Political Ideology in Malaysia: Reality and the Beliefs of an Elite

Published just eleven years after Merdeka, this book captures Malaysia's governing class at a formative moment — before the 1969 racial riots, before the New Economic Policy, before the long consolidation of Malay political hegemony that would define the following decades. The civil servants Scott interviewed were the architects of a new nation, still negotiating what that nation was supposed to stand for.

The book examines the attitudes and beliefs of seventeen randomly selected Malaysian civil servants who had assumed positions of government leadership since independence. Scott conducts an intimate, qualitative study — not a survey of party manifestos or constitutional texts, but a direct inquiry into the minds of the men who actually ran the newly independent Malaysian state.

By James C. Scott | Yale University Press, 1968 | Yale Southeast Asia Studies, Vol. 3 | 302 pages