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Augustine's
famous distinction between the City of God and the City
of Man has been re-worked in many ways.
George Bush and Tony Blair certainly are not the only ones to think
that we are caught up in a global struggle between good and evil, or
to suppose that this transcendent struggle is immanent in everyday life.
Nor is such thinking confined to the religiously minded. Since the eighteenth
century, the great secular ideologists of modernity -- liberal and socialist,
progressive and conservative, anarchist and statist, humanist and post-humanist
-- have posed the most urgent problems within an Augustinian frame.[1]
They tell us that there is an immanent, widely suppressed, but potentially
transcendent "good," faced with an omnipresent evil that can
somehow be overcome or contained by those who commit themselves to the
struggle against it.
Apocalyptic in tone, universalistic in aspiration, reductionist in analysis,
often violent in practice, this onto-theological politics gathers us
all in from time to time. Those reared in the monotheistic cultures
of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam may be particularly vulnerable to
the appeal of such a politics, but there are many signs that people
from other cultural backgrounds feel the pull of it as well.[2] In this
context, it is particularly important to explore other ways of thinking,
which are not so apocalyptic, universalistic, reductionist, or violent.
There is no easy way of escaping Augustine's clutches, but his grip
can be loosened.
My suggestion
is simple: that we take Augustine's central figure, the
city, much more seriously as an analytical and political focus.
Considered on its own terms -- that is, as the form of order implicit
in urbanism as a way of life[3] -- the city transcends its place as
a subordinate entity within a particular state. Even ordinary cities
now have global reach, and the greatest of them function as command
centres for the global economy.[4] Cities are key switching points
for globalizing cultures and organizational centres for social, political,
and religious movements. Moreover, cities are connected to one another
in a way that gives form and meaning to the idea that we all now live
in a single "global city," within which a global economy
is organized and a global politics played out.[5] The city as the
embodiment of urbanism as a way of life is not a merely local political
entity. Nor can it be identified with the ancient ~polis~, which is
the model for the modern republic. No particular city is self-contained.
Nor is there a singular order to the city. A city is multiply networked
and diversely ordered, internally and externally.[6] Most importantly,
there is no sovereign centre to the urban way of life locally or globally.
Forms of order (and hence centres of power) proliferate within and
between cities. They do not remain stable. Whereas the state is characterized
by sovereignty,
cities are characterized by complicated practices of government and
self-government, which overlap and modify one another. These practices
work against any monopoly of authority. As such they can neither redeem
us from evil nor lead us to glory. Neither human nor divine sovereignty
is on offer. The global city may enable us to govern and express ourselves
in various ways, but the terms are always limited by the freedom of
others.[7]
It is the absence
of sovereignty within the city as city that has deflected the attention
of political theorists from it. Political theorists have allowed others
to conceptualize the city socially, culturally, and economically,
but they themselves have failed to work out what the city is as a
form of political order. In my view, that form is one that relates
distinct practices of government and self-government to one another
by means other than sovereignty. It is not that claims to sovereignty
are unknown within the global city or particular cities. On the contrary,
such claims are common, and sometimes seem productive. But, practices
of government and
self-government develop independently, and modify the impact of any
effort to impose order by sovereign authority. Although we are trained
to think of political authority as singular (that is, as something
that flows from a sovereign centre), close attention to the reality
of cities reveals something different. Multiple authorities are the
rule, not the exception. Some of these authorities pretend not to
be political, because that gives them more autonomy in relation to
the ostensible sovereigns. (Business corporations are an obvious example,
but there are many others.) Whatever the case, the
field of government and self-government -- and hence the field of
politics within the city, globally and locally -- is likely to be
occupied by a variety of authorities that contend with one another,
cooperate at times, seek to be autonomous, and work to impose their
will in various ways. When cities work, in the sense that they provide
reasonably congenial conditions of life for people, that is because
of the ensemble of activities that these various authorities mediate,
not because of the sovereignty that particular authorities purport
to exercise. We know this, but we are too much under the spell of
sovereignty to appreciate its significance. As a result, we
exaggerate the political importance of the state and give too little
attention to other political authorities like businesses, NGOs, and
religious or other "movement" organizations that actually
govern us in a variety of ways.
Thus, to re-focus
our political attention on the city is actually to open ourselves
up to a re-examination of the conditions of possibility for civilized
life. The argument in this article is neither for nor against state,[8]
but it opposes a state-centric politics that belies the complexity
of urban life and seduces us with notions of sovereign centre from
which we can all be redeemed. The current "war on terror"
(or, if you prefer, war on Islam) focuses on cities, but from the
outside. Cities and the urban networks that
connect them are recognized as the breeding grounds for the evils
that Bush, Blair, and Bin Laden seek to eliminate. Cousins under the
skin, the B & B & B warriors seek to redeem the city from
without by forcing it to surrender to sovereign authority.[9] To think
otherwise about our political possibilities is to move away from this
moral drama and from the imaginary sovereignty that incites it. This
is difficult, because we have so long been conditioned to think of
politics in sovereigntist terms. My suggestion here is that we can
use the figure of the city to work out the implications of a
different ontology of the political, one that begins from the ubiquitous
and proliferating practices of government and self-government -- the
practices that make urban life possible -- rather than from the sovereignty
moves that are supposed to bring the political into being.[10] In
doing this work, we have to draw on sources that make many people
uncomfortable: in particular on the theorists who celebrate the magic
of the market. In my view, these theorists mistake the implications
of their own analysis, in that
they neglect most of the practices that make civilized life possible
in favour of the few that are associated with the market.
