CITY AND VILLAGE

STEPHEN SCHNECK

A tacit Aristotelianism dominates most academic conceptualizations of the city and constitutes an intellectual field within which questions of "city" are resolved. At one pole of the field is the polis as crafted by Aristotle himself, an hierarchical corporation whose order points toward a divine telos. At the other pole of the field, however, is the society of self-interested individuals. This also obviously draws its inspiration from Aristotle but simply inverts the idea of polis. In the West, this two-poled Aristotelianism has defined the intellectual field by which the idea of city has been considered.

The polis exerts the more intense grip on academic thinking and is linked to many interpretations of the human being itself. For Aristotle's zoon politikon there are no persons beyond the walls of the city; outside the city there exist only beasts or gods. To be a person means to be part of the corporate whole of the polis. The essence/end of the person does not inhere in the individual; it does not emerge in the development of the solitary self nor in the development of the self in family as child, brother or father. Neither, for Aristotle, does the person emerge in village, imperial or cosmopolitan life. Only in the polis can there be persons, for the nature of the person is political. This notion of cities and persons is not an empirical claim: Aristotle's review of contemporary politics revealed a panorama of cities at wide variance with his notion of polis. Nor, philosophers tell us, did Aristotle mean this in an eidetic way--that some ideal of the polis existed waiting only for the right sort to uncover its reality. No, Aristotle's polis represented an end (telos) called for by the changeable character of cities and of people in everyday experience. In other words, apparent in the dynamic of human living was a direction toward an unchanging universal end for being a person. By this teleological nature, the person is political. The political life of the polis is the definitive condition for being a person.

Thinking in this manner it is not surprising that academics approach their crises of the city as a crisis in being human, for the life of the polis takes on a normative ambience. Lurking in the rhythms of their thinking lies Aristotle, who maintains that without the polis (its corporation, harmony, divine end and so forth) the person is not possible. At this pole of the intellectual field, cities are normative for the highest reason: they make possible being human. Good cities conform with the polis. In accord with this reasoning, since the cities of our experience do not conform, then the city is in crisis.

At the other pole of the Aristotelian intellectual field is found an inversion of the polis called "liberal/romantic." While opposite the polis. this too takes its bearings from Aristotle. Indeed, it is little more than an inversion of Aristotle's thinking, an inversion of his notion of the relationship between person and nature. From the liberal/romantic perspective nature is inverted from being a distant end to being a lost origin. It is still the measure for norms in human practice, but contemporary human practice is measured against an original rather than a teleological nature. The measure is how human beings ought to have been, not how human beings ought to be. There is an implied regression in such thinking. The hint is that as humans are increasingly alienated from their original being, they are perverted. Moreover, because our original being had not been in cities, then city is doubly perverted. A construct of perverted humans and a condition of human living at some distance from the original condition of being human, the city for the liberal/romantic is suspect. Rather than an urban life, live an agrarian life when possible; when it is not, bring agrarian life into the city. Reform the urban character of city life.

The ideas of polis and perversion delimit the boundaries of the usual academic approaches to the city. At one extreme, vision of city as polis conjures an image of a coordinated harmony of parts in a social whole, an image that inspires much of the literature that celebrates community and neighborhood. At the other extreme, the vision of city as perversion seems attuned with many of the so-called progressive approaches to the idea the city. But, what of approaches to the city that begin with an effort to resolve this dichotomy, or point to an overcoming of the dichotomy in some final synthesis of polis and perversion? Toennies' analysis of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. for example, implies such a synthesis. Max Weber's bureaucratic society, Hegel's state and Karl Marx's communist society are even more proximate origins of many of these contemporary models for the city. Yet, do these notions represent an overcoming of the polis/perversion dichotomy, or are they an amalgam of qualities of the two poles still situated within the boundaries inspired by Aristotle? How far do the notions of bureaucratic society, communist society and state vary from the corporate hierarchy of the polis? Perhaps our theoretical approaches to the city tell us much more about the impact of Aristotle on intellectual history than they do of the city.

