[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Richard Sennett: The New Political Economy and its Culture
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Richard Sennett: The New Political Economy and its Culture
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1210867&textreg=1&id=SenPoli2-1
Democracy today takes form within a public culture that is
profoundly influenced by the new political economy. In this economy,
work and place are changing in ways that a mere twenty years ago
seemed unimaginable. In the 1970s, the great corporate bureaucracies
and government hierarchies of the developed world appeared to be
securely entrenched, the products of centuries of economic development
and nation-building. Commentators used to speak of "late capitalism"
or "mature capitalism" as though earlier forces of growth had somehow
entered an end-game phase. But today, a new chapter has opened. The
economy is global and makes use of new technology; mammoth government
and corporate bureaucracies are becoming both more flexible and less
secure institutions. As a result, the ways we work have altered:
short-term jobs replace stable careers, skills rapidly evolve, and the
middle class experiences anxieties and uncertainties more confined in
an earlier era to the working classes.
Richard Sennett is Professor of History and Sociology and
University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His
many publications include The Corrosion of Character; Flesh and Stone:
The Body and the City in Western Civilization; The Conscience of the
Eye; and The Fall of Public Man.
Place has a different meaning now as well, in large part thanks
to these economic changes. An earlier generation believed that
nations--and within nations, cities--could govern their own fortunes.
Now, the emerging economic network is less susceptible to the controls
of geography. A divide has thus opened between polity--in the sense of
self-rule--and economy. This then raises the question, where can
democracy really happen? What interests me in particular is the
dramatic impact that underlying economic conditions have on the
pursuit of democracy in the postmodern community and the postmodern
workplace.
I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set
of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have
certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where
people are in relation to each other. In other words, all democratic
processes need to culminate in symbolic forms that are provisional but
defined. And one of the ways that the postmodern economy is
challenging democracy has to do with the destruction of those sign
posts, especially those sign posts that mark how people are to make
sense of their lives in terms of place and time. Postmodernity has
managed to challenge the notion that time should have a coherent,
narrative shape--it has had a disorienting effect. The flexible
economy has not only fragmented workers' lives, but also made it very
difficult for workers to understand how the project of survival itself
has a history in time.
How do we experience institutional changes in work and place
and, more generally, changes in our concept of time as a cultural
shift? Old Marxist notions, which argued that the economy directly
represents itself in consciousness, will not serve us. Allow me to put
forward instead two simple propositions that seem to be emerging at
the end of the twentieth century.
First, today's material conditions are impoverishing the value
of work. Flexible, short-term work is ceasing to serve as a point of
reference for defining durable personal purposes and a sense of
self-worth. Sociologically, work serves ever less as a forum for
stable, sociable relations. Second, the value of place has thereby
increased. The sense of place is based on the need to belong not to
"society" in the abstract, but to somewhere in particular. As the
shifting institutions of the economy diminish the experience of
belonging somewhere special at work, people's commitments increase to
geographic places like nations, cities, and localities. The question
is: commitments of what sort? Nationalism or ethnic localism can
indeed serve as defensive refuges against a hostile economic order,
but at a steep human price, fostering hatred of immigrants or
outsiders.
These two propositions might suggest an unrelievedly bleak view
of the culture of the emerging political economy. But this is not my
view. Work is a problematic frame for the self, since it tends to
equate worldly success and personal worth. Of more civic consequence
is the fact that troubled fortunes might actually induce people to see
themselves as other than economic animals. Rather than act
defensively, they might instead put a certain distance between
themselves and their material circumstances. They might recognize that
their value as citizens is not dependent upon their riches. Such
detachment could enrich the ways in which people use the places where
they live. If work now restricts the self, place could expand it.