Nonetheless, it is important to understand that the city can be conceived
as a self-organizing system with no sovereign authority and no ultimate
goal. That idea can inform a politics very different from the ones
we associate with neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism.
The City Becomes
Global
The now familiar
notions about global cities and the larger processes of globalization
draw our attention to the way that cities work as connectors. Cities
are the places where trading expeditions are organized. They are the
sites at which information is gathered and exchanged, the places where
the surplus is sent to be distributed and sold, and the locales where
problems are identified and great projects are formulated. There are
other kinds of places where these things happen, but the city is unique
in its capacity to generate productive connections between people
who are alien to one another.
One need not be of the same religion or community or share the same
allegiance or vision of the future to connect with others peacefully
and productively. The city facilitates this, by bringing people of
diverse backgrounds together, and giving them reasons to cooperate
and live peaceably with one another. The city is a space of such opportunity
that it calls us to put our differences aside for mutual advantage.
Some of the opportunity at issue is economic, but there are other
dimensions to it: cultural, religious, social, and political. To be
"urbane" or "civilized" is to take difference
in stride, react with tolerance and curiosity to alien customs, and
to see the diversity of the city as an advantage. Every city is potentially
global in that it welcomes people in and reaches out everywhere. In
principle, a city is outside the order of sovereignty, in the sense
that it transcends the realm or the state in which it is located and
gathers people in, regardless of what the ostensibly "sovereign"
authorities say they want. Urbanism as a way of life produces relationships
that cannot easily be governed from without.
Moreover, urbanism is fruitful in a way that makes authorities of
all sorts dependent on its productivity. The productivity at issue
is by no means only economic. City life enables new understandings,
creates new connections, and produces new possibilities in every area
of human endeavour.
Max Weber thought
that occidental cities were unique in the way that
they worked as islands of freedom, in which the hold of the "higher"
religious and secular authorities was loosened.[11] He exaggerated
the distinctiveness of the Western experience. Urban life has its
own logic, and everywhere it has had the effect of freeing people
from certain constraints and giving them new opportunities for connection.
When the Europeans burst out of their own corner of the world five
hundred years ago, they created some new trading routes, but mostly
they seized control of old routes and knit them together as part of
a new system. They built new cities, but for the most part they took
control of the older ones, and re-worked the urban system to new purposes.
The long process of globalization was one in which autonomous urban
systems were knit together and organized on a larger scale, thus facilitating
more intense exploitation of the countryside and ultimately greater
productivity. When the political economists of the eighteenth century
tried to make sense of the emergent order, they focused on the exchanges
that seemed to occur regardless of what the authorities might expect
or require. These exchanges produced a civilized order more or less
automatically. Everyone had an incentive to be peaceable in order
to engage in exchange, and peaceable
exchange was (for most people) more profitable than violent conquest.
So, there was an immanent order, geared to free exchange and dependent
on self-restraint or self-government, which tended to emerge naturally
if it was not perverted by violence. If the violence of the European
navigators and adventurers had been the hand-maiden of a new world
order, the order itself was of a different character, based on free
exchange between people (and peoples). Although it was rarely recognized
as such, this cooperative order was the order of the city writ large.
Most contemporary
economists have an even narrower understanding of
this order than Adam Smith did. They treat market exchanges in
abstraction, and gloss over the fact that markets work to the advantage
of the strong, the aggressive, the unscrupulous, and the self-interested.
A market-mediated order is by no means ideal (as Marx made clear enough).
That said, however, the economists are working with an important idea,
namely that order can emerge from exchanges between people who have
little in common with one another.
In fact, the differences between people can be an incentive to exchanges
of all sorts. If people see those differences as a reason to deal
peaceably with one another, rather than to attack one another, then
a peaceable order can emerge whether or not there is a powerful figure
to enforce it. To understand this is to have apowerful insight, an
insight on which the modern social sciences in general have built.
Sociologists in particular have been keen to
discern the properties of a naturally emergent order. By comparison
with the economists, they are open to a subtler and more complicated
understanding of that order. Of course, for the past century, critical
work in sociology and political economy has tended to debunk theories
that present the emergent order as benign or inevitable. The emphasis
has been on exposing the structures of domination and plays of power
that lie behind what seems like a natural order.[12] This critical
work is useful, but it often
obscures as much as it reveals. The best conventional sociologists
and economists are not just ideologists. They have been trying to
work out how a relatively benign and durable order can emerge despite
the obvious structures of domination and plays of power. This is important
work, but the neo-Augustinian political ontology on which most critics
rely leaves little room for a story that fails to distinguish the
good guys from the bad guys. The demand is for a clear moral ground
on which we can stand and do our political work.
