Chapter Eight: The New Municipal Agenda

From the moment nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down into stable villages, they introduced radically new changes that go beyond the turn’from food gathering to food cultivation. Where villages became towns, human beings began to “detribalize” themselves, and create those civic institutions we associate with “civilization/’ The blood tie, the male-female divisions in functions, and status groups based on age formed the sinews of tribalism and were slowly absorbed into an entirely new social dispensation: the city. Cities were to be structured primarily around residence, a vocational division of labor, and a variety of “orders” and classes, some of which were united by economic interests but others by power and prestige. The biological facts of blood, sex, and age, in effect, began to slowly phase into the social facts of propinquity, Vocation, wealth, and privilege.

Out of this sweeping historical transformation, new ways of ordering life began to emerge. The biological realm of life, seemingly “natural” in its origins, became what we normally regard as the social: the realm in which people formed to meet their material needs, to reproduce as well as produce, to “relate” with each other as individuals and family groups, to fraternize in a variety of personal associations and degrees of intimacy. The town and city, even the village, provided a political realm of life, human-made in origins, in which individuals related to each other as citizens in order to manage their communities and cope with its “civic” affairs. Until comparatively recent times, to be sure, “biological” and political realms overlapped significantly so that political elites such as aristocracies legitimated their authority over towns and cities by the highly tribalistic claims of ancestry and genealogy. Until the Emperor Caracalla made all free men in the Roman Empire citizens of the state, citizenship was largely regarded as an ancestral privilege. The rights it conferred to citizens in the management of the community were marked by various degrees of ethnic exclusivity.

But the city, initially the Hellenic polis, created a new social dispensation: minimally, a territorial space in which the “stranger” or “alien” could reside with a reasonable degree of protection—later even a measure of participation—that few tribal communities allowed to outsiders, however hospitably they were treated. Two new civilizatory categories—politics and citizenship—began to absorb the largely biosocial forms that held early familial and tribal lifeways together.

The professionalization of power and violence that we associate with the state came much later. Indeed, in its national form it is a fairly recent phenomenon. State and the practice of statecraft has no authentic basis in community life—by which I mean that, until recently, the acquisition of power by professionals encountered the greatest difficulty in legitimating itself. Tribal institutions can be easily understood because human beings are, after all, natural organisms. They must feed themselves, acquire their means of subsistence, reproduce, live in safety, and, given their evolution as primates, engage in some kind of communal intercourse. In contradistinction to other animals, however, they organize these activities into institutions and make them operationally systematic—hopefully rational, predictable, and ideologically legitimate. Animals, including the genetically programmed “social insects,” do not have institutions, however habituated and predictable their behavior may be; in short, they do not have consciously formed ways of ordering their communities that are continually subject to historical change.

It is important to distinguish the social in humanity from the political and, still further, the political from the statist. We have created a terrible muddle by confusing the three and thereby legitimating one by mingling it with the other. This confusion has serious consequences for the present and future. We have lost our sense of what it means to be political by assigning political functions and prerogatives to “politicians,” actually to a select, often elite, group of people who practice a form of institutional manipulation called statecraft. Inasmuch as many politicians are viewed with a certain measure of contempt, we have degraded the concept of politics—once a participatory dimension of societal life and the activity of an entire community—by confusing it with statecraft, a distinctly power-oriented form of activity. Accordingly, we have lost our sense of what it means to be a citizen, a status we increasingly accept as mere “constituents” or, worse, voters and taxpayers who are the passive recipients of the goods and services provided to us by an all-powerful state and our “elected” representatives.

Ideologically, we tend to justify this historical degradation of our status as political beings by invoking the “nation” as the basic and most elemental unit of social life, an entity that is itself of very recent origin. That nations are made up of cities, towns, and villages on which our well-being, culture, and security ultimately depend has begun to elude us and slip from our consciousness. It remains a lasting contribution of Jane Jacobs to have demonstrated in a very compelling way that our economic well-being depends on cities, not on nation-states; indeed that while nations may be “political and military entities it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth.... We can’t avoid seeing, too, that among all the various types of economies, cities are unique in their abilities to shape and reshape the economies of other settlements, including those far removed from them geographically.”{79} We may leave aside Jacobs’s conventional use of such words as politics, her imagery of the economy as a strictly market, indeed, a capitalistic economy, and her strongly economistic interpretation of cities primarily as centers of production and exchange. Her argument invites a debate about the superfluity of the state that has been too long neglected, and her examples can only be ignored for the most dubious ideological reasons.

A close reading of history has demonstrated that the state—and, in our own time, the nation-state—is not only the repository of agents and institutions that have made a mockery of politics; it shows, in fact,’ that these state agents and institutions have degraded the individual as a public being, as a citizen who plays a ‘ participatory role in the operations of his or her community. In this respect, the nation-state has impeded the development of much that is uniquely human in human beings^ disempowering the individual and rendering him or her a warped and self-degraded being. ’

It is equally demonstrable that the state—and, again, the nation-state—parasitizes the community, denuding it of its resources and its potential for development. It does this partly by draining the community of its material and spiritual resources; partly, too, by steadily divesting it of the power, indeed of its legitimate right, to shape its own destiny. Despite recent rhetoric to the contrary, nothing has seemed more challenging to the state than demands for local self-management and civic liberty. Decentralization, a term that is often abused these days for the most cynical ends of statecraft, is not merely rich in geographic, territorial, and political values; it is eminently a spiritual and cultural value that links the reempowerment of the community with the reempowerment of the individual.

Municipal freedom, in short, is the basis for political freedom and political freedom is the basis for individual freedom—a recovery of a new participatory politics structured around free, self-empowered, and active citizens. For centuries, the city was the public sphere for politics and citizenship, and in many areas the principal source of resistance to the encroachment of the nation-state. In its acts of defiance it often delayed the development of the nation-state and created remarkable forms of association to counteract the state’s encroachment upon municipal freedom and individual liberties.

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The case for the nation-state today is almost entirely logistical and administrative. Social life, we are normally told, is too “complex” to allow for municipal autonomy and participatory citizenship. This argument does not stand up very well against historical and contemporary evidence. Fascinating examples can be found of economic and political coordination within and between communities that render statecraft and the nation-state utterly superfluous.

Aside from Hellenic, Italian, medieval German, and Castilian endeavors, one of the most lasting are the Swiss communes whose practice of using local resources without turning them into private property was to be an object of fascination for generations to visitors in the mountain areas of central Europe. These communes and the confederations they formed for their common welfare, and safety seem to have absorbed almost tribalistic forms of intimacy into their practices, even attitudes that Viewed sharing according to need rather than work into their ways of dealing with material goods. According to some accounts, the word “land,” which was often open to use by all who needed it, included streams, clay pits, quarries, or, in H. Mooseburger’s words, “the entire region with every and all its products and fruits.”{80} Let me emphasize that this was a municipal form of “ownership” about which we shall have more to say later, riot the nationalized forms advocated by Marxian socialists, the “economic democracy” advanced by many liberals, or systems of “workers’ control” demanded by orthodox anarchists—all of which, I may add, involve some degree of state involvement or a particularistic and potentially competitive body of interests within the community, however collectively “owned” or, democratically “managed” an enterprise may be.

The Gray Leagues (Graubunden), the source of the Swiss referendum and the town meetings of its 222 communes, have to be singled out as the most libertarian of all. Until Napoleon forced it into the Swiss Confederation, the Freistaat der Drei Bunde (literally, the Free State of the Three Leagues) arid specifically the Graubund itself, the league that give its name to the confederation of the three leagues that composed it, was to exist for nearly three centuries (1524–1800) and place its distinctly decentralistic imprint on Switzerland as a whole. This Free State “was not merely democratic,” observes Benjamin Barber in his superb account of the league and its standards of community freedom. The fact is that “it was democratic in a particular way not easily accounted for by the conceptual perspective of Anglo-American thought... Graubunden’s experience with democracy has been inseparable from its experience with community, and as a model of integral community, no region of Switzerland can equal it”{81}

Barber’s conclusions cannot be emphasized too strongly. What they concretely indicate is that the ultimate source of sovereignty reposed in the commune—the village, town, and city—whose assent or opposition to a course of action was achieved by referendum. The confederal system that united the communes had the right to deal with foreign affairs, and little more. Beyond this sphere, confederal bodies were concerned mainly with preventing their component leagues from making foreign alliances on their own than with any formulation of foreign policy. Issues such as war and peace were decided directly by the communes themselves. “The only instrument of the central government was a three-man commission (Haupter) made up of the heads of each of the leagues that, with the assistance of an elective assembly (Beytag), prepared the referendum and executed the will of the communes,” Barber tells us. “In the new structure power was an inverse function of level of organization. The central ‘federal’ government had almost none, the regional communes had a great deal.”{82} Whatever its capacity to deal with the problems that confronted the Free State, the people were provided “with several centuries of real thoughtful independence and a measure of autonomous self-government rare in Germanic Europe.”

