most people “life outside the state came to seem hopelessly utopian.”

But not to everyone. Scott’s new book, The Art of Not Being Governed, is about some people living in the hills of