As I shall attempt to explain in the next section, the ground demanded
is the one offered by the state (however much the critics deny this).
One of the problems
that everyone has is that social scientific explanations tend to treat
civilization as something that emerges either by violent imposition
or by a process that occurs behind people's backs. The first sort
of explanation is actually dependent on the second, in that stories
of violent imposition presuppose processes that go on behind the backs
of conquerors. The city is destroyed; the conqueror has to rebuild
it; that can only happen if the conqueror submits to the creative
energies of others. Social scientific accounts tend to obscure the
fact that the emergent order
is always established politically. In these accounts, politics is
usually associated with the moment of violent imposition (or the ongoing
practices of domination or the plays of power associated with domination)
and not with the creativity (and the practices of peaceful exchange
and cooperative effort) associated with building and sustaining a
civilization. Thus, it is hard to see that the order at issue is always
political. Critical work tends to treat politics as a scandal. To
reveal that there are structures of domination or
plays of power in a civilized order is to say that there is something
bad there, generated by "politics". The remedy for this
bad politics is always a good politics. An Augustinian political ontology
always points in that direction. The alternative to this implicit
Augustinianism is to put cheap moral judgements aside, and look more
carefully at the various political practices that come into play when
the problems of living together are posed. The problems emerge in
everyday life. Everyone is involved in them in one way or another.
Everyone has to be a politician. If a relatively benign -- or, at
least, liveable -- order emerges, it will be the result of the political
work that many, many people do. It is an open question what importance
princes, presidents and prime ministers have in this context. Nevertheless,
the lineaments of a benign order are fundamentally political.
My point is that
the city or civilization is a political construct that needs to be
understood in those terms. The most creative political work is keyed
to ubiquitous and proliferating practices of self-government. Individuals
engage in these practices when they govern themselves, in the double
sense of limiting themselves (so that their actions do not offend
or otherwise impinge negatively on others) and taking charge of themselves.
The latter part of the
practice is celebrated by the ideologists of freedom.[13] The other
part (self-limitation as opposed to self-expression or self-fulfillment)
is what enables cities to function despite the fact that the nominal
rulers are distant, ineffectual, or altogether absent. "Live
and let live" really is the principle of urban life, for it is
only on this principle that a multitude of strangers (with
different customs and beliefs) can share the same space and go about
their business in a relatively harmonious way. If Hobbes were right,
cities would be impossible. What occurs at the level of the individual
also occurs at the level of the group. Mutual accommodation is the
rule, and it is this practice that actually enables particular groups
to sustain distinct ways of life within the city. How this works is
of particular interest to economists who have noticed how the incentive
to trade generates markets governed by an ethic of peaceable exchange.
For many economists, the market is a
primordial fact, not requiring any particular explanation.
Anthropological and historical evidence suggests to the contrary that
it takes a lot of work -- political work -- to bring a market into
being and sustain it.[14] This is true whether the market is a physical
space or a more complex virtual space like the ones with which we
are now familiar. Other practices also have to develop for civilized
life to be sustained: rules of the road that enable undisturbed passage;
practices that allow even the poor to find food, drink, and a place
to sleep; rules about the keeping of animals and the disposal of wastes;
codes of accommodation that relate to
personal space, noise, and interpersonal address. The list is almost
endless. It needs to be articulated only in part to reveal something
else: namely, that the public services and facilities that we associate
with modern life generally grew out of the practical necessities of
living together in cities. We all need roads; we all need water; we
have to dispose of our wastes somehow; we all want someone to turn
to when other people break the rules. Government in the sense of the
intense, intrusive activity in which the authorities are now engaged
is something made necessary by life in cities, but it is nonetheless
the tip of the iceberg: most of the activity that makes urban life
possible occurs beneath the surface (as it were) in practices of self-government
that develop whether or not the authorities are there to require them.
The authorities generally take these practices for granted. So, (to
change the analogy) government rests on a bedrock of self-government.
The tendency
among social scientists is to treat everyday practices
of self-government as "social" or "cultural" and
hence pre-political.
This is a mistake. It obscures the political work that goes into the
development and maintenance of these practices. Much of that work
goes on in public, but it involves government officials only indirectly.
People sort themselves out at bus-stops, on sidewalks, in cafes and
restaurants, on waterways and in parks. These intimate practices of
regulation and self-regulation involve plays of power, shows of authority,
threats of violence, calls to solidarity, habits of deference, and
challenges to the existing order: in short, they involve people in
an everyday politics that vexes and threatens them from time to time,
but that works surprisingly smoothly in most
instances. We notice when things are going badly -- as in Baghdad
or
New Orleans recently -- because the norm is one of peaceful co-existence
enabled by ubiquitous and proliferating practices of self-government.
Narrow and ideological
as it may be, Friedrich Hayek's work is interesting because it offers
such a robust defence of the idea that a benign social order can emerge
from these practices. One of his key claims is that the Great Society
(as Adam Smith called it) is not an organization or ~taxis~ but a
spontaneous order or ~cosmos~.