The challenges faced by the Free State and its component leagues over these centuries require a lengthy study of the kind provided by Barber. The problem of dealing with foreign intervention; the incorporation of sizable towns and the expansion of older ones into cities; the disparities in status, wealth, and power that developed, not to speak of local parochialism at one extreme and cosmopolitian “modernity” at the other, were never fully resolved. But they were held in remarkable balance for most of the Free State’s history. Even after Napoleon had reduced the Free State to a canton in the more centralized Swiss Confederation, Barber notes that the peasant still turned the harshness of his sparse land “into a discipline of individuality, a teacher of autonomy. He held the intuitive conviction that his rural mountain life, his uncomplicated involvement in a pastoral economy that left him considerable leisure time, was inextricably bound up with his independence and his freedom.”{83}

By no means should this strong sense of individuality be mistaken for the “individualism” associated with traditional “natural law” ideologues and the modern-day proprietary emphasis on egoism. The hardships inflicted on Alpine dwellers, locked in a glacial land of heavy snowfalls, avalanches, and floods, placed a high premium on “collective labor and common decision making. ... Thus as the hardness of life molded a man’s sense of autonomy, it also compelled him to cooperation and collective action.” As Herman Weilenmann has put it, to the villagers of the Graubunden freedom involved “not individual emancipation from his obligations to the whole, but the right to bind himself by his own choice.”{84} Neither the individual nor the collective, in effect, claimed sovereignty over each other but rather they formed a complementary relationship that supported each other.

These are abiding notions that are difficult for modern Euro-Americans to accept nowadays. Yet they are deeply rooted in the American tradition itself. I refer more to the New England town meeting tradition from which so many of the authentic libertarian aspects of the “American Dream” derive rather than the “cowboy” tradition that presumably “tamed the West” and threatens to reduce it to a battleground of sheer avarice. We are only now becoming aware of the localist and communitarian motives that drove Puritan settlers to New England. Religious persecution by Charles I was only one of several reasons that the lives of the Puritans were intolerable under the Stuart kings. “If Charles I is remembered at all today, it is as an ineffectual monarch who lost his head on the chopping block,” observes T. H. Breen, whose work on Puritan institutions is perhaps one of the best that has been published in recent years. “During the first years of his reign, however, he brought considerable energy to his position. He instituted or tried to institute far-reaching changes in civil, ecclesiastical, and military affairs. These unprecedented, often arbitrary policies disrupted the fabric of local society, and they were a major preoccupation of the men and women who moved to Massachusetts Bay. One cannot fully understand the institutional decisions that the colonists made in America unless one realizes how gravely Stuart centralization threatened established patterns of daily life in England’s local communities.”{85}

The men and women who formed the New England townships of the seventeenth century sought not only to restore Christianity to its “pure,” ecclesiastically untainted, biblical forms; they also sought to restore society itself to its pristine, egalitarian, and devoutly communitarian patterns, presumably paralleling the ethical and social covenants that appear in “Acts” and the quasitribal democracy of the Hebrew Bedouins and their compacts. A shared assumption seemed to exist that the English town corresponded to the Hebrew tribal community and that its restoration was a necessary move toward social as well as religious purification. Every community was conceived as an ethical compact, not simply a form of association for personal and collective survival—a notion decidedly antithetical to the Hobbesian and Lockean principles that enter into liberal conceptions of republicanism as we know them today. Men and women, in the Puritan world view, formed communities to achieve a “good society” in the moral, not merely the material, sense of the term: a society marked by virtue as defined in Christian precept. Individual and community, in this sense, were no less inseparable among the early colonists of New England than they were among the villagers of the Swiss Graubund.

The stormy declamations of angry prophets such as Amos, whom Ernst Bloch has so aptly called a “barn burner,” sear the Puritan soul, and explain the institutional development of Puritan communities. It was Charles I and his “ill-advised attempt to increase his authority by attacking local English institutions” who appears as the Moloch in this drama, and the Puritan divines as the prophets who denounced royal encroachments on the “liberties of Englishmen,” to use the language of the day. Despite the diversity of their origins, ranging from “populous commercial centers such as London and Norwich” to “isolated rural communities ... most had been affected in some personal way by the king’s aggressive efforts to extend his civil and ecclesiastical authority ... The experience of having to resist Stuart centralization, a resistance that pitted small congregations against meddling bishops, incorporated boroughs and guilds against grasping courtiers, local train-bands against demanding deputy lieutenants, and almost everyone in the realm against the collectors of unconstitutional revenues, shaped the New Englanders’ ideas about civil, ecclesiastical, and military polity. The settlers departed from England determined to maintain their local attachments against outside interference, and to a large extent the Congregational churches and self-contained towns of Massachusetts Bay stood as visible evidence of the founders’ decision to preserve in America what had been threatened in the mother country.”{86}

In view of the grim reputation the Puritan towns acquired as dour “theocracies” and parochial, self-righteous, dogmatic nests of intolerance, we must provide, with more nuance, a picture of their variety, roundedness, and militancy—not simply as they existed at any given moment in time but as they evolved, eventually to become centers of social rebellion, civic autonomy, and collective liberty. Nor can we ignore the strong-minded yeomanry they produced, the high sense of individuality and citizenship they nourished. We must bear in mind that these personal and social traits persisted in New England for some three centuries—not as mere historical ephemera that pass like wispy clouds across the social horizon but as an established democratic legacy. No less ingrained in the mythology of the American tradition than the reality of business and its virtues, this legacy has always acted as a force countervailing the egoistic sensibility fostered by reactionary nationalists and liberal centralists in other parts of America.

Let us quickly rid ourselves of the idea that this Yankee yeomanry was “tight-fisted,” “commercially oriented,” “grasping,” and emotionally guarded. This imagery mistakes Boston, a commercially oriented and acquisitive port, for New England as a whole. The port cities, in fact, often stood at odds with the many small townships that were networked into the interior of the New England colonies and states. These colonies and their interiors were unique insofar as they were municipal entities, vital towns, in contrast to other regions of America, which were generally marked by dispersed settlements and farmsteads. Two facts emerge that deserve emphasis. Firstly, Boston and other port cities in New England were no different in their outlook and interests than Baltimore or Charleston, hence they were fairly atypical of the Yankee spirit of the region. Indeed, they were no different as commercial ports than port cities elsewhere in the world. Secondly, the fact that small towns could be planted so firmly, indeed, doggedly in New England’s thin, rocky, glaciated soil was an act of ethical defiance, for the region is a poor agricultural area that offers no congenial home for flourishing communities.

The towns and townships that emerged on the rocky soils of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and particularly New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont were a challenging moral statement of firm intentions to live in a very definite way, a structural expression of what constitutes a virtuous life, not merely a bountiful one. Whereas Boston eventually visualized itself as the “New World’s” counterpart of London, many New England townships saw themselves as biblical communities, united by Old Testament convenants that hypostasized simple living, a high regard for essentials over frivolities, fairness and mutuality in relationships, egalitarianism in status, self-sufficiency in the development of needs and their satisfaction, and more elaboration of communitarian values than fetishization of change. In short, they were committed to a moral economy and society, not to lifeways premised on the market and gain.

We must look at these lifeways closely if we are to understand the political institutions and economic relationships that expressed them and were designed to reinforce them. However much these moral lifeways varied—owing, in part, to their ties with the commercially oriented port cities—they were remarkably self-sufficient. I speak, here, of a world in which the yeomanry comprised 70 percent of the agrarian population. Crops were cultivated mainly for survival rather than trade. As one yeoman wrote in the 1770s, a farm gave “me and my whole family a good living on the produce of it. Nothing to wear, eat or drink was purchased, as my farm provided all.”{87} That surplus crops were used to purchase manufactured goods such as iron, nails, glass, weapons, gunpowder, and medicine does not alter the marginality of commerce for most townships. Land utilization reflected the domestic nature of the economy. It was very sparsely used despite the large amount that was available for cultivation. Although yeomen often had fifty or more acres of land, generally only a fifth to a tenth was actually put to pasture and food cultivation, and usually only for the family and its livestock. Women were engaged in caring for the home, child rearing, making homespun clothing, and other family and farm chores; men, in the also arduous tasks of farming, woodcutting, and construction. Diversified crop cultivation is evidence of efforts to meet domestic more than market needs.

If anything, this yeomanry seems to have viewed commerce disdainfully, indeed as parasitic and demeaning to a productive and spiritually oriented way of life. In the words of the Bostonian, George Richards Minot, writing in the 1780s, yeoman-landed property “had always been held in higher esteem and more valuable nature than any personal estate.” Indeed, its “possession ... seems to be of greater gratification to the pride and independence of men.”{88} This image of agriculture, divested of acquisitive and commercial ends, provided the New England farmer with a sense of personal and ethical autonomy that made him eschew the word “farmer” or “peasant” for “yeoman” or “husbandman,” an example of the way in which men think of themselves that was to profoundly alter their behavior and the course of history.

Yet as David P. Szatmary points out, “a feeling of independence did not necessarily lead to individualism. Although priding themselves on their autonomy, yeomen lived in a community-oriented culture. To ease their backbreaking work during planting and harvesting, they asked family and friends for help. The independent status of yeomen, then, resulted neither from self-s uffi ciency nor a basically competitive system but led, rather, to cooperative, community-oriented interchanges.”{89} More concretely, this communal orientation brought women directly into food cultivation and enhanced their social status, all talk of Puritan “patriarchy” to the contrary notwithstanding. The enormous respect—and troubled concern—that made dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson the center of religious and political controversy in the early years of the colony attest to the forwardness of women in this society and their enormous strength of character.

Barter and the sharing of resources reinforced neighborliness and fostered a warmly hospitable openness to people, even to newcomers, as the Marquis de Chastellex was to observe in his tour of New England during the early 1780s. The all-encompassing egalitarianism that pervaded this yeoman world included even agricultural laborers, a mere ten percent of the rural workforce, who usually owned some land in their own right or were given land in reward for their services. New England did not really have a rural proletariat Indeed, disparities in wealth were too insignificant to give rise to a stable class society.