At least this was Hannah Arendt's hope a generation ago, when
she articulated in The Human Condition her famous distinction between
labor and politics.[3]^1 She hoped in particular that in urban life,
with its large scale and impersonality, people could conduct a civic
existence that did not merely reflect or depend upon their personal
fortunes. Today, the uncertainties of the new economy argue more than
ever for a selfhood, as well as civic behavior, unchained from the
conditions of labor. Yet, the places in which this might occur can
neither be classical cities, like those Arendt admired, nor can they
be defensive, inward-turning localities. We need a new kind of civic
life to cope with the new economy.
Growth
To make sense of the culture of the emerging political economy,
we might begin by defining its key word, "growth." Growth occurs, most
simply, in four ways. The simplest is a sheer increase in number, an
increase in supply (such as more ants in a colony or more television
sets on the market). Growth of this sort appears in economic thinking
among writers like Jean Baptiste Say, whose loi des debouches
postulated that "increased supply creates its own demand." This
increase in number can lead to an alteration of structure. This is how
Adam Smith conceived of growth in The Wealth of Nations.[4]^2 Larger
markets, he said, trigger the division of labor in work. Growth in
which size begets complexity of structure is familiar to us in
government bureaucracies, as well as in industry. A third and quite
different kind of growth occurs through metamorphosis. A body changes
its shape or structure without necessarily increasing in number. A
moth turning into a butterfly grows in this way, so do characters in a
novel. Finally a system can grow by becoming more democratic. This
kind of growth is anti-foundational. As John Dewey argued, the
elements in a system are free to interact and influence one another so
that boundaries become febrile, forms become mixed. The system
contracts or expands in parts without overall coordination.
Communications networks, such as the early Internet, are obvious
examples of how growth can occur democratically. Such a growth process
differs from a market mechanism, in which an exchange ideally clears
all transactions and so regulates all actors in the system.
Resistances, irregularities, and cognitive dissonances take on a
positive value in democratic forms of growth. This is why subjective
life develops through something like the practice of inner
democracy--interpretive and emotional complexity emerges without a
master plan, a hegemonic rule, and an undisputed explanation.
My own view is that the freedom and flexibility of democratic
growth is not a matter of pure process, but gives rise to the need for
signposts, defined forms, tentative rituals, and provisional decisions
that help people to orient themselves and evaluate future conduct.
Yet, the flexible economy is destroying exactly these formal elements,
which orient people in the process of democratic growth. Put another
way, what we need to cope with the emerging political economy is more
democratic forms of flexible growth. The question is: where should
such growth be promoted? At the workplace? In the community? Are they
equally possible, or equally desirable, sites for democracy?
Smith's Paradox
Let me begin to look at these questions by examining the
cultural deficits to the new capitalism. For example, one paradox of
growth has dogged the development of modern capitalism throughout its
long history. With material growth comes the impoverishment of
qualitative experience.
The age of High Capitalism--which for convenience's sake can be
said to span the two centuries following the publication of Adam
Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776--was an era that lusted for
sheer quantitative growth, of the first sort I've described, but had
trouble dealing with the human consequences of the second sort, in
which the increase in wealth occurred through more complex economic
structures. Adam Smith argued that the division of labor, which was a
structural complexity, was promoted by the expansion of free markets
with ever greater numbers of goods, services, and laborers in
circulation. To Smith, a growing society seemed like a honeycomb; each
new cell was a place for ever more specialized tasks. A nail-maker
doing everything himself could make a few hundred nails a day. Smith
calculated that if nail-making were broken down into all its component
parts, and each worker did only one task, a nail-maker could process
more than 48,000 nails a day. Work experience, however, would become
more routine in the process. Breaking the task of making nails into
its component parts would condemn individual nail-makers to a
numbingly boring day; hour after hour nail-makers would be doing the
same small job.