This ~cosmos~ or spontaneous global order is a side-effect of things
people have done for other purposes. No one can understand it as a
whole, because it is not something that people have created consciously.
It cannot be managed or planned by a central authority, because that
authority can never comprehend it or adequately anticipate people's
reactions to the situations in which they find themselves. Attempts
to control the ~cosmos~ are counter-productive: we must live and let
live.
The Great Society
arose through the discovery that men can live together in peace and
mutually benefiting each other without agreeing on the particular
aims which they severally pursue. The discovery that by substituting
abstract rules of conduct for obligatory concrete ends made it possible
to extend the order of peace beyond small groups pursuing the same
ends, because it enabled each individual to gain from the skill and
knowledge of
others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly
different from his own.[15]
In Hayek's account,
the key principles of the Great Society are the ones that enable market
exchange. This narrow reading is tendentious and ideological, however.
A more generous reading enables us to see that civilization or ~cosmos~
or urbanity depends on other principles, like mutual recognition and
respect, the search for consensus, concern for the common good, tolerance,
generosity, charity, and humanity. As Hayek tells us, we can only
identify the most valuable principles in retrospect, and we cannot
predict what new principles of conduct will make the ~cosmos~ more
robust or satisfying for people. Nonetheless, it is clear that the
enabling principles of the emergent cosmopolitan order go far beyond
the ones that Hayek himself identifies, and include many of the ones
implicit in the everyday practices of self-government that enable
cities to flourish. The Smithian Great Society and the Hayekian ~cosmos~
are actually the effects of everyday political initiatives.
Hayek wanted
to use constitutional measures to protect the spontaneous order of
the human ~cosmos~ from statist initiatives. In a sense, he wanted
to use the state against itself or (more accurately) to organize the
state to forestall initiatives that would reshape the ~cosmos~ in
accordance with some plan. Nevertheless, his own idea of what the
~cosmos~ is and should be informed the measures he envisaged, ones
that would bind the state up and deploy it in a particular direction.
Subsequent neo-liberal measures, both domestic and international,
clearly follow from this Hayekian idea: a
particular conception of the ~cosmos~ is to be embodied in legal
principles that are beyond the control of particular states, popular
movements, or local authorities. Those who abide by these principles
are to be accepted as rights-bearing members of this liberal ~cosmos~.
Others are to be treated as enemies. Thus, the current religious crusade
against the enemies of neo-liberalism follows fairly directly from
the effort to define the ~cosmos~ in advance and constitute it in
a way that reflects a particular conception of human possibility.
A more authentic commitment to the idea of a spontaneously ordered
~cosmos~ would not involve this return to a vengeful Augustinian moralism,
nor would it lead to desperate efforts
to forestall collective initiatives. Instead, it would problematize
the moral/political centre that Hayek takes for granted: the modern
state.
The State
Captures the Political Imagination
Most analysts
of the state seem to know little about the way it developed.[16] They
focus on the concept of the state in abstraction from its practice,
or on its practice in abstraction from the concept. To understand
the concept, we have to go back to the late medieval era, and trace
the emergence of ideas about the impersonal "state". We
then have to understand how the state came to be associated with "sovereignty,"
a doctrine that took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Modern republican or liberal democratic theory, which evolved in the
eighteenth century, was articulated on the assumption that the sovereign
state was necessary for political order. Although this assumption
certainly has been
contested -- by nineteenth century anarchists and socialists, for
instance -- it has been generally accepted since the early modern
era. Indeed, it is so widely accepted now that most analysts fail
to see any reason for making it explicit. The immediate effect of
conjoining the ideal of democracy with the concept of the sovereign
state (as happens in the contemporary political imaginary) is to give
"politics" an obvious focus. If people are to resolve the
big issues democratically, how can they not focus their attention
on the venue that has been endowed with sovereign authority: the venue
where the
"ultimate" questions are decided? Surely any other politics
must be
peripheral. According to this logic, a politics focused on the great
issues must be centred on the sovereign state, even if it proceeds
through other institutions and practices and is oriented toward controlling
what is outside the state.
If we look at
the practice of the state as it evolved in relation to cities, we
begin to see something different: namely, that the politics that generated
new activities occurred at the boundaries of urban self-government.
This becomes clearer if we look at the history of the public services:
education, transportation, policing, public health, and so on.[17]
What we now take to be essential public activities -- sanitary disposal
of liquid and solid wastes,
suppression of fires, protection from criminal activity, maintenance
and lighting of streets, etc. -- were not always present in cities.
The great expansion of these services and facilities began in the
nineteenth century and continued on into the twentieth. The taken-for-granted
character of most of our public services and facilities is testimony
to the fact that they developed out of people's efforts to deal with
the practical problems of modern urban life. What to do about the
filth of the streets? Animals running
wild? People getting sick from the food sold in the markets? Kids
roaming the streets and getting into trouble? Disease spreading out
of control? Homeless people with nowhere to go? Workers without the
education necessary for the jobs now available? Congestion that keeps
people from getting to work? Foul-smelling air and polluted water?