Out of this world emerged the town meeting, a direct democracy in which local and, in times of social unrest, broadly political issues were fervently debated and resolved. Here, in contrast to Swiss democracy, attempts to trace the New England town meeting back to Germanic tribal traditions may well be examples of historical overkill. The immediate source of the town meeting lies very much at hand. Puritans were mainly Congregationalists, a form of Protestantism that denies by definition the need for any ecclesiastical hierarchy or centralizing body. In this utterly anarchic conception of Christianity, all powers of religious interpretation belong to the local congregation, which is mystically united to others of the same kind by the presence of Christ, a spiritual metaphor rather than an institution. This radically decentralistic interpretation of the community as an autonomous congregation can easily extend outward into the civil, world in the form of an equally autonomous political body, the town meeting. The periodic meeting of the entire male population of a community in order to govern its own affairs is a logical outcome of Puritan religious belief and forms of organization. Property and income restrictions on the right to participate in town meetings were not taken too seriously. Disparities in land ownership and the payment of taxes could have excluded only a small number of residents in most New England towns. In the more rural areas, these restrictions counted for virtually nothing. By the 1760s, when colonial unrest was to lead to outright revolution^ town meetings were so notoriously open that even newly arrived or transient residents could participate ih them. Historians who tend to tie property qualifications to New England’s franchise system have proven themselves to be sticklers for regulations that went unenforced two centuries ago or were essentially nonexistent.

The reaction to Charles I’s attempts to place localities under centralized control and weaken local militias heightened the sensitivity of the New England towns to their autonomy and right to bear arms. It is contemporary libel regarding the role of an armed people to invoke the insecurities of the American frontier as an excuse to ban arms ih the more “stable” and, presumably, more “secure” society of our own day. By the late eighteenth century, the New England states were largely free of Indian attacks. The prevalent notion of a covenanted township and a covenanted militia had very little to do with personal safety. The yeomen of New England were not so much in fear of Indian forays against their persons as they were concerned with statist forays, against their liberties. In one of the most radical state constitutions to be adopted during the American Revolution, Vermont yeomen, gathering at Windsor in July 1777, not only abolished slavery and property qualifications for the franchise, they also avowed that “as standing armies, in the time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.” Accordingly, “the people have a right to bear arms for a defense of themselves and the State,” a right that explicitly goes far, beyond the reticent wording of ‘the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. These, sentiments reflected the yeomanry’s state of mind two-hundred years ago. They had nothing to do with the West’s “gun slinging” and its bullying machismo. Rather they expressed the sound conviction that the state cannot be trusted to claim a monopoly of violence over its citizenry and the full custody of public freedom. Democracy, if it was to mean anything, presupposed the active involvement of the citizen in developing a participatory politics, public security, and the direct face-to-face resolution of community problems. Hacking the means and instruments, particularly the weapons, to enforce its decisions, such a citizenry in the eyes of the yeomanry would be reduced to a mere instrument of the state, whose legitimacy in their eyes was extremely dubious.

The township formed the living repository of institutions such as the town meeting and the militia. “When the eighteenth-century Yankee reflected on government,” observes Robert A. Gross, “he thought first of his town. Through town meetings, he elected his officials, voted his taxes, and provided for the well-ordering of community affairs. The main business of the town concerned roads and bridges, schools, and the poor—the staples of local government even today. But the colonial New England town claimed authority over anything that happened within its borders. It hired a minister to preach in the town-built meetinghouse and compelled attendance at his sermons. It controlled public uses of private property, from the location of slaughterhouses and tanneries to the quality of bread sold at market. And it gave equal care to the moral conduct of its inhabitants ... No issue was in theory exempt from a town’s action, even if in practice the provincial government occasionally intervened in local disputes and told the inhabitants how to run their lives.”{90}

Not surprisingly, the town meeting in even more secular form swept out of New England during the Revolution and was to extend as far south as Charleston. With the end of the Revolution itself, municipal “counterrevolutions” (to use the language of the historians) essentially pushed it back to the region of its origin and replaced municipal assemblies with mayors and aldermanic councils. New England and a number of towns bordering the region tenaciously, even defiantly, held on to their democratic municipal institutions, at least in the smaller towns and villages.

The “Founding Fathers” who fashioned the national constitution of 1788 created a fairly centralized republic, but they were also obliged to tolerate a basically confederal, face-to-face municipal democracy within their instrument of government and a fairly radical “Bill of Rights” that had been foisted upon them by a restless yeomanry. The United States Constitution, in effect, expresses a precarious compromise between demands for a municipal democracy and a centralized nation-state. Running at cross purposes throughout the document and the quasilegal “Declaration of Independence” are agrarian, precapitalist commitments to freedom, a participatory politics, and an involved citizenry on the one hand, and a distinctly capitalistic imagery of acquisitive individualism favored by the rising commercial elements in the port cities and inland market towns of the new nation.

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Having examined the yeoman world of New England in the eighteenth century, our account would be incomplete if we failed to look at the urban commercial world that coexisted with it. It was in this world that the seeds of urbanization were already planted. Port cities and inland market towns of New England “lived in a largely commercial culture,” notes Szatmary, “The market-oriented way of life included the drive toward acquisition and accumulation and emphasized the individual over the community. Merchants, shopkeepers, professionals, commercial farmers, urban artisans, sailors, and fishermen formed the most important economic groups in this society. New England merchants, residing in large port towns such as Boston, Newport, and Providence, dominated and represented the most successful sector in the commercial culture. Handling and transporting farm goods, manufactured commodities, and, at times, human cargoes, they primarily sought personal wealth. Such middlemen, although they worked at as lower pace than modern industrialists, had the accumulation of money as their primary goal.”{91}

Commerce and acquisitiveness, as I have emphasized, are not new to the precapitalist world. What makes the merchant stratum unique in the modern social landscape is that it funneled its earnings into its various enterprises and sought unceasingly to expand them—partly as a response to the intense competition that existed in new markets, partly in an effort to gain control of home markets. This difference between an acquisitive and expanding market economy on the one hand and precapitalist markets that were not nearly as accumulative on the other is important. The yeomanry outside the cities bartered produce to meet its basic survival needs. The merchants within the city exchanged goods to expand and absorb rivals. The simple commodity markets of the village, even of many medieval communes, encountered cultural constraints to growth that placed socially accepted moral limits on the acquisition of wealth. Gilds and public opinion enforced these limits hand-in-hand with religious precepts. Acquisition seemed demonic rather than elevating. Hence trade could be held in check and a mixed economy developed that maintained its integrity against the corrosive, homogenizing effects of an uncontrolled market economy.

By contrast, the rising capitalists of the eighteenth century in their port and inland commercial towns removed virtually all of these moral, public, and religious constraints to acquisition and expansion. Even land, once the refuge of the ancient capitalists from a life devoted to commerce, became a mere commodity so that its acquisition in the eighteenth century, particularly in the “New World,” conferred no special status on the new merchant stratum.‘The Ohio Land Company, a speculative enterprise formed in the late 1780s by New England and New York merchants, did not intend to cultivate any of the vast territories it acquired on the western frontier. Its goal was “to profit from their purchases through quick sales to incoming settlers.”{92} As one Boston lawyer put it in 1785: “Money is the only object attended to, and the only acquisition that commands respect.”{93}

This monetary and speculative mentality, while not unprecedented historically, is unique when it acquires such complete centrality! What is significant here is that moneymaking became an ethic such that prestige, personal integrity, indeed social status depend upon the acquisition of capital, not upon the ownership of land and the acquisition of titles. By the eighteenth century, the new republican ethos of the cities was altered such that it placed a high premium on the accumulation of money and the means for making money, not on social position and. high living. The aristocratic values that had permeated merchant strata from time immemorial were replaced by acquisitive values, egoism, and a brutalizing appetite for profit. In such a highly acquisitive and competitive economy, the virtues of community were subordinated to the value-of personal gain and capital expansion.

From an ethical association for mutual support community was turned into an entrepreneurial nexus for competition and manipulation. This sweeping inversion of the very meaning of consociation and friendship has no precedent in human history. Whatever else the seafaring warriors of the Bronze Age did during their acts of brigandage or the merchants of the classical and feudal eras did in their forays abroad, their own communities were seen as refuges from their predations, and they made lavish contributions to civic beautification! The new merchant and particularly the industrialist who followed, began to view his own community as an object of predation and often plundered it ruthlessly. This behavior, graduated to the level of the “business ethic,” began to supplant the religious precepts and cultural values that had been passed on from time immemorial, even to earlier merchants and entrepreneurs. Herein lay its enormous power: the ability to replace one set of ethical ideals with another, in short, to make gain itself a value that could be used to countervail and ultimately overcome all traditional constraints to asociality and predation. Enveloping this distinctly antisocial form of individualism was a new ideological support system: laws that gave an almost religious sanction to contracts irrespective of their content and clerics who legitimated gain as a heavenly calling. The courtierlike profligacy and extravagance of French merchants and, the passion for titles’ that existed among English merchants, were dissolved by American merchants into an ethos of prudence, simple living, and the embellishment of gain with the myth of “republican virtue.”