I call this coupling of material growth with qualitative
impoverishment "Smith's Paradox," after Adam Smith. Though Smith did
not coin this term, he did recognize the existence of this paradox,
which came down to us in what we call "Fordist Production," monotonous
assembly-line work, the kind of assembly-line work prevalent in Ford's
Highland Park plant in Michigan during the First World War. Today,
proponents of the new capitalism claim that Smith's Paradox is now
coming to an end. Modern technology promises to banish routine work to
the innards of machines, leaving ever more workers free to do
flexible, non-routine tasks. In fact, however, the qualitative
impoverishment recognized by Smith has simply taken new forms. New
technology frequently "de-skills" workers, who now tend to machines as
electronic janitors. Meanwhile, the conditions of job tenure also
compound de-skilling. Workers learn how to do one particular job well,
only to find that work-task at an end. The reality now facing young
workers with at least two years of college is that they will change
jobs, on average, at least eleven times in the course of their working
lives.
More brutally, the division of labor now separates those who get
to work and those who don't. Large numbers of people are set free of
routine tasks only to find themselves useless or under-used
economically, especially in the context of the global labor supply.
Geography no longer separates the skilled First World from the
unskilled Third World. Computer code is written efficiently, for
instance, in Bombay for a third to a seventh its cost in IBM home
offices.
Statistics on job creation do not quite get at people's fear of
uselessness. The number of jobs, even good skilled jobs, does not
dictate who will have access to them, how long the jobs can be held,
or, indeed, how long the jobs will exist. Ten years ago, for instance,
the U.S. economy had a deficit of computer systems analysts. Today, it
has a surplus. And many of these highly skilled workers, contrary to
ideology, do not retrain well. Their skills are too specific. In sum,
the specter of uselessness now shadows the lives of educated
middle-class people, and this specter now compounds the older
experiential problem of routine among less-favored workers. The young
suffer the pangs of uselessness in a particularly cruel way, since an
ever-expanding educational system trains them ever more elaborately
for jobs that do not exist.
The result of uselessness, de-skilling, and task-labor for the
American worker is the dispensable self. Instead of the
institutionally induced boredom of the assembly line, this
experiential deficit appears more to lie within the worker--a worker
who hasn't made him-or herself of lasting value to others and so can
simply disappear from view. The economic language in use
today--"skills-based economy," "informational competence,"
"task-flexible labor," and the like--shifts the focus from impersonal
conditions like the possession of capital to more personal matters of
competence. As this economic rhetoric becomes more personal, it
gradually de-symbolizes the public realm of labor: economic
inequality, power, and powerlessness are facts that are difficult to
translate into self-knowledge. Similarly, the process of
flexibilization in the workplace destroys permanent categories of
occupation. Ironically, while work inequality has grown, the map for
evaluating this inequality has been lost. While this shift in language
seems personally empowering, it, in fact, can serve to increase the
burdens on the working self.
This sense of "dispensability"--a sense of failing to be of much
value in this economy--has great sociological implications. What
Michael Young feared in his prophetic book, The Rise of the
Meritocracy, has come to pass: As the economy needs ever fewer,
highly-educated people to run it, the "moral distance" between the
masses and the elite widens.[5]^3 The masses, now comprising people in
suits and ties, as well as those in overalls, appear peripheral to the
elite, productive core. The economy profits by shrinking its labor
base. Its emphasis on personal agency helps explain why welfare
dependency and parasitism are such sensitive issues for people whose
fortunes are now in doubt. Labor is disposable.
Some tough-minded economists argue that current forms of
unemployment, under-employment, de-skilling, and parasitism are
incurable in the emerging economic order, since the economy profits
from doing "more with less." But this qualitative impoverishment, this
re-organization that makes increasing numbers of people feel that they
personally have no footing in the process of economic growth, poses a
profound political challenge. There is no easy solution to Smith's
Paradox, the problem of impoverished work experience. The postmodern
vision of a project-less life is only for the elite. In the lives of
most people, it is a form of oppression--a cultural ethos that is
inhumane. There is a loss of the notion that you can guarantee
something for your children, a profound loss of social honor. It is
possible to live with a flexible self only if you are so empowered
economically, culturally, and politically that "possibility" requires
choices of the sort made by consumers in a mall.