When people posed these questions to themselves, it was in the context
of efforts to deal with problems by individual initiative orgroup
action. At a certain point, someone said that this problemcould only
be solved if public authority were brought to bear, in theform of
regulations to control the activities in question or taxation
to raise the necessary revenues or direct administrative action on
the part of the public authority in question. It was in this context
also that many new public authorities were created, along with a variety
of other institutions that defy easy characterization. On the ground,
what we see now (or in any earlier era) is not the state on the one
hand and society on the other, but a panoply of institutions rooted
in people's efforts to deal with a variety of practical problems.
These institutions are ~sui generis~. They conform to no single pattern.
State activity in relation to these institutions is
second-order: a matter of rationalizing the allocation of authority,
clarifying jurisdictions, providing resources, specifying responsibilities,
and so on. So, the politics that occurs at the level of the state
is a second-order politics that only makes sense in relation to the
first-order politics that occurs on the ground where urban services
and facilities have to be developed.
Most analysts
assume that the second-order activities of the state are more significant
because the state's authority is superior and its geographical reach
greater. In fact, to take rationalization as one example, what occurs
by way of the establishment of professional norms and standards may
be at least as significant universally and be as much an effect of
"indisputable authority" as anything that emanates from
the state. The political struggles around these norms and standards
are of great significance. Those struggles are rarely mediated by
the state. Instead, the state (and other authorities) must adapt to
these evolving standards. With respect to the familiar urban services,
the basic form of the school, the hospital, the paved
road, the sewerage system, and even the police force had to be worked
out politically, but the venues in which that politics occurred were
not legislative assemblies or ministerial cabinets (at least not for
the most part). If we ask how the infrastructure of the modern city
developed, we are led to many different sites of initiative, innovation,
collaboration, competition, and political dispute, sites networked
to one another in ways that do not correspond to the hierarchy of
the state. So, the ontology of urban politics (the politics that generates
the city as we know it) is quite different from the one presented
by the familiar political ontology of the state. There is no obvious
centre to urban politics, no Archimedean point from which the political
universe can be moved, and no place whose political significance is
guaranteed in advance. Where is the best place to act? That depends
on the nature of one's concerns and on the particular configuration
of forces in that time and place. We cannot know the answer in advance.
An analyst might
argue that what happens at the level of the city is only one aspect
of what happens more generally, and that "high politics"
occurs at a different level altogether. This is simply to repeat the
statist mythology, however. If cities are globally networked -- as
they evidently are -- then they are not "below" states.
They are not contained "within" states, either. (This is
most obviously the case with respect to places like New York City,
but
even small communities have a presence in the world that transcends
their immediate physical boundaries, thanks to economic, social, cultural,
and political links with people elsewhere.) The infrastructure of
the modern state is essentially urban, and hence what is "of
the state" is also "of the urban" and vice versa. To
think the political through the urban rather than through the state
is not to put the traditional questions of high politics aside. It
is instead to ask how these questions appear in relation to all the
other questions of urban life.[18]
Is the imminent
bird flu pandemic a matter of less concern than the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, the adoption of terror tactics by
political dissidents, the breakdown of order in major cities, the
failure to control greenhouse gases, the immigration of the poor to
the cities from the countryside, the lack of economic development
in many parts of the world, the intensification of state and private
security measures, or the general inadequacy of current mechanisms
of democratic accountability? It would be hard to judge. It is clear,
however, that each of these issues could well be considered a matter
of high politics, if the human consequences of the issues concerned
were our measure. The latter is not the measure suggested by the political
ontology of the state, however. If something is
crucial to the state, then it is a matter of high politics; if not,
not. This trivializes the matter, by making any politics that eludes
or transcends the state "low" by definition and insignificant
by implication.
The truth is
that a God-figure is concealed in the conventional political ontology
of the state. The notion of an "ultimate" authority or a
"supreme" legislature is obviously borrowed from monotheistic
understandings of the order of things. Because the state is imagined
to have God-like powers, its significance is magnified, but in a way
which is ultimately self-defeating. Although the state stands in place
of God, it evidently is not God: it clearly lacks God-like powers.
Because it cannot deliver on the sovereign power
implicit in its own rationale, its ultimate authority seems hollow.
Thus, we have people drifting away from the state and hence from politics
as they conceive it, because the state/politics appears impotent.
They may engage with the particular problems of urban life in other
ways, inventing or supporting public services and facilities at one
remove from the state or helping to develop regulatory practices that
extend through the networks of everyday life. On the other hand, they
may despair of the problems and reframe them in religious terms. This
is the ground on which apocalyptic scenarios are laid out. Some of
these scenarios bring the state back in, as the faithful are called
to turn the supreme secular authority to their
purposes.