Let it be noted that this ethos did not roll over the new American republic like a moral tidal wave. Most of the country still adhered to yeoman values, albeit in a less communitarian form than we still find among rural New England Yankees, Southern plantation owners still held to aristocratic values that placed a higher premium on consumption than acquisition. To spend one’s substance in a grand fashion was the sign of a gentleman, in contrast to the craven acquisitiveness of the New England merchant. On the frontier, material self-sufficiency and personal autonomy were still ends in themselves, and the acquisition of wealth that sent so many adventurers to the West in pursuit of gold originated more in visions of luxurious living than capital expansion. It was not until the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War that American capitalism, seen as a system of growth for its own sake, began to hypostasize all of these acquisitive values and steadily destructure earlier institutional, ethical, and personal ideals.

Urbanization became the physical expression of this destructuring process, the way in which it assumed visibility. I speak here of the industrial, commercial, and residential sprawl that we call urban belts. Already early in the twentieth century cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and, in Europe, London, Manchester, Berlin, even Paris began to absorb adjacent towns and cancerously afflict the landscape with overbuilt, densely populated, and overextended structures. The new electric trolley systems that networked communities within regions supplemented the railroads that networked regions into nation-states. Vast areas of the western world, once relatively impenetrable to the deadening effects of capitalistic forms of urbanism, were ruthlessly opened to exploitation and homogenization. By the 1920s, the automobile became the vehicle of choice for expanding suburban development and for subverting the remaining distinctions between town and country that were so vital for maintaining the identity of both. The famous “antagonism between town and country,” so celebrated by historians as a driving force in social development, had produced much of the political and cultural variety we associate with the mixed economy preceding modern capitalism and energized the movements that gave us modern concepts of democracy. The tension between rural and urban society and the diversity it created as people moved between both worlds accounts in very great part for the fecundity of social life in the past. The 1930s, perhaps mercifully, arrested urban homogenization and reinforced agrarian values that had nourished the democratic images of the yeomanry and artisans. Placed in the urban context of the decade, this remarkable marriage of countryside and town had produced a vitally creative hybridization of outlooks from which the Depression years gained so rich a sense of humanism and social commitment.

The end of the Second World War—notwithstanding the 1960s decade—revived the trends initiated by the twentieth century. The acquisitive individualism that existed on a pocket-size scale in American society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ballooned out over the entire country. Today it constitutes a social malignancy, more properly a cancer of society that threatens to destructure and undermine not only the social bond but the natural world. Its primary effect is simplification, the unraveling of all social ties into the loose threads of the marketplace with its anonymous buyers and sellers, its objectification of all values, its monetization of ideals—and its unrelenting “growth,” which takes the demonic form of turning everything organic into the inorganic, ossifying community and individual alike. That it may yield a society divested of all cultural variety, a human psyche divested of all uniqueness, and a natural world divested of all diversity is the hidden intuition of our times for which nuclear immolation and the wasteland it may yield is as much a metaphor for our times as it is a potential reality. Politics and citizenship are not only the victims of this corrosive process. It may well be that they are also the antidote for it—provided, to be sure, that we can reconstruct them in ways that are redolent of their classical meaning and enlarged by what we can learn from the modern world.

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Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not because of the confusion that surrounds the two words.

Politics is not statecraft, which, alas, is what we ordinarily mean when we speak of “politics” today. And citizens are not “constituents” or “voters.” Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, its governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies, police forces, bureaucracies, and the ancillary professionals who service its operations such as lawyers, educators, technicians, and the like. Statecraft takes on a political patina when so-called “political” parties attempt, in various power plays, to occupy the offices that make state policy and execute it. This kind of “politics” has an almost tedious typicality. A political “party” is normally a highly structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some countries, notably modern Russia, actually constitutes the state itself.

The Soviet example of the state qua party is simply the logical extension of the party into the state if only because every party has its roots in the state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to the state like a garment on a clothing hook. However varied the garment and its design may be, it is not part of the body politic; it merely clothes it. There is nothing authentically political about this phenomenon: it is meant precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it, not to express its will—or even permit it to develop a will. In no sense is a conventional “political” party derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. Leaving metaphors aside, “political” parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and often synonomous with the state when they are in power. They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus they are as inorganic as the state itself—an excrescence of society that has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power, and mobilization.

Politics, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon. It is organic in the very real sense that it is the activity of a public body—a community, if you will—just as a plant is rooted in and nourished by soil. Politics, conceived as an activity, involves rational discourse, public empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and its realization in a shared, indeed participatory, activity. It is the sphere of societal life beyond the family and the personal needs of the individual that still retains the intimacy, involvement, and sense of responsibility that is enjoyed in private arenas of life. Groups may form to advance specific political views and programs, but these views and programs are no better than their capacity to answer to the needs of an active public body. A clear failing of many “political” parties is the fact that their programs or “ideologies” are imposed on the public by individuals or their acolytes whose relationship to the community is tenuous and largely conceptual: One thinks here of the insights of a Karl Marx whose ideas were developed within the confines of the British Museum and then foisted on the world with a scriptural authority that still generates an endless stream of academic dissertations even though they exercise virtually no influence in public life. By contrast, political movements, in the authentic sense of the word, emerge out of the body politic itself, and their programs are formulated not only by theorists, invaluable as they may be, but in great part by the public itself, which plays a participatory role in their elucidation and dissemination. The populist movements that swept out of agrarian America and Czarist Russia or the anarchosyndicalist and peasant movements of Spain and Mexico—all, despite their ideological patina, emerged from the populace and articulated their deepest social and political aspirations. They developed into political cultures that solidified completely into the body politic.

Social theorists seem to lack a sufficient awareness of the public’s power to create its own political institutions and forms of organization. Twentieth-century popular uprisings such as the Russian, German, Spanish, and, most recently, the Hungarian revolutions witnessed the widespread self-organization of the people into councils (some that were networked into regional and national congresses), popular assemblies in a wide variety of areas, and autonomous municipalities—often without party leadership. The notion, so common across the political spectrum, that a party structured along conventional hierarchical lines and guided by a commanding leadership is indispensable to political change is, in fact, thoroughly belied by experience.

Robert Michels, despite his jaundiced view of the “competence” of the “masses” in Political Parties and his proclivity for charismatic leaders, provides a compelling argument for the inertial effect of conventional political parties in periods of rapid social change. They tend to take over institutions that the people create rather than innovate them, indeed, ultimately reworking them along statist lines.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917–21 is a textbook example of the appropriation of a popular movement by a highly centralized party. The revolution ended, in the evisceration of an elaborate grass-roots council system (the Soviets) by a state-oriented party and the complete divestiture of all power that the populace had so painstakingly acquired. A new state apparatus was largely embodied in the Bolshevik party. By the 1920s in Russia, statecraft had completely replaced politics, and constituents—more properly, subjects—had replaced citizens. The Russian Bolsheviks had introduced a new wrinkle in the concept of a constituent, Deprived even of the status of “voters” and any representation in the state, the Russian people were turned by Bolshevism into a “mass.” Bolshevism, in effect, established a pattern for “mass mobilization” that was to be emulated and used with socially disastrous effects by National Socialism in Germany.

The recovery and development of politics must, I submit, take its point of departure from the citizen and’his or her immediate environment beyond the familial and private arenas of life. There can be no politics without community. And by community! mean a municipal association of people reinforced by its own economic power, its own institutionalization of the grass roots, and the confederal support of nearby communities organized into a territorial network on a local and regional scale. Parties that do not intertwine with these grass-roots forms of popular organization are not political in the classical sense of the term. In fact, they are bureaucratic and antithetical to the development of a participatory politics and participating citizens. The authentic unit of political life, in effect, is the municipality, whether as a whole, if it is humanly scaled, or as its various subdivisions, notably the neighborhood.

Nor can politics be structured around the delegation of power. The words “representative democracy,” taken literally, are a contradiction in terms. Democracy, conceived as the “rule by the people” is totally inconsistent with the more republican vision of “rule by representatives” of the people. It is historical cliche to emphasize that the authors of the United States Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation in the 1780s, meant that they and their social strata were the “People” in the opening sentence of the document. The Constitution did not create a democracy along Hellenic lines; it created a republic along Roman lines. And like the Roman Republic it unavoidably and reluctantly incorporated inherited democratic institutions such as popular assemblies, which the brothers Gracchi tried to radically expand—an endeavor that ended in tragic failure.

All statist objections aside, the problem of restoring municipal assemblies seems formidable if it is cast in strictly structural and administrative forms. New York City has no way of “assembling” if it tries to emulate Athens with its comparatively small citizen body. New York City, in fact, is no longer a city in the classical sense of the term and hardly rates as a municipality even by nineteenth-century standards of urbanism. The “city” is a sprawling urban belt that sucks up millions of people daily from communities at a substantial distance from its commercial center. But New York City is made up of neighborhoods—that is to say, largely organic communities that have a certain measure of identity, whether they are defined by a shared cultural heritage, economic interests, a commonality of social views, or even an esthetic tradition such as in Greenwich Village. However much its administration as a logistical, sanitary, and commercial artifact requires a high degree of coordination by experts and their aides, it is quite open to political decentralization. Popular, even block, assemblies can be formed irrespective of the size of a city, provided its organic cultural components can be identified and their uniqueness fostered. Discussions about the “optimal” size of such components, while interesting to statistically minded sociologists, are politically irrelevant.