Durable Time
Because sheer quantitative growth and the division of labor
offer no remedy to the subjective, experiential problems of work, some
policy makers have turned to the third model of growth, metamorphosis.
In the political arena, such a form of development is called variously
"auto-gestion," "self-management," or simply "change from within." The
practical and worthy aim is to make work more humane by having workers
themselves control their work. The goal is to have workers reform
their institutions of work through a decisive act of collective will.
In the political arena, metamorphosis occurs through rupturing
established institutions. While management gurus practice rupture from
the top down, socialists have aimed to remake work institutions from
the bottom up. The practical record of such efforts at work
re-organization is mixed. Some forms of change from within and
workers' auto-gestion succeed, mostly in small, niche enterprises;
others fail, overwhelmed by the larger currents of the global economy.
Change from within supposes order can be made out of chaos by an
act of will; in political terms, the polity is self-creating. The
social difficulty with the model arises, though, from the very act of
will it supposes. Basic social bonds like trust, loyalty, and
obligation require a long time to develop and have diminished as
people do shifting, task-centered jobs. Loyalty requires that personal
experience accumulate at an institution over time, but the emerging
political economy will not let it accumulate. Personal time, like
civic time, must possess duration and coherence. Workers form a sense
of subjective strength and positive agency through making things last.
But will alone is insufficient to accomplish that task.
Max Weber's famous image of modern life confined in an "iron
cage" slights stability as a positive even in the lives of ordinary
people. Weber feared the rise at the beginning of the twentieth
century of large national bureaucracies and corporations that made use
of the service ethic, earning the loyalty of those whom they made
secure. Weber doubted that loyal servants make objectively-minded
citizens. Yet petty bureaucrats, time servers, and the like derived a
sense of status and public honor from their stations in bureaucracies.
T. H. Marshall, the intellectual father of the modern British welfare
state, understood this well: however static big institutions may be,
however resistant to change from within, they provide their members a
scaffolding of mutual loyalty and of trust that events can be
controlled, which are prerequisites of citizenship. The bureaucrat as
good citizen is not a pretty picture, but then, Jay Gould had no
interest in the subject at all.
The current rush to take apart this institutional architecture
is undoing the social, civic dimensions of durable time. Take loyalty,
for example. When career paths are replaced by intermittent jobs,
loyalties to institutions diminish. This generalization, of course,
needs all sorts of qualification. For instance, one study of dismissed
IBM programmers found that the people with more than twenty years of
service remain enthusiastic about the company, while accepting their
firing as a matter of fate. A more diminished sense of loyalty appears
among younger workers, who have had more brutal dealings with the new
economic order; many of these younger workers view the places where
they work mostly as sites to make contacts with people who can get
them better, or simply other, jobs.
In this, the young have not failed to do their duty, since new
economic institutions make no guarantees in return. They routinely
replace permanent workers with temporary workers, or "off-shore" work.
Loyalty requires that personal experience accumulate in an
institution, and the emerging political economy will not let it
accumulate. Indeed, the profitable ease with which international
capital today assembles, sells, and re-assembles corporations erases
the durability of institutions to which one could develop loyalty or
obligation.
Time, then, is everything in reckoning the social consequences
of the new political economy. And as a cultural value, rupture--that
favored child of postmodernism--is less politically challenging than
the assertion that people ought to have the right to develop loyalty
and commitment within institutions. If the dominant powers of the
political economy violate durable time, can individuals provide for
themselves--formally or informally--amongst one another the sign posts
that institutions deny them?
This question is less abstract than it might seem at first. The
modern economy did not simply wipe out the social struggles and
personal values formed in an earlier phase of capitalism. What has
been carried into the present from the past is a set of subjective
values--values for making time coherent and durable, but in entirely
personal terms. This personal, durable time intersects with the new
economy of work in particularly disturbing ways.
The Coherent Self
The Victorians founded their sense of self-worth on life
organized as one long project: the German values of formation, the
English virtues of purpose, were for keeps. Careers in business,
military, or imperial bureaucracies made the life-long project
possible; these careers graded work into a clear sequence of steps.