Many critiques
of contemporary politics turn on a demand that we return to the old
secular faith, a faith in the state as the ultimate redeemer. This
demand is keyed to the idea that democratic politics is the field
in which questions of right and wrong are appropriately joined. Democracy
is supposed to overwhelm evil, and enable us towork out the good life
for ourselves. The state is the imaginary centre at which our efforts
come together, enabling us to deploy thegood that we embody to the
very limits of our power and authority. To lack faith in the state
is to lack faith in ourselves as a sovereign people, a people capable
of remaking its life in accordance with its own ideal of the good
life. But, of course, such a faith is difficult
to sustain. What is the alternative? I want to suggest that the alternative
is in the various activities that make urban life more bearable. None
of these activities is sovereign. There is no privileged place where
we have to engage politically. Nonetheless, there are many places
where we can act productively and where we have to be politically
aware to be productive. The conventional political imaginary induces
us to think that in turning from the state we are turning from politics.
As a result, we know not what we do
politically. It is not that people are turning away from politics,
but that they have such a statist sense of what politics is that they
have trouble understanding the fields of activity in front of them
in political terms. This is profoundly disabling.
Let us be clear
about what is at stake. The question is not whether the state is withering
away, morphing into a new shape, or returning to its old form. Nor
is the question whether we should or should not act through the state.
There is no reason to think that the state is about to disappear or
that the venues it offers lack promise. The issue is how we are to
conceive of our politics. Is our politics to be centred on the state
or on the practices of self-government that enable cities to flourish?
The Political
Becomes Otherwise
The idea that
the political can be otherwise than state-centric is not new. In fact,
it has been a constant theme in recent years, as various groups have
focused on issues that others have tried to set outside politics proper.
The disputed exclusions (women's issues and environmental issues,
for example) were often justified on the grounds that the state lacked
the authority or capacity to deal with the matters raised, matters
that were properly within the ambit of society or culture or private
business. So, to say that these exclusions had to be overcome (as
feminists and environmentalists have done) was to say that politics
had to transcend the state. This move was and is crucial because it
enabled people to see that the line between the political and the
non-political is not the same as the line between the state and society.
One can be politically active in the state, in society, or in an indeterminate
zone that seems as much one as the other. Is that not the meaning
of what we call "social" movements, ones that defy the existing
political limits, and establish spaces for political action that connect
ordinary people with the wider world in innovative ways?[19] Once
these spaces are claimed, don't new authorities arise, ones that have
a powerful call on adherents and pose a challenge to the existing
authorities? Although the more dramatic (or dangerous) movements catch
our attention, there are many others that generate authorities quietly
and establish important new spaces for politics in the process.
Political authority
takes many shapes, not only in the sense that Weber indicated in his
famous system of classification, but also in the sense that authorities
of different sorts emerge out of various practices of government and
self-government and take forms quite particular to the purposes at
hand. The authorities that deal with child abuse are not like the
ones that deal with recycling. The individual who is called to take
responsibility for child protection is not exactly the same individual
who is enjoined to take
responsibility for his or her own wastes. Different subjects or citizens
are called into being by different practices, as are authorities with
specific mandates and jurisdictions. Although there may be similarities
between the various networks of government and self-government, there
is never a complete identity. Thus, there is no single model for politics
that carries from one field to the next.
This is one of the main lessons of recent social movement politics,
but it is also a lesson implicit in discussions of governmentality
and globalization, which highlight the amorphousness of both phenomena.
The space of the political is multiform, changeable, and ultimately
so chaotic that it is not subject to sovereign control.
Thus, the Augustinian imperative implicit in sovereigntist politics
is a snare and a delusion.
Most of the political
authorities within contemporary networks of government and self-government
actually make no pretence to sovereignty. They are just "local,"
in a geographic sense and otherwise. Although they claim regulatory
authority and demand autonomy, they tend to concede that their authority
and autonomy is not exclusive. Overlapping authorities are the norm.
They interfere with one another less than they might, because they
differentiate themselves from one another qualitatively. They see
themselves as authorities of different types, and often co-exist with
remarkable
harmony. Even rivals can work out boundaries without too much difficulty
when they lack the capacity to destroy one another. So, the universe
of contemporary political authorities is highly differentiated. It
cannot be mapped on the assumption that all political authority comes
from a single centre, such as a constitution, a supreme legislature,
or an imperial power. We can arrange the various authorities in a
hierarchy (as
sovereigntist/Augustinian thinking encourages us to do), but that
will not tell us where the important centres of power are.
The municipality
is an especially important model in this context, because it is an
integrative, but non-sovereign political authority.
The fact that the municipality is the normative political form of
the city (just as the state is the normative political form of the
nation) is significant. It suggests that a self-governing city should
not be a city-state that claims sovereignty but rather a municipality
that enables self-government more generally, something it can do by
facilitating citizen participation, connecting authorities of different
sorts with one another, and stimulating innovation. If there is a
model for global governance, it is to be found in the city and hence
in the municipality, rather than in the nation-state. Not only is
the municipal form of political organization more consonant with urbanism
as a way of life -- and hence with the emergent global order -- but
also it embodies practices that come out of our mundane requirements
rather than demands for personal, national, or global salvation. The
very modesty of the municipality is its virtue. In so far as it is
not sovereign, it is not a God-figure, and its limitations are a constant
reminder of the necessity of being modest in our objectives and practical
in our orientation. There is no
promise of transcendence in the municipality, although there is the
possibility of acting together on matters of common concern. These
matters may carry municipal leaders well beyond the bounds of their
own municipality. This need not involve conflict with the state, since
municipalities exist in a qualitatively different political space.[20]
Of course, I am well aware of the claim -- backed by the superior
courts in most countries -- that municipalities are just creatures
of the state and hence prisoners within the political spaces of the
state system. This claim is an inevitable consequence of the logic
of state sovereignty. Current European discussions of the principle
of subsidiarity replay this logic in a familiar way,
reaffirming the hierarchy even in articulating a rationale for decentralization.