Assemblies can be formed from populations that may consist of anywhere from a typical residential block to a dozen or more. They can be coordinated by strictly mandated delegates who are rotatable, recallable, and, above all, rigorously instructed in written form to support or oppose any issue that appears on the agenda of local confederal councils composed of delegates from several neighborhood assemblies. There is no mystery involved in this form of organization. The historical evidence of their efficacy and their continual reappearance in times of rapid social change is considerable and persuasive. The Parisian sections of 1793, despite the size of Paris (between 700,000 and a million) and the logistical difficulties of the era (a time when nothing moved faster than a horse) functioned with a great deal of success on their own, coordinated by sectional delegates in the Paris Commune. They are notable not only for their effectiveness in dealing with political issues based on a face-to-face democratic structure; they also played a major role in provisioning the city, in preventing the hoarding of food, and in suppressing speculation, supervising the maximum for fixed prices, and many other complex administrative tasks. No city, in fact, is so large that it cannot be networked by popular assemblies for political purposes. The real difficulty is largely administrative: how to provide for the material amenities of city life, support their immense logistical and traffic burdens, or maintain a sanitary environment.

This issue is often obscured by a serious confusion between the formulation of policy and its administration. For a community to decide in a participatory manner what course of action it should take in dealing with a problem does not oblige all its citizens to execute that policy—unless, to be sure, there are obvious forms of behavior that involve everyone in the community. The decision to build a road, for example, does not mean that everyone must know how to design and construct one. That is a job for engineers, who can offer alternative designs—a very important political function of experts, to be sure, but one that the people in assembly can be free to decide. But to design and construct a road is a strictly administrative responsibility. To debate and decide the need for a road, including the choice of its site and the suitability of its design, is a political process. If the distinction between policy making and administration is kept clearly in mind, the role of popular assemblies and the people who administer their decisions easily unscrambles logistical problems from political ones, both of which are normally entangled with each other in discussions on decentralistic politics based on municipalities and assemblies. Superficially, the assembly system is a “referendum” form of politics: it is based on a “social contract” to share decision making with the population at large and abide by the rule of the majority in dealing with problems that confront a municipality, a regional confederation of municipalities, or, for that matter, a national entity.

Why, then, is there reason to emphasize the assembly form as crucial to self-governance? Is it not enough to use the referendum, as the Swiss profess to do today, and resolve the problem of democratic procedure in a simple and seemingly uncomplicated way?

A number of vital issues, involving the nature of citizenship and the recovery of an enhanced classical vision of politics, must be considered in answering these questions. The autonomous individual qua “voter” who forms the social unit of the referendum process in liberal theory is a fiction—whether in seemingly democratic notions at one extreme or a totalitarian politics of mass mobilization at the other. The individual, left to his or her own destiny in the name of autonomy and independence, becomes a seemingly asocial being whose very freedom is denuded of vital traits that provide the necessary flesh and blood for genuine individuality. Indeed, “individuality is impaired when each man decides to shift for himself,” observes Max Horkheimer in a pithy critique of personalistic atomism. “... as the ordinary man withdraws, from participation in political affairs, society tends to revert to the law of the jungle, which crushes all vestiges of individuality. The absolutely isolated individual has always been an illusion. The most esteemed personal qualities, such as independence, will to freedom, sympathy, and the sense of justice, are social as well as individual virtues. The fully developed individual is the consummation of a fully developed society. The emancipation of the individual is not an emancipation from society, but the deliverance of society from atomization, an atomization that may reach its peak in periods of collectivization and mass culture.”{94}

One can take these observation still further. The dependent individual violates the justifiably high premium we place on autonomy, will, control of one’s destiny, and untrammeled assertion of ideas. In liberal society, this has led to a mythic “individualism” that in popular parlance is presumably “rugged”—that is to say, totally “independent” and “self-seeking.” “Rugged individualism” is as little a desideratum as dependence, which we normally associate with an inadequate formation of selfhood. The real anthropology of our species involves the prolonged dependence of the infant and young on elders, a socialization process that, until recent times, ultimately led to a deep sense of interdependence in adulthood, riot a brash sense of “independence.” The notion of “independence,” which is often confused with independentthinking and autonomy of behavior, has been so marbled by pure bourgeois egoism that we tend to forget that our freedom as individuals depends heavily on community support systems arid solidarity. It is not by childishly subordinating ourselves to the community on the one hand or by detaching ourselves from it on the other that we become authentically human. What distinguishes us as social beings, hopefully with rational institutions, from solitary beings, presumably with minimal or no institutions, are our capacities for solidarity with each other, for mutually enhancing our self-developnient and creativity and attaining freedom within a socially creative and institutionally rich collectivity.

“Citizenship” apart from community is as debasing to our political selfhood as “citizenship” within a totalitarian community. In both cases, We, are thrust back to the state of dependency that characterizes our infancy and renders us dangerously vulnerable to manipulation, whether by powerful personalities in private fife or the state and corporations in public life. In neither case do we attain individuality or community. Both, in fact, are dissolved by removing the communal ground on which authentic individuality depends. Rather, it is interdependence within an institutionally rich and rounded community that fleshes out the individual with the rationality, solidarity, sense of justice, and, ultimately, the reality of freedom that makes for a creative arid caring citizen.

Paradoxical as it may seem; the authentic elements of a rational and free society are communal ones, not individual bnes. Conceived in more institutional terms, the municipality is the basis for a free society, the irreducible ground for individuality as well as society. The significance, of the’municipality is all the greater because it constitutes the discursive arena in which people can intellectually and emotionally confront each other, indeed, experience each other through dialogue, body language, personal intimacy, and face-to-face modes of expression in the course of making collective decisions. I speak, here, of the all-important process of communizing, of the on-going intercourse of many levels of fife, that makes for solidarity, not only the “neighborliness,” so indispensable for truly organic interpersonal relationships. The referendum, conducted in the privacy of one’s voting booth or, as some “Third Wave” enthusiasts would have it, in the electronic isolation of one’s home privatizes democracy and thereby subverts it. Voting, like registering one’s “preferences” for soap and detergents in opinion polls, is the total quantification of citizenship, politics, individuality, and the very formation of ideas as a mutually informative process. The mere vote reflects a preformulated “percentage” of our perceptions and values, not their full expression. It is the technical debasing of views into mere preferences, of ideals into mere taste, of overall comprehension into quantification such that human aspirations and beliefs can be reduced to numerical digits.

Finally, the “autonomous individual,” lacking any community context, support systems, and organic intercourse, is disengaged from the character-building process—the paideia—that the Athenians assigned to politics as one of its most important educational functions. True citizenship and politics entail the on-going formation of personality, education, a growing sense of public responsibility and commitment that render communing and an active body politic meaningful, indeed that give it existential substance. It is not in the privacy of the school, any more than in the privacy of the voting booth, that these vital personal and political attributes are formed. They require the existence of a public presence, embodied by vocal and thinking individuals, a responsive and discursive public sphere, to achieve reality. “Patriotism,” as the origin of the word indicates, is the nation-state’s conception of the citizen as a child, the obedient creature of the nation conceived as a paterfamilias or stern father, who orchestrates belief and commands devotion. To the extent that we are the “sons” and “daughters” of a “fatherland,” we place ourselves in a mindless, indeed infantile, relationship to the state.

Loyalty, by contrast, implies a sense of commitment to a human community that is guided by knowledge, training, experience, and a sense of caring—in short, by a political education created in the course of political participation, not by institutional obedience. The Greek term, philia, ordinarily translated as “friendship,” but which I prefer to call “solidarity,” is the ultimate result of the educational and self-formative process that paideia was meant to achieve. In the absence of a humanly scaled, comprehensible, and institutionally accessible municipality, this all-important function of politics and its embodiment in citizenship is simply impossible to achieve. Indeed, it ceases to even enter into contemporary notions of “politics” and “citizenship.” Accordingly, we begin to gauge “political involvement” by the “percentage” of “voters” who “participate” in the “political process”—a degradation of words that totally denatures their authentic meaning and eviscerates their ethical content. If the class-oriented politics in the past was ultimately a civic politics, individual politics today is ultimately a municipal politics. In both cases, I use the term “politics” to denote not only the direct self-management of the polis or community by its citizens but the educational process of forging a self that is capable of the self-management of the municipality.

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There are many questions that arise when one tries to develop a new municipal agenda today, and many possibilities, I may add, that open the way to a new, richly imaginative politics as well as a traditional conception of citizenship as participatory, educative, and community oriented.

In an era of growing power in nation-states and corporations, when administration, property ownership, production, bureaucracies, and the flow of capital as well as power are notoriously centralized, how can we invoke a localist, municipally oriented society without seeming to be starry-eyed visionaries? Is this municipalist, decentralist, and participatory vision of self-governance and selfhood utterly incompatible with the overwhelming trend toward public massification? Does the notion of clearly definable, humanly scaled communities not seem to be redolent of atavistic, backward-looking parochial ideas of a premodern world, indeed of the “folk community” (Volksgemeinschaft) advocated by German Nazism? Do its advocates, specifically this writer, wish to undo the technological gains achieved by the several industrial revolutions that followed the first one, two centuries ago? Can a “modern society” be governed any longer by local groups in an era when centralized power is presumably “here to stay”?