Such expectations devalue the present for the sake of the future--the
present that is in constant upheaval and that may tempt the individual
into byways or evanescent pleasures. Weber described
future-orientation as a mentality of delayed gratification. Yet, this
Victorian experience of cohering time has another side, which was
subsumed under the ethical category of taking responsibility for one's
life, though in a way quite opposite from the innovatory character of
the will to change from within.
Today, late Victorian values of personal responsibility are as
strong as a century ago, but their institutional context has changed.
The iron cage has been dismantled, so that individuals struggle for
security and coherence in a seemingly empty arena. The destruction of
institutional supports at work, as in the welfare state, leaves
individuals only their sense of responsibility; the Victorian ethos
now often charts a negative trajectory of defeated will, of having
failed to make one's life cohere through one's work. Take what happens
when career paths are replaced by intermittent jobs. Many temporary
workers are put in the unenviable position of knowing that their job
insecurity suits obligation-resistant companies, yet these temporary
workers none-the-less believe that they are themselves responsible for
the mess made of their careers. This sense of personal responsibility
deflects workers' anger away from economic institutions to themselves.
Meanwhile, the new economic map, which devalues the life-long
career project, has shifted the optimal age curves of work to younger,
raw employees (employees who range in age from the early twenties to
early forties, instead of employees who range in age from the late
twenties to middle fifties) even though adults are living longer and
more vigorously. Studies of dismissed middle-aged workers find these
workers both obsessed and puzzled by the liabilities of age. Rather
than believing themselves to be faded and "over the hill," these older
workers feel that they are more organized and purposeful than younger
workers are. Even so, they blame themselves when they are perceived by
management to be obsolete. Likewise, they blame themselves for not
having prepared better for this contingency. 21 [6]^1
Workers' sense of personal responsibility and personal guilt is
compounded by the rhetoric of modern management, which attempts to
disguise power in the new economy by making the worker believe he or
she is a self-directing agent--managers are now called "coaches,"
"facilitators," and the like. It is not the workers' "false
consciousness" that makes these titles credible, but rather a twisted
sense of moral agency.
In modernity, people take responsibility for their lives because
the whole of their lives feels their making. But when the ethical
culture of modernity--with its codes of personal responsibility and
life purpose--is carried into a society without institutional
shelters, there appears not pride of self, but a dialectic of failure
in the midst of growth. Growth in the new economy depends on gutting
corporate size, ending bureaucratic guarantees, and profiting from the
flux and extension of economic networks. People come to know the
resulting dislocations as their own lack of direction. The ethic of
responsibility becomes, ironically and terribly, a subjective
yardstick to measure one's failure to cohere.
In contrast, I would like to see discussions about democracy in
the workplace enlarged beyond references to worker self-management.
When we talk about democracy in the workplace, we must address the
cultural dimensions of work, a different and literal kind of
self-management in which coherence rather than rupture is a primary
value. We must think through worker democracy in terms of this legacy
of subjectivity. Is there some way to lighten workers' burden of
self-responsibility, while acknowledging workers' desire for coherence
and durability?
Place
The city is democracy's home, declared Hannah Arendt, a place
for forming loyalties and practicing responsibilities. It also is a
social setting in which personal attributes fade somewhat in a milieu
of impersonality. Thus, Arendt imagined that the city--or more
properly, "urbanity"--could relieve burdens of material circumstances
in the social relations between people. Could Arendt's vision somehow
be combined with the ideal of democratic growth invoked by John
Dewey--that of the city as a place of ever increasing complexity of
values, beliefs, and cultural forms?