Nonetheless, the idea of a municipality as a political entity of a
different type remains with us, especially here in North America.
A hundred years ago, it was common to talk of themunicipality as a
"joint-stock company" belonging to the people ofthe community
concerned. (Was it enough to live in the community concerned or did
one have to be a property-owner to be a full share-holder?) This conception
pointed back toward the medieval origins of cities as centres of commerce
and industry. On the other hand, there was a companion view that invoked
the folk-moots of Saxon England or the warrior-assemblies of the Germans
that Tacitus had described. Although the connection was rarely made
at the time, these moots, assemblies, or meetings of the village,
town, or parish were obviously similar to the ones that brought non-European
peoples together in their villages, clans, or wider groupings. In
the decades before the First World War, it was commonly argued that
municipalities had to take the lead in dealing with the problems of
urban-industrial life and that their strength lay in their capacity
to organize people for purposes of local self-government. The presumption
was that the state was at a distance, and that the practical problems
of urban-industrial life required political authorities of a different
type: more intimate, participatory, and immediately rooted. Although
advocates of municipal autonomy usually deferred to the logic of state
sovereignty (and so conceded that municipal authorities could only
be lesser authorities within the order of the state, subject to the
higher law of the state), there remained an element of defiance, which
was reflected in ideas like municipal socialism. Even the idea that
the municipality was a joint-stock company suggested that municipal
governments were somehow outside the order of sovereignty.
To think of the
municipality as a political authority outside the order of sovereignty
is to suggest that its roots are in the ubiquitous practices of local
self-government rather than in the state as such. It is to pick up
on Weber's conception of the city as a sphere of "non-legitimate
domination": non-legitimate precisely in the sense that is outside
the order of sovereignty. As Weber's phrase suggests, the order of
the city is not necessarily benign, but the delusion of sovereigntist
thinking is that we can free ourselves from domination by submitting
to the absolute authority of the state. The alternative view is that
political authority can be multiple in its
forms and purposes, and that qualitatively different authorities can
co-exist without any over-arching authority to regulate their relations.
This is not anarchism. Quite the contrary, one might use the term
polyarchy to describe it, had Robert Dahl not already used that term
to refer to a pluralistic order of sovereignty.[21] The point is that
the complexity of urbanism as a way of life is such that government
must take various forms if it is to be effective, and that these various
forms can co-exist with one another because they differ in their character
as well as in their scale of operations.
The notion of "side-by-side" authority is helpful in understanding
this relation, but it can be misleading if it suggests that the authorities
in question exist in comparable spaces. If authorities are qualitatively
different from one another, they occupy spaces that are not strictly
comparable. In Canada, aboriginal authorities have been claiming a
space that is incommensurable with the space of the Canadian state.
What that means in the end has still to be negotiated, but this much
is clear: Canadian sovereignty does not limit the aboriginal right
of self-government. How can that be?
Aboriginal self-government exists in a different domain from the domain
of the Canadian state, so that even if it touches on some of the same
matters -- housing, education, social services -- it functions autonomously.[22]
The analogy may be with the way that familial authority or corporate
authority functions in a different domain from that of the state.
A municipal authority, like an aboriginal authority, is more obviously
political. To the extent that
it asserts itself as an autonomous authority existing in a space of
its own -- a space of local self-government -- it sets itself apart
from the state and opens up political possibilities that cannot be
contained within the order of the state or the state system. American
municipalities that have committed themselves to the Kyoto Accord
have recognized this, following the example of many other previous
initiatives.[23]
The political
form appropriate to urbanism as a way of life is not the monopolistic
state but a pluralistic order characterized by proliferating practices
of local self-government. The municipality relates these practices
to one another within a particular geographical territory, but it
lacks the capacity to impose a sovereign order. Practices of local
self-government spill over municipal boundaries, relate municipalities
to one another and to
authorities of other kinds, and divide the various municipalities
from within. Municipalities exist within the domain of local self-government:
they do not order it as sovereigns. Thus, the practices of non-sovereign
government -- and hence polyarchal political authority in the proper
sense -- are implicit in the relations within and between municipalities.
The fact that municipalities have usually been overwhelmed by sovereign
state authority is certainly important, but not as important as we
usually imagine. Practices of local self-government are actually quite
robust. They have to be: otherwise, cities could not exist. To see
this is to see the possibilities of globalism in a new way. The fact
that we cannot have a world-state or a federation of republics on
the American model is not a matter for despair. On the contrary, it
suggests that hopes for our future lie in the practices that generate
urban order without resort to sovereignty. These are the practices
that provide us with most security -- whatever the advocates of the
gun may suggest to the contrary.