To these largely theoretical questions, I can add a host of very practical ones. How will politically localized citizens’ assemblies be coordinated to deal with the practical questions of such simple facts as rail transportation, road maintenance, the supply of resources and foodstuffs, from distant or select regions? How can we readapt an economy based on the business ethic (including its plebeian counterpart, the “work ethic”) to one that is guided by an ethics of self-fulfillment and self-realization in productive activity? How can we change present-day instruments of government such as national constitutions and city charters to reflect a system of self-governance based on municipal autonomy? How can we restructure a profit-oriented market economy, reinforced by a centralists technology, into a humanly oriented moral economy, reinforced by an alternative decentralis,tic technology? Finally, how can all of these visions be brought into accord with an ecological society that seeks a harmonious, indeed participatory, relationship with the natural world, free of social hierarchy,’ class and gender domination, and cultural homogeneity?

This work, let me emphasize, is not a handbook for social recipes that meet the taste of every palate. To make it so—and more than enough books exist that profess to do so is to subvert the very meaning of the libertarian municipal project it seeks to advance. In the last analysis, these pages are an effort to apply the principles of social ecology to ah interpretation of the present and to a past that really is always with us, informed by a deep concern for the contours of a liberatory and ecological future society. To provide a detailed institutional and economic map of what such a future society should or “must” look like is to use a seemingly ecological interpretation of the future against one of the most fundamental precepts of social ecology: unity in diversity. The ecological belief that every human community, indeed every individual—not to speak of every natural ecocommunity is deliciously unique permeates this book from its opening lines to those that close it. Detailed recipes that profess to resolve every problem that every decentralized human community will face—and should creatively face, given its uniqueness and specificity—is to cut across the grain of all the ecological ideas that give coherence to this book. It is to assume precisely what social ecology emphatically denies: namely, that all our social problems are so universal, indeed so “global” (to use the pop vernacular of environmentalism today), that we have no need to “act locally.” Localism, taken seriously, implies a sensitivity to specialty, particularity, and the uniqueness of place, indeed a sense of place or topos that involves deep respect (indeed “loyalty,” if I may use a term that I would like to offset against “patriotism”) to the areas in which we live and that are given to us in great part by the natural world itself.

Once this is emphasized, there are still broad answers that can be advanced to the questions I have raised, particularly to those that have a highly polemical character. In trying to answer these questions, I presuppose a thorough understanding of the essential principles raised in this book: not only is politics to be sharply distinguished from statecraft, but policy making is to be distinguished from administration; not only is “rugged individualism” to be’ distinguished from authentic individuality, but the notion of the isolated individual is to be distinguished from the rounded individual who is rooted in a rounded community; not only is independence to be distinguished from dependence, but authentic independence is indistinguishable from interdependence.

These caveats cannot be restated often enough. The notion that decentralized communities are premodern, indeed antimodern, “atavisms” reflects an almost willful failure to recognize that an organic community is not necessarily an “Organism” in which the individual parts are subordinated to the collective whole. That such highly bourgeois prejudices should be echoed by socialists and liberals alike reflects a very clouded view of individualism that confuses individuality with egoism. Our market society, riddled by its preoccupation with objects called “commodities” and its gross monetization of all aspects of life, has never produced authentic individuality, unless one chooses to mistake buccaneering industrial and commercial predators for authentic personalities. While any attempt to fashion an ecological society out of free, autonomous, and organic communities—organic no less in their respect for land, flora, and fauna than in their attempts to foster human solidarity and social support systems—always risks the possibility of becoming a “folk community” in the parochial, even fascistic, sense of the term, they also open the possibility of producing a highly fecund terrain for promoting the development of deeply individuated and richly creative personalities. Ironically, Nazism, for all its bombast about the desirability of a German Volksgemeinschaft, opportunistically surrendered the utopian content of this popular yearning for a sense of place and community to a leadership principle” that totally subordinated localism to centralism, community to nationalism, technical conservatism to industrial innovation, particularly in the design of weapons and methods of political surveillance. The academic frippery that clothes the hard realities of Nazism with myths that it patently discarded is almost textbook evidence of the yawning separation of campus scholasticism from the real world beyond its confines.

There is nothing that is either “backward looking” or “forward looking” about humanity’s effort to find community together with individuality. The impulse to achieve these complementary aims—especially in times like our own, when both of them are faced with sweeping disintegration—is an abiding human goal that has been expressed as much in religion as in secular radicalism, in utopian experiments as in city neighborhoods, in self-enclosed ethnic groups as in expansive cosmopolitan cities. Nothing but a feeling for truth and its custody by the human mind has ever kept any notion of community and individuality from tipping over into spiteful parochialism at one extreme or fragmented atomism at the other.

The result is that consciousness—not pat formulas—ultimately determine whether humanity will achieve a rich sense of collectivity without sacrificing a rich sense of individuality. A creative politics without a creative citizenry is as unattainable as a creative citizenry without a creative politics. The guarded mind, whether we call it “class consciousness” or “social consciousness,” is the sole guarantor of a social and personal life that will be guided by the thin line of truth. The tendency of radicals and liberals who emphasize abstractions such as “class” and “social” over the more existential need for consciousness is the true “betrayal of the intellectuals” that was mourned in earlier times. Any expectation that a formula, even a salad of democratic institutions, will in itself rescue us from any impulses that yield totalitarianism, whether in its “futuristic” or atavistic forms, is sheer myth. The guarded mind, informed by knowledge and a humane sense of solidarity, is all that we possess as a fortress against authoritarian “reversion” at one extreme and authoritarian “progress” at the other. Indeed the “dark past” has become the counterpart of the “dark future” in an age that seeks form rather than content to guide us through its modern dilemmas and panaceas.

Paradoxical as it seems and dialectically irascible as it may be, the conflict—more precisely, the tension—that exists between a localistic vision and a nationalistic reality is the most important basis for a new politics that we can redeem from the present crisis for which “urbanization” is a metaphor. The growing power and centralization of the state and its corporate underpinnings are not necessarily the harbingers of victory over the municipality. It may well be that they are the harbingers of a deepening social crisis that may give new vitality to municipal politics and alter the very shape of politics itself. One does not have to be a visionary (apparently, a pejorative term, these days) to see that every human impulse is now being affronted by the disempowerment of ordinary people in everyday life. Locked increasingly into an inward world in which society and collectivity are excluded, transclass desires seem to be slowly welling up in countless individuals who are seeking the open air of a meaningful public life, not to speak of a more creative personal one. Like the tensions that gathered together in western society during the four centuries directly preceding the emergence of industrial capitalism, we are witnessing a new period of transition with deep-seated tensions that are emerging in our own era.

Localism, in fact, has never been so much in the air as it is today—all the more because centralism and corporatism have never seemed more overwhelming than they are today. The state and the corporations have “ghettoized” the western world, particularly North America, to such a suffocating extent that public sentiment threatens to overflow the barriers they have created and perhaps in time to burst them. Demands for local control and attempts to redefine democracy along ever-expansive lines are yielding a multitude of interest groups and citizen-initiative committees. Demands for local control and redefinitions of democracy that are normally preceded by such adjectives as “grass-roots” are yielding a multitude of various local associations, “alliances,” and block committees that stress local control as well as economic justice. “Socialist” mayors have been elected in several American communities for the first time since the 1930s. The town meeting, initially a New England institution, is becoming a byword in regions of the United States that have no shared tradition with the, American Northeast. Community and action groups have invaded local politics, a terrain that was once the exclusive preserve of political parties, on a scale that has significantly altered the entire landscape of municipal policy making.

That these grass-roots organizations are often ephemeral or co-optable does not alter the fact that the underlying ferment at the base of American society is vitalized precisely by the fact that the centralized state has made the most elementary hmnan demands for self-expression and self-empowerment highly problematical, a fact that may well change the entire texture of American politics. The tension between vision and reality is no less a creative force than it was in times past, particularly in periods of social and economic transition.

Put bluntly, a latent “dual power” seems to be emerging today in which, the local base of society is beginning to challenge the authority of its seemingly invulnerable state and corporate apex. It. is precisely the inaccessibility of this apex to grass-roots influence that threatens to disintegrate the very architecture of power as such. The fact that public control over public fife has never seemed more visionary is precisely what makes the demands for such control particularly compelling, just as intractable resistance by power tends to foster opposition rather than mute it. Almost intuitively, people seem to be molding their own institutions for expression in the public realm with an obstinacy that may well render localist politics an irrepressible force. The very ephemeral nature of many such grass-roots institutions and organizations is evidence less of failure than of persistence. I am no longer talking of the explosive episodes that marked the’ uprisings of the 1960s, such as those in black ghettos or antiwar street actions. Grass-roots politics, specifically popular municipal politics, is becoming an integral part of American politics as a whole, one that has yet to find a coherent voice and sense of direction. But the fact is that it is here to stay and has worked its way, however confusedly, into the real world of the political landscape.

In trying to formulate a municipal agenda for our time, the real question is how will this often formless political energy be institutionalized? What structures will it create that will turn it into a powerful force to countervail the growing power of the state and a centralized corporate economy? What kind of political culture can it create that will play a transformative role in an era of urban and governmental gigantism? And what kind of political economy can it fashion that will avoid the pitfalls of a property-oriented market economy on the one hand and a totalitarian nationalized economy on the other?

I do not profess to have answers to these questions that apply’ to all municipalities—nor, giyen their variety, would it be anything but presumptuous to provide them. But certain basic coordinates can be formulated that are integrally wedded to any conception of municipal freedom, certainly of a kind that is meant to recover a participatory idea of politics and a classical idea of citizenship.