If only to open up greater intellectual space for considering the idea of city, a line of analysis outside the usual might be entertained. Instead of polis and perversion, consider a line between "city" and "village." The line is drawn well by that apocryphal 15th century peasant who claims that "Die Stadtluft macht frei!"¹ ("the city air makes us free!"). Consider the tension revealed here between the qualities perceived in village life and those anticipated in the city. Village represents a smothering community. An homogeneity of tastes, styles and desires is inscribed on each villager's soul by an intrusive familiarity that begins in the cradle. The village represents a life lived with intimate, ubiquitous authorities wherein all is public. City, for our peasant, offers the heterogeneity of anonymity and the possibility of private spaces resistant to the intrusive, public scrutiny found in village life. In the peasant's ideal of the city there is room for private space and authority is formal, not intimate or personal.

The peasant's analysis is intriguing. If die Stadtluft macht frei then Aristotle's polis is no measure for the idea of city. Even more clearly, it is not the city of experience. Consider Athens on the eve of Alexander's empire; note the distance between the experience of its occupants and the polis of Aristotle's Politics. For the 75,000 people who left their villages and communities for the Stadtluft of Athens' Piraeus the appeal of city life was not corporate hierarchy and communal place. The city was not sought for its public space so much as for its private space. They saw city life as desirable for the space it offered that was relatively free from the suffocating presence of community as experienced in their village living. On the other hand, choosing Piraeus was certainly not congruent with the escape from living in civilization that is the characteristic of the liberal/romantic pole.² Indeed, for the Piraeans as for our apocryphal peasant, the cities and villages of their experience seem to be in keeping neither with the polis nor with the perversion.

If this thinking is persuasive, then the so-called "crisis of the city" bemoaned by so many urban theorists is a misconception. That is, it is misconceived if the crisis at stake is judged against the standard of insufficient solidarity (polis) or the standard of harmony with mankind's individuality in nature (perversion). In the analysis of our peasant, the notion of city is not associated with concern for solidarity. The notion of city, rather, conveys an opening or space that relatively is free from the hegemony of expression and taste that one finds in village living. Neither, for our peasant, is the notion of city associated with concern for being alienated from some individual nature or natural condition. The crisis is not one of alienation from community nor of alienation from natural self. If, for the peasant, the notion of city is one of private space--creative space opened by heterogenous anonymity--then the crisis of the city involves loss of that space. The crisis of the city from peasant's line of analysis concerns an erosion of the heterogeneity of anonymity, and the narrowing of discretion for urban living. The peasant yearns to create a life on his own responsibility, not one measured against the standards of traditional community nor against an idyllic natural man. Perhaps, therefore, the crisis of the city is that the space for such responsibility is narrowing on both fronts.

A consideration of contemporary experiences of the city lends credence to the peasant's analysis. The expressed concerns about urban life seldom evidence the theme of missing solidarity. Instead, the concerns revolve around missing vitality and heterogeneity. Cities are losing their free air. The why and how of this loss reveals an absent line in our peasant's analysis, for unknown to our peasant was the emergence of state-society as a smothering macro-village of tastes, values and expression against which the city seems unable to endure.

Understood now as a crisis of heterogeneous anonymity (a crisis of the space for personal creativity, responsibility and difference), the crisis of the city concerns the loss of free city air to the extension of authority by what is here called "state-society." State society has so pervasively and subtly insinuated its grip on the soul of the contemporary person that the space once opened by the idea of city largely has been lost. But, what is state-society that this has occurred?