Notes:
[1] Compare William
E. Connolly, _The Augustinian Imperative_, Newbury Park, CA: SAGE,
1993.
[2] The ongoing
conflict in Sri Lanka is one reminder of this, as is the legacy of
the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
[3] The phrase,
"urbanism as a way of life," is from a famous 1938 article
by Louis Wirth, reprinted in his _On Cities and Social Life_, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964. Compare Henri Lefebvre, _The Urban
Revolution_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (originally
published published in French in 1970). Simon Parker, _Urban Theory
and the Urban Experience: Encountering the
City_, London: Routledge, 2004, offers a useful overview of the development
of urban theory. See also Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds.,
_The City Reader_, 3rd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
[4] Compare Paul
L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, eds., _World Cities in a World-System_,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, and Saskia Sassen, _The
Global City: New York, London, Tokyo_, rev. ed., Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001.
[5] Marshall
McLuhan's concept of the "global village" anticipates this
idea: _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (New York: Signet,
1964). I develop the idea in a way pertinent to this discussion in
"Social Movements and the Global City," _Millennium: Journal
of International Studies_, XXIII:3 (Winter 1994), 621-45, and "Politicizing
the Global City," _Democracy, Citizenship, and the
Global City_, ed. Engin Isin, (London: Routledge, 2000), 289-306.
[6] Manuel Castells,
_The Rise of the Network Society_, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
[7] Compare Hannah
Arendt, _Between Past and Future_, London: Faber, 1961.
[8] Nor is it
an argument for reducing the scale of the state to that of the city.
A city-state is not inherently superior to a nation-state.
[9] Compare Bruce
B. Lawrence, ed., _Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama
Bin Laden_, London: Verso, 2005, and Michael Ignatieff, ed., _American
Exceptionalism and Human Rights_, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005.
[10] Most recent
accounts, such as Agamben's, follow Carl Schmitt in this regard. They
confuse politics with a certain concept of it, produced by sovereignty.
Compare Giorgio Agamben, _Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life_,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, and Chantal Mouffe, ed.,
_The Challenge of Carl Schmitt_, London: Verso 1999.
[11] Max Weber,
_Economy and Society_, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978,
vol. 2, ch. 16.
[12] For example,
see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. _Empire_, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
[13] Compare
Nikolas Rose, _Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought_, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[14] Karl Polanyi,
_The Great Transformation_, New York: Rinehart & Co, 1944.
[15] Friedrich
A. Hayek, _Law, Legislation and Liberty_, London: Routledge, 1998,
vol. 2, p. 109. Compare _The Constitution of Liberty_, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1960.
[16] See, however,
Jens Bartelson, _A Genealogy of Sovereignty_, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995, and _The Critique of the State_, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
[17] See especially
Jon C. Teaford, _The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America,
1870-1900_, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
[18] The difficulties
that urbanists have had with these issues post-9/11 are reflected
in two symposia: _Urban Affairs Review_ 37:3 (2002), pp. 460-67, and
_International Journal of Urban and Regional Research_ 27.3 (2003),
pp. 649-98. See also Hank V. Savitch, "Does 9-11 portend a new
paradigm for cities?" _Urban Affairs Review_ 39.1(2003), pp.
103-27. In my view, most urbanists still think the
political in statist terms, despite their commitment to urban analysis.
Compare William Finnegan, "The Terrorist Beat: How is the N.Y.P.D.
defending the city?" ~The New Yorker~, 25 July 2005. Finnegan's
analysis makes clear that the actual struggle to deal with terrorist
threats to New York City is led by the municipal police department,
a department that necessarily thinks locally and acts globally.
[19] Compare
William K. Carroll, ed., _Organizing Dissent: Contemporary Social
Movements in Theory and Practice_, 2nd ed., Toronto: Garamond Press,
1997.
[20] I have explored
the implications of this idea in a trio of recent articles focused
on the Canadian situation: "Are Municipalities Creatures of the
Provinces?" _Journal of Canadian Studies_, 39:2 (Spring 2005),
5-29, "Urbanism, cities and local
self-government," _Canadian Public Administration_, 48:1 (Spring
2005), 96-123, and "Protecting the Right of Local Self-Government,"
_Canadian Journal of Political Science_, 38:4 (December 2005), 1-26.
[21] Robert A.
Dahl, _Polyarchy; Participation and Opposition_, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1971.
[22] Compare
James Tully, _Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in the Age of
Diversity_, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[23] See http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/mayor/climate/
for the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement of 13 June 2005. I
have discussed a number of the earlier initiatives in _The Search
for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements and the Urban
Political Experience_, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996,
ch.
--------------------
*Warren Magnusson teaches urban politics and political theory at the
the University of Victoria, Canada. Among his books are _The Search
for Political Space_ (1996) and _A Political Space: Reading the Global
through Cloyoquot Sound_ (2003), with Karena Shaw.
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