The most important of these coordinates is the’revival of the citizens’ assembly, be it in the form of town meetings inhumanly scaled communities or neighborhood assemblies in large, even metropolitan urban entities. Such assemblies are not merely a historical legacy that belong to the archaeology of urbanism. A large portion of this book would be completely meaningless if the reader failed to see that in nearly all periods of social upheaval people have turned to assembly forms as a way of entering the doors of history and taking control of their destiny, If these assemblies seem remote, even archaic, when we stray back to ancient Mesopotamia and classical Greece, they become very close to our fives when we see them in revolutionary America and France, and even seem to make direct contact with us when we find them in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the post-World War II era. Apparently, we have something at work here that has a more abiding reality than the distant “age of cities,” which has since been supplanted by the “age of nation-states.” They seem to be speaking to something in the human spirit that demands systems of governance based on face-to-face! decision making, a personafistic as well as a participatory politics. It is as though the need for community and communing were not simply a social desideratum but an ethical one that emanates from the human spirit itself.

The second of these major coordinates is the need fpr the assemblies to “speak” to each other, literally, to confederate. Leagues of towns and cities, as I have argued earlier, have always surfaced, however, temporarily, as centripetal forms of municipal association. Calls for the creation of nationlike entities structured around confederations of municipalities go back to Greek times and range over history up to the Paris Commune, indeed into very recent times when the centralized nation-state threatens to become an overbearing force in local affairs. The concept of confederation is as old as the fact of municipal life itself. Initially more defensive than creative in character, it has provided us with extraordinary, indeed inspiring, examples of freedom within localities and in the relationships between localities. Even as a word, “confederation” implies a commitment to liberatory ways of associating that “nationalism,” with its jingoistic and totalitarian nuances has rarely possessed. It is notable that the first American constitution was deliberately called “the Articles of Confederation,” which, for all its limitations, was cynically and secretively replaced by a so-called “federal” Constitution, one that Hamilton and his supporters foisted on the American people as the next best alternative to a constitutional monarchy.

The third of the major coordinates for guiding us toward a municipal democracy is the need to create politics as a school for genuine citizenship. Ultimately, there is no civic “curriculum,” as it were, that can be a substitute for a living and creative political realm. But what we must clearly do in an era of commodification, rivalry, anomie, and egoism is formulate and consciously inculcate the values of humanism, cooperation, community, and public service in the everyday practice of civic fife, not only in our schools, religious institutions, and local societies. Grass-roots citizenship must go hand in hand with grass-roots politics. The Athenian polis, for all its many shortcomings, offers us remarkable examples of how its high sense of citizenship was reinforced not only by systematic education, but by the development of an etiquette of civic behavior and an artistic culture that adorned its ideals of civic service with the realities of civic practice. Deference to opponents in debates, the use of language to achieve consensus, on-going public discussion in the agora in which even the most prominent of the polis’s figures were expected to debate public issues with the least known, the use of wealth not only to meet personal needs but to adorn the polis itself (thus placing a high premium on the disaccumulation rather than the accumulation of wealth), a multitude of public festivals, dramas, and satires largely centered on civic affairs and the need to foster civic solidarity—all of these and many other aspects of Athens’s political culture created the civic loyalty and responsibility that made for actively involved citizens with a deep sense of civic mission.

The development of citizenship, in effect, must become an art, not merely an education—and creative art in the esthetic sense that appeals to the deeply human desire for self-expression in a meaningful spiritual community. It must be a personal art in which every citizen is fully aware of the fact that his or her community entrusts its destiny to his or her moral probity, loyalty, and rationality. The very essence of state power and statecraft today is that the “citizen” is an incompetent being, indeed infantile and normally untrustworthy, while the state is a disciplinary institution, not an avenue of self-expression. Even liberal theory, not to speak of Christian theology, justifies the existence of the state as a whip to keep its “naturally” irascible subjects in hand and correct their inherent “incompetence” by entrusting public affairs to professional politicians and bureaucratic institutions. For citizens to directly intervene in public affairs beyond obediently voting annually for preselected candidates and paying their taxes with a reasonable modicum of honesty has been regarded as a safety valve for public dissatisfaction at best and “anarchy” at worst.

The municipalist conception of citizenship assumes precisely the opposite. Every citizen is regarded as competent to participate directly in the “affairs of state,” indeed what is more important, encouraged to do so. Every means is provided, whether esthetic or institutional, to foster participation in full and see it as an educative and ethical process that turns the citizen’s latent competence into an actual reality. Social and political fife are consciously orchestrated to foster a profound sensitivity, indeed a real sense of caring for the adjudication of differences without denying the need for vigorous dispute when it is needed. Public service is seen as a uniquely human attribute, not a “gift” that a citizen confers on the community or an onerous task that he or she must fulfill. Cooperation and civic responsibility are seen as expressions of care, concern, and sociability, not as ordinances that the citizen is expected to honor in the breach and evade where he can do so.

Put bluntly and clearly, the municipality is seen as a theater in which life in its most meaningful public form is the plot, a political drama whose grandeur imparts nobility and grandeur to the citizenry that forms the cast. By contrast, our modern cities have become in large part agglomerations of bedroom apartments in which men and women spiritually wither away and their personalities are trivialized by the petty concerns of entertainment, consumption, and small talk.

The last and perhaps the most intractable of our coordinates is economic. Today, economic issues tend to center around “who owns what,” “who owns more than whom,” and, above all, how disparities in wealth are to be reconciled with a sense of civic commonality. Nearly all municipalities have been fragmented by differences in economic status, pitting poor, middle, and wealthy classes against each other often to the ruin of municipal freedom itself as the bloody history of Italy’s medieval and Renaissance cities so clearly demonstrates.

These problems have not disappeared in recent times. Indeed in many cases they are as severe as they have ever been. But what is unique about our own time—a fact so little understood by many liberals and radicals in North America and Europe—is that entirely new transclass issues have begun to emerge that concern environment, growth, transportation, cultural degradation, and the quality of urban life generally—issues that have been produced by urbanization, not by citification. Cutting across conflicting class interests are such transclass issues as the massive dangers of thermonuclear war, growing state authoritarianism, and, ultimately, global ecological breakdown. To an extent unparalleled in American history, an enormous variety of citizens’ groups have brought people of all class backgrounds into common projects around problems, often very local in character, that concern the destiny and welfare of their community as a whole.

Issues such as the siting of nuclear reactors or nuclear waste dumps, the dangers of acid rain, and the presence of toxic dumps, to cite only a few of the many problems that beleaguer innumerable American municipalities, have united an astdnishing variety of people into movements with shared concerns that render a ritualistic “class analysis” of their motives utterly irrelevant. No less remarkable in crossing traditional class, ethnic, and economic barriers is the emergence of feminism, a movement that sees the gender oppression that afflicts wealthy women, no less than poor, a matter of dignity and self-respect. Carried still further, the absorption of small communities by larger ones, of cities by urban belts, and urban belts by “standard metropolitan statistical areas” has given rise to militant demands for communal integrity and self-government, an issue that surmounts strictly class and economic interests. The literature on the emergence of these trans-class movements, once so secondary’ to internecine struggles within the cities of earlier times, is so immense that to merely list the sources would require a sizable volume.

I have given this brief overview of an emerging general social interest over old particularistic interests to demonstrate that a new politics is already coming into being—indeed one that is not only restructuring the political landscape on a municipal level but the economic landscape as well. The old debates between “private property” and “nationalized property,” between “individual ownership” and “public ownership,” are becoming threadbare. Not that these different kinds of ownership and the forms of exploitation they imply have disappeared; rather, they are being increase ingly overshadowed by new realities and concerns. “Private property?’’ in the traditional sense of the term, with its case for perpetuating the citizen as an economically self-sufficient and politically self-empowered individual, is fading away. It is disappearing not because “creeping socialism” is devouring the “free entrepreneur” but because “creeping corporatism” is devouring everyone—ironically, in the name of “free enterprise,” The economy of North America, like that of Europe and even Third World countries, is becoming either “corporatized” or “nationalized”—or to use the one term that embraces both, “bureaucratized.” The Greek ideal of the politically sovereign citizen who can make a rational judgment in public affairs because he is free from material need or clientage has been reduced to a mockery. The oligarchic character of economic life, whether in the “western bloc” of the “eastern,” threatens democracy such as it is—not only on a national level but also on a municipal level, where it still preserves a certain degree of intimacy and leeway.

We come here to a breakthrough approach to a municipalist economics that innovatively dissolves the mystical aura surrounding corporatized property and nationalized property, indeed workplace elitism and “workplace democracy.” I refer to the municipalization of property, not its corporatization or its nationalization. As for the workplace, I refer to more than “economic democracy” or “economic collectivization.” Rather, I refer to the substitution of public democracy for both of these traditional images of productive management and operations. Significantly, “economic democracy” in the workplace is no longer incompatible with corporatized or nationalized economy. Quite to the contrary: the effective use of “workers’ participation” in production, even the outright handing over of industrial operations to the workers who perform them, has become another form of time-studied, assembly-line rationalization, the systematic exploitation of labor by bringing labor itself into complicity with its own exploitation.