The cities, as well as the smaller communities, we know in
America bear little relation to this ideal place. In communities,
people do indeed try to compensate for their dislocations and
impoverished experience in the economy, but often in destructive
ways--through communal coercion and shared illusion. Many current
building projects are exercises in withdrawal from a complex world,
deploying self-consciously "traditional" architecture that bespeaks a
mythic communal coherence and shared identity in the past. These
comforts of a supposedly simpler age appear in the New Englandish
housing developments designed by the American planners Elizabeth
Platter-Zyberg and Andreas Duwany, among the architects in Britain
working for the Prince of Wales to reproduce "native" English
architecture, and in the neighborhood renovation work on the Continent
undertaken by Leon Krier. All these place-makers are artists of
claustrophobia, whose icons, however, do indeed promise stability,
longevity, and safety.
In order to avoid place-making on these conservative terms, we
need to clarify what signposts and markers of form might successfully
orient an alternative, open, and democratic community life. Let me
cite three.
First, communities must not shy away from confronting hostile
forces. Communities can indeed challenge the new economy rather than
react defensively to it. Modern corporations like to present
themselves as having cut free from local powers--they may have a
factory in Mexico, an office in Bombay, and a media center in lower
Manhattan; these all appear as nodes in a global network. Today,
localities fear that if they exercise sovereignty, as when they tax or
regulate a business locally, the corporation could just as easily find
another node. I believe, however, that we are already seeing signs
that the economy is not as locationally indifferent as has been
assumed. You can buy any stock you like in Dubuque, Iowa, but not make
a market of stocks in the cornfields. The ivy cloisters of Harvard may
furnish plenty of raw intellectual talent, yet lack the craziness,
messiness, and surprise that makes Manhattan a stimulating if
unpleasant place to work. Similarly, in South-East Asia, it is
becoming increasingly clear that local social and cultural geographies
indeed count for a great deal in investment decisions. And because the
new political economy is not, in fact, indifferent to location, there
exists the possibility for making communal demands--contracting with
corporations to assure jobs for a certain number of years in exchange
for tax relief, or enforcing strict work-place rules on age
discrimination. What matters is the will to confront. Up until now,
polities have tended to behave like weak supplicants rather than
necessary partners. Put simply, place has power.
Second, strong communities need not turn inward in a repressive
fashion. Planning, especially in large-scale environments, can avert
this and open groups up to one another by focusing on the borders of
local sub-communities as active zones. For instance, "active edge"
planners today seek to direct new building away from local centers and
toward the boundaries separating communities. In East London, for
example, some planners are working to make the edge of distinct
communities into a febrile zone of interaction and exchange between
different groups. Yet another strategy is to diversify central spaces,
so that different functions overlap and interact in geographic
centers. Planners in Los Angeles are seeking ways to put clinics,
government offices, and old-age centers into shopping malls, which
formerly were devoted solely to consumption activities. Planners in
Germany are similarly exploring how to get light manufacturing back
into the pedestrian zones in city centers.
In honor of Arendt, many of these planners call themselves
members of the "New Agora" movement. They don't see planning as the
attempt to determine a specific outcome, but they do make assumptions
about the form in which interaction and process should occur. In the
case of active-edge planners, the animating belief is that the more
people interact, the more they will become involved with those unlike
themselves. In the case of the central zone planners, the animating
belief is that the value of a place will increase when it is not
simply commercial. Such planning is "democratic" in my own use of the
word. The agora has a defined shape that can open up the possibility
of complexity rather than hegemony. Again, part and parcel of this
complexity of place is the diversification of a place's purpose. For
instance, you can make shopping malls into places where people
actually hang out, not just places for consumption. If you make malls
more like town centers, you can draw people out of the network of
their intimate neighborhood.
When I say "intimate," I am not speaking of a psychological
intimacy, but of exposure to your neighbors--such as knowing whether
and how they are employed. Did they use credit to buy that Ford
Windstar? America exposes people economically to each other in ways
that enter social discourse as measures of relative personal merit.
The reason I have focused my work on impersonality as a political
project is that I believe that if we can provide more places in which
that exposure is obscured, we can create the preconditions for a more
just political discourse and interaction. Granted, you cannot force
people to treat each other just as plain citizens, but at least you
can provide the sites in which that kind of interaction might occur.