For the contemporary world, state-society is the paradigmatic sociality of human experience. For all intents and purposes it defines the character of social and political life. Some might argue that there are two ideals of state-society: state dominant and society dominant. But, seizing on the increasingly slippery difference between the two only serves to obscure the more fundamental singularity of state-society (arguably, Saturday morning children's programming on NBC and Maoist opera, converge more than they diverge). In this larger sense, then, state-society can be recognized as something like our peasant's village writ large and raised to the level of universality. The idea of village connoted a smothering familiarity that instructed the person in a traditional public order. The city idea, in contrast, evoked the absence of such familiarity, instruction and monolithic public order; at its center is the heterogeneity of anonymity. State-society infiltrates the space opened by the city. Like the village, it opposes diversity and pluralism, filling the space for personal responsibility and creativity with public scrutiny.

Still, there is a difference between state-society and village. Where the idea of village proposes a public heterogeneity of familiarity, and where the idea of city suggests a personal, private heterogeneity of anonymity, the idea of state-society conjures the picture of a public homogeneity of anonymity. Instruction into the public order in state-society involves the reification of persons into singular, interchangeable objects under the gaze of rigorous public scrutiny.

The idea of state-society, perhaps unlike the ideas of city and village, has a modern history. Village, city and state-society are the Aristotelian field of traditional approaches to the idea of city. But, as we have seen, village is not Hegel's "community," city is not his "civil society" and (most clearly) state-society is not simply "state." Hence, not Hegel, but Tocqueville offers a better glimpse of the crisis of the city.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America offers a picture of three polities that parallel our notions of village, city and state-society. The township of New England is Tocqueville's village. His ideal of America stands in complex fashion as both dystopia and utopia--or, in our words, as city and state-society. Tocqueville's work on America can be perceived as a klaxon warning of the possibility of state-society. He ranks among the first to recognize the dangers for city. Yet, unwittingly perhaps, he pursues the idea of village as defense against the possibility of state-society.

Writers on this continent have long been amused or confused by the apparent errors in Tocqueville's treatment of the government and laws of the United States . Amusement is perhaps more in keeping with Tocqueville's intent, for the laws and government are best understood as constituent elements in the story he tells. At the foundation of the politics of his America is the principal of popular sovereignty. That the people rule in fact, he claims, is a universal for all human institutions. In the United States, however, this universal is not kept secret from the people; it is a manifest public knowledge that informs all aspects of the polity and its operations. Still, there is a riveting incongruence in Tocqueville's discussion of the principal of popular sovereignty. Cultivating ground for his later arguments of the dystopia of America, he determines that the expression of the sovereignty of the people in America is not by way of "the people united" or "the genius of the people" or "spirit of the people." In his America, popular sovereignty is expressed via the numerical majority of individuals.³

Why does he opt for this utilitarian formulation instead of the more aristocratic Montes quieu version that one senses as the inspiration of Tocqueville's new science of politics? Frankly, what he be brings to life at this point is a straw man. The people who inhabit his America must stand a priori as radical individuals, each equal in political efficacy, in order that the specter of mass society--his dystopia--be made most frightening. The anarchy, chaos and anomie of the potentially resultant state begs the therapy which Tocquevi lle proffers. In other words, the foundation for America as the dystopia of undisciplined democracy is laid here. Atop this foundation he constructs a politics where a faceless calculus of quantitative popular input actually rules. It is a bottoms-up politics wherein policies result from vast, on-going tabulations of the yeas and nays which constitute the political activities of homogenized and radically equal individuals.

From this dystopic perspective of Tocqueville's city, America is a directional sign which points toward a polity as masterless and uncontrollable as Shelley's Frankenstein. His purpose is plain. If the foundation of America points as it does, he implicitly asks, then should we not take steps to discipline and educate the monster in its infancy--to bind its mind and the habits of its heart?

In keeping with the federalism he describes, townships lie nearest the foundation of Tocqueville's order. "In the townships as everywhere else," he explains, "the people are the source of power; but nowhere do they exercise their power more immediately."⁴ Nearest the dangerous, unbridled discretion of the people as individuals, townships must provide the first and most effective political layer in the boilerplate necessary to contain and thereby canalize the forces of democratic man. To cqueville writes that the township, "at the center of the ordinary relations of life," serves his America "as a field for the desire of public esteem, the want of exciting interest, and the taste for authority and popularity." In this way, he continues, "the passions that commonly embroil [democratic] society change their character when they find a vent so near the domestic hearth and the family circle."⁵ It is in the towns and villages that the habits of the heart most precisely and effectively can be wielded. Townships "form a complete and regular whole; they are old; they have the support of the laws and the still stronger support of the manners of the community over which they exercise prodigious influence."⁶

Moreover, it is not a generic township that Tocqueville has in mind for this element of his theory. Rather, it is the peculiar township of New England. Renowned for its ubiquitous "manners of the community" that peer into every nook and cranny of individuals' lives, the township of old New England is an appropriate counterweight for the operation of Tocqueville's city. His imagery evokes the ambience of a Norman Rockwell illustration: the one with the simple worker rising to speak his piece in the town meeting? "Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science," Tocqueville advises, "they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how it enjoy it."⁷

The imagery notwithstanding, however, it is not Rockwell's town meeting but that of Arthur Mil ler's Crucible that is more in keeping with Tocqueville's intent. Instead of the accessibility of political power, it is the instruction and critical disciplining of individuals under the community's gaze of judgement that is most important for Tocqueville's thesis. Indeed, the very origins of the New England town meeting in the Puritan past are precisely in congruence with Tocqueville's tacit purposes. In Puritan times town meetings in part served the function of maintaining the conformity of individuals to the mores of the community and, more politically, town meetings were controlled settings for bringing indictments against individuals held to be in non-conformity.

Similarly, Tocqueville notes:

I believe that provincial institutions are useful to all nations, but nowhere do they appear to me to be more necessary than among a democratic people. In an aristocracy, order can always be maintained in the midst of liberty; and as the rulers have a great deal to lose, order is to them a matter of great interest. . . . But a democracy without provincial institutions has no security against these evils. How can a populace unaccustomed to freedom in small concerns learn to use it temperately in great affairs? What resistance to tyranny can be offered in a country where each individual is weak and where the citizens are not united by any common interest? Those who dread the license of the mob and those who fear absolute power ought alike to desire the gradual development of provincial liberties.⁸

Tocqueville's city is presented to the technicians of the state as a parable of a polity teetering on the edge of controlling the powerful forces of democracy. Both the promise and its supposed peril are necessarily presented, just as Machiavelli's prince is shown the path to chaos and failure and the path to order and success.

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.⁹

Laws and governments alone are insufficient to withstand the irresistible strength. Laws and governments are too general and too formal to provide the critical targeting and particular application of discipline to the people as individuals. Especially those laws and governments at greater distances from the people are capable only of rudely channelling the passions of individuals toward appropriate paths. For these reasons, Tocquev ille assigns the administration of formal and general law in his America to vigilante groups and to voluntary associations. Nearer to the objects which must be ordered and disciplined, such volunteer groups as his admired posse are able to apply the designs of law more precisely and with correspondingly greater effect.

These efforts to manipulate the sovereignty of the people are not really, then, of the character of law. Tocqueville realizes this, naturally; it is the greatest novelty of his science. Formal and general, laws and governments--overtly political institutions--lack the effectiveness and surgical precision available to these extra-governmental authorities. In his conceptualization of America something more is needed to discipline the individual himself in the minutiae of daily living. As he puts it:

American laws are good, and to them must be attributed a large portion of the success that attends the government of democracy in America; but I do not believe them to be the principal cause of that success; and if they seem to me to have more influence than the nature of the country upon the social happiness of Americans, there is still reason to believe that their effect is inferior to that produced by the customs of the people.¹⁰

T ocqueville turns to those authorities of our everyday homes and workplaces, to the enforcers of customs, manners, mores, and to the discipliners of the habits of the heart, for the ultimate mechanism of control of the dangerous power of the people. Needed is something like the ubiquitous hand of village life that effectively reaches into the private, daily living of citizens, binding and ordering their lives from cradle to dotage. This intimate power canalizes personal desire and disciplines the habits of the heart. It is the ordering of tastes, values and mind, wielded best in the smothering familiarity of the New England town, America's village.