And that is why cosmopolitanism (in a non-Kantian sense) can be a
political project. My emphasis on the shaping of community is not, as
it were, that such veiled communal relations would triumph over
capitalism. That would give to place an absurd power. But where
democracy occurs does matter in how democracy occurs.
Places, especially urban places, have the capacity to help
people to grow out of themselves into a more impersonal citizenship,
and so to relieve themselves of their own subjective burdens. This may
seem abstract, but we experience one of its elements whenever we
plunge into a crowded street. A hoary cliché views impersonal crowds
as an evil. Throughout the history of the city, people have voted
otherwise with their feet. And one great theme in the literature of
modern urban culture--from Baudelaire to Aragon to Benjamin to Jane
Jacobs--finds in crowds a peculiar antidote to selfhood with all its
burdens, a release into a less personalized existence. When she moved
to Washington Square in 1906, beginning an affair with another woman,
Willa Cather declared, "At last I can breathe," by which she meant
that her erotic life no longer defined the terms of her social
existence--at least in the dense, impersonal place to which she had
moved.
Impersonality does more than shelter outsiders or members of
sub-cultures; it offers the possibility for what Stuart Hall calls
"hybridity," a mixture of social elements beyond any single definition
of self. Impersonal release has a particular value in terms of social
class and material fortune. Various studies of existing mixed-class
areas of big cities like New York and London yield an interesting
portrait; intimate "neighborliness" is weak, but identification with
the neighborhood is strong. The poor are relieved of social stigma;
those who are rich in comparison--contrary to common sense, that most
fallible of all guides--find daily life in a diverse neighborhood more
stimulating than in places that serve only as private mirrors. These
studies exemplify the sociological proposition advanced by Durkheim
that impersonality and equality have a strong affinity.
The relief of self found in dense streets, mixed pubs,
playgrounds, and markets thus is not inconsequential. Such dense forms
of civil society affect how people think of themselves as citizens. As
the late Henri Lefebvre put it, sensing one's "right to the city"
helps people feel entitled to other rights, rights not based on
personal injuries or on victimhood. As I say, no one could argue that
an impersonal city life will extinguish either the reality or the
sentiments aroused by economic failure. But "extinguish," like
"rupture," belongs to the sphere of growth envisioned through
metamorphosis. I imagine instead a more realistic democratic project,
one which develops a kind of concurrent consciousness, in which a
middle-aged, supposedly "over the hill" worker can also think of
him-or herself in an entirely different way, by virtue of where he or
she lives. This doubleness of self seems to be more practicable than
the striving for rebirth, as in a metamorphosis.
To conclude, whether we seek for democracy in workplaces or in
cities, we need to address the culture of the new capitalism. The
economy does not "grow" personal skills and durable purposes, nor
social trust, loyalty, or commitment. Economic practice has combined,
however, with a durable cultural ethic, so that institutional
nakedness co-exists with the will to take responsibility for one's
life. The forms of polity we need to invent must help people transcend
both elements of that combination: we need a model of growth that
helps people transcend the self as a burdensome possession.
Place-making based on exclusion, sameness, or nostalgia is poisonous
medicine socially, and psychologically useless. A self weighted with
its insufficiencies cannot lift that burden by retreat into fantasy.
Place-making based on diverse, dense, impersonal human contacts must
find a way for these contacts to endure. The agora has to prove a
durable institution. This is the challenge that urbanists like myself
now confront.
Baudelaire famously defined modernity as experience of the
fleeting and the fragmented. To accept life in its disjointed pieces
is an adult experience of freedom, but still these pieces must lodge
and embed themselves somewhere, hopefully in a place that allows them
to grow and endure.
________________________
[7]^1 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1959). ] [8]^2 See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Strahun and Cadell,
1776). ] [9]^3 See Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy,
1870-2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution (New York: Random
House, 1959). ]
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