Tocqueville, clearly, is no friend of cities among democratic peoples. He notes with some relief that American state-society works because it travels in the direction of the New England town writ large. "The principles of New England," he is happy to say, "interpenetrated the whole confederation." In the state-society as village, as Michel Fou cault puts it:

The judges of normalcy are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor judge, the "social worker" judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.¹¹

The last quote from Foucault brings much of what I have to say about cities to a head. State-society as an encompassing village of tastes, values and mind undercuts the heterogeneity of anonymity by which the air of the city was free, by which the city had the quality of "city." The crisis of the city is the extension of state-society such that the it defines the human condition of our time almost completely; the quality which was city is more and more difficult to have in even the smallest ways. I see the ghostly hand of H egel (sire of the German mandarins) among academics who write about the city. In the Philosophy of Right there is much of the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in embryo. Hegel sees a final synthesis of human sociation where corporate solidarity and societal individuality are fused and transformed in a resulting sociation where we have the best of both village and city. They are both right and, sadly, wrong. State-society overcomes both village and city such that we have the worst of both qualities: the homogeneity, orthodoxy and smothering familiarity of the village and the anonymity of the city.

Tocque ville is more accurate than the Germans: Democracy in America well explains the origin of the state-society and its overcoming of the quality of city. Moreover, Tocqueville demonstrates the human intent of the technologists of the state in the creation of the state-society, where the Germans see only the Gang Gottes in der Welt. The bane of the city is the ever-tightening grip of state-society on its citizens, the insinuating of public fingers into every crevice and fiber of human being. Foucau lt, in Discipline and Punish, speaks to the problem with a comparison that fits well with these musings. He discusses the cities of antiquity--before the emergence of state-society. He talks of Athens not as Aristotle's polis , but as a city. The heterogeneity of anonymity in the city allowed individuals the space for spectacles. In contrast, he writes:

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supporters of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greek than we believe.¹²

So, what is to be done? I do not know about urban planning, or architecture, or social services; and would rather not presume. But, if the crisis of the city is to enhance the quality of "city" then it seems to me we make a mistake by taking our bearings from the village (or from the noble savage or some unholy amalgam of the two). Cities ought to serve as a bulwark of sorts against the disciplining of tastes, values and mind at the hand of state-society. The inevitable structures of city life need to allow for maximizing the heterogeneity of anonymity by which the Stadtluft frees us. Cities do not need more social glue, they need to provide mechanisms by which to fend off the subtle and pervasive insinuation of individuals into the maw of state-society. If this thinking is valid, cities must respond to the crisis engendered by state-society with a celebration of pluralism, of differance.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. Special thanks to Prof. Paul Peachey who brought this line to the author's attention in his chapter in this book.

2. This distinction between city life and community owes inspiration to Hannah Arendt's distinction between public and private as outlined in The Human Condition. In making her distinction, Arendt maintains that life in the public sphere is open and free while private life is the realm of necessity. Human associations can be either public or private. Private associations would be what I call here "community"; Arendt speaks of family and village as belonging to the private realm. Public association has the character of city. Unfortunately, Arendt refers to polis as public, even using Aristotle to illustrate the concept. I would see the corporate hierarchy of Aristotle's polis as only marginally different from the life oi the village. See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), especially Chapter II on public and private.

3. Alexis de Tocque ville, Democracy in America, Book I, transl. by Reeves (Boston: Engmann, 1868), Chap. 4, p. 46

4. Ibid., Book I, Chap. v, p. 50.

5. Ibid., p. 53.

6. Ibid., p. 50.

7. Ibid., p. 49.

8. Ibid., Chap. v, pp. 69-70.

9. Ibid., Chap. xiv, p. 150.

10. Ibid., Chap. xvi, p. 193.

11. Michel Fouc ault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 304.

12. Foucault, 219.