Many workers, in fact, would like to get away from their factories and find more creative types of work, not simply “participate” in their own misery. What “economic democracy” meant in its profoundest sense was free, “democratic” access to the means of life, the guarantee of freedom from material want, not simply the involvement of workers with onerous productive activities that we would do better to turn over to machines. It is a blatant bourgeois trick, in which many radicals unknowingly participate, that “economic democracy” has been reinterpreted to mean “employee ownership” or that “workplace democracy” has come to mean workers’ “participation” in industrial management rather than freedom from the tyranny of the factory, rationalized labor, and “planned production.”

A municipal politics, based on libertarian principles, scores a significant advance over all of these conceptions by calling for the municipalization of the economy—and its management by the community as part of a politics of self-management. Syndicalist demands for the “collectivization” of industry and “workers’ control” of individual industrial units are based on contractual relationships between all “collectivized” enterprises, thereby reprivatizing the economy and opening it to traditional forms of private property—whether collectively owned or not, while libertarian municipalism politicizes the economy and dissolves it into the civic domain. Neither factory nor land becomes a separate or potentially competitive unit within a seemingly communal collective. Nor do workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, professionals, and the like perpetuate their vocational identities as separate interests that exist apart from the citizen body in face-to-face assemblies. “Property” is integrated into the municipality as a material constituent of its free institutional framework, indeed as part of a larger whole that is controlled by the citizen body in assembly as citizens—not as “workers,” “farmers,” “professionals,” or any other vocationally oriented special-interest groups.

What is equally important, the famous “contradiction” or “antagonism” between town and country, so crucial in social theory and history, is transcended by the “township,” the traditional New England jurisdiction, in which an urban entity is the nucleus of its agricultural and village environs—not a domineering urban entity that stands opposed to them. A township, in effect, is a small region within still larger ones, such as the county and the bioregion.

So conceived, the municipalization of the economy should be distinguished not only from “corporatization” but also from seemingly more “radical” demands such as “nationalization” and “collectivization.” Nationalization of the economy invariably has led to bureaucratic and top-down economic control; collectivization, in turn, could easily lead to the emergence of a privatized economy in a collectivized form with the perpetuation of class or caste identities. By contrast, municipalization brings the economy as a whole into the orbit of the public sphere, where economic policy can be formulated by the entire community—notably its citizens in face-to-face relationships working to achieve a general interest that surmounts separate, vocationally defined specific interests. The economy ceases to be merely an economy in the strict sense of the term, composed of capitalistic, “worker-controlled” enterprises. It becomes a truly political economy (to use a very traditional terminology in a very untraditional sense): the economy of the polis or the municipality. The municipality, more precisely, the citizen body in face-to-face assembly, absorbs the economy into its public business, divesting it of a separate identity that can become privatized into a self-serving enterprise.

What can prevent the municipality, now reinforced by its own economic apparatus, from becoming a parochial city-state of the kind that appeared in the late Middle Ages? Once again I would like to Emphasize that anyone who is looking for guaranteed solutions to the problems raised here will not find them in the form of blissfully insulated institutions that take on a life of their own apart from the role of consciousness and ethics in human affairs. But if we are looking for countertendencies rather than “guarantees,” there is an answer that can be given. The most important single factor that gave rise to the late medieval city-state was its stratification from within—not only as a result of differences in wealth, but also in status positions, partly originating in family origins, partly, too, in vocational differences. Indeed, to the extent that the city lost its sense of collective unity arid divided its affairs into private and public business, public life itself became segmented into the “blue nails” or plebeians who. dyed cloth in cities such as Florerice and the’ more arrogant strata of artisans who produced quality goods. Wealth, too, factored heavily in a privatized economy where material differences could expand and foster a variety of hierarchical differences.

The municipalization of the economy not only absorbs the vocational differences that could militate, against a publically controlled economy; it also absorbs the material means of life into ‘ communal forms of distribution. “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs” is now institutionalized as part of the public sphere. This traditional maxim, which is meant to assure that people will have, access to the means of life irrespective of the work they are capable of performing, ceases to be merely a precarious credo: it becomes a practice, a way of functioning politically—one that is structurally built into the community as a way of existing as a political entity.

Happily, no community can hope to achieve economic autarchy, nor should it try to do so unless it wishes to become self-enclosed and parochial. Interdependence between communities is no less important than interdependence between individuals. Divested of the cultural crossfertilization that is often a product of economic intercourse, the municipality tends to shrink into itself and disappear into its own civic privatism, Shared needs and resources imply the existence of sharing and, with sharing, communication, rejuvenation by new ideas, a wider social horizon that yields a wider sensibility to new experiences. The recent emphasis in environmental theory on “self-sufficiency,” if it does not mean a greater degree of prudence in dealing with material resources, is regressive. Localism should never be interpreted to mean parochialism nor should decentralism ever be interpreted to mean that smallness is a virtue in itself. Small is not necessarily “beautiful.” The concept of human scale, by far the more preferable expression for a truly ecological community, is built around the ability of people to completely grasp their political environment, not to parochially bury themselves in it to the exclusion of cultural stimuli from outside their community’s boundaries.

, Given these coordinates, it is possible to envision anew political culture with a new revival of citizenship, popular civic institutions, a new kind of economy, and a countervailing dual power, confederally networked, that could arrest and hopefully reverse the growing centralization of the state and corporate enterprises. Moreover, it is also possible to envision an eminently practical point of departure for going beyond the town and city as we have known them up to now and developing future forms of habitation as genuine ecocommunities—human ecocommuniti.es, in this case, that seek to achieve a new harmonization between people and between humanity and the natural world. I have emphasized the word “practical” because it is now clear that any attempt to tailor a human community to a natural “ecosystem” in which it is located cuts completely against the grain of centralized power, be it state or corporate. Centralized power invariably reproduces itself in centralized forms at all levels of social, political, arid economic life. It is not only “big”; it thinks big. Indeed, this way of being and thinking is a condition for its survival, not only its growth.

Not surprisingly, the ecotechnologies that came very much into vogue during the 1970s, such as solar, wind, and methane power, later to be explored and toyed with by the national governments of the world, literally collapsed under their own weight. Governments almost invariably designed them with technical gigantism in mind. One thinks here of the huge tidal dams that were constructed in France, the plans for immense solar installations that were designed in American universities, the oversize windmills that were reared by federal agencies, some of which were almost calculated to fail and few of which could have significantly affected local life. Organic agriculture, while given a ritualistic nod of approval and a modicum of funding by state agencies, was virtually elbowed out by the more earnest attention that was given to conventional agribusiness and industrial techniques for cultivating food.

Ecotechnologies of this kind have been earnestly used almost entirely by individuals and local communities. To the extent that solar and wind power are used today, it is mainly because ecologically concerned citizens and their neighbors have introduced them as part of their home dwellings, not because their use has been taken very seriously as part of a national agenda. To induce the nation-state and corporations to think about energy, designers are obliged to speak about the feasibility of nuclear power plants, immense, ecologically destructive hydroelectric dams, and large fossil fuel installations. The ideological terrain of the nation-state is primarily continental, not local, just as the ideological terrain of the medical profession is primarily disease, not health. The very notion of sensitively tailoring technology to fit the natural ecocommunity in which people five is possible to a serious extent only within a locally oriented political community where the uniqueness of the natural environment can be fully experienced in all its intimacy.

Moreover, it is the only level in which natural cycles can be respectfully lived out—not as the mere rhetoric of “environmentally”-oriented politicians but as the everyday experience of householders who are able to return domestic wastes to their organic gardens and recycle the American consumers’ kitchen-middens of discardable trash for more rational ends. Nation-states are instruments for the domination of other nation-states and for the domination of the natural world. If we are to remove this fixation on domination that first appeared with the emergence of hierarchy, particularly with the domination of women by men, we are in dire need of local communities, technologies, and a political culture that will bring people into a face-to-face relationship with their natural habitat and the communities around them. In such communities, technology will then hopefully cease to be a force for “dominating nature” as the received wisdom of our era would have it. Indeed, like the political culture that is meant to bring citizens into a participatory relationship with each other, we can expect that such ecologically oriented municipalities will see themselves as integral parts of the natural world and technology as a way of fostering natural fecundity rather than exploiting or vitiating it.

We five today in a world that casts relationships oppositionally, not integratively. Mind is set against body, thought against materiality, individual against community, urban belts against towns, towns against country—and humanity as a whole against a natural world that is seen as “stingy,” “cruel,” and “intractable,” a world that has to be conquered by science and technology before society can hope to be free. Nation-states and corporate enterprises invoke large-scale technology presumably to achieve this very end. They not only presuppose the basic divisions that have separated humanity from nature but exacerbate them as justification for the rationalization and exploitation of human labor. Urbanization is the physical expression of this divisive reality at one of its most fundamental levels: the place where people live, produce goods, and consume them, indeed the most immediate arena in which they enter into contact with each other apart from their places of work. Urbanization not only removes these relationships and activities from the individual’s control; it undermines, simplifies, and literally fossilizes them such that people and their habitats become entirely inorganic, indeed synthetic objects that can be easily manipulated and ultimately divested of all their living attributes.

To restructure our institutions into richly articulated forms, to reorganize our relationships into creative forms of human solidarity, to reempower our communities and cities so that they can effectively counteract state and corporate power—indeed replace the nation-state with politically confederated and economically vital municipalities—and to create a new, nonhierarchical and participatory relationship between humanity and nature by means of a sensibility and technics that fosters a participatory form of complementarity rather than atomistic antagonisms—all, taken together as one coherent ensemble, constitute not only a desideratum of major proportions but anew ethical calling. The incarnation of this human project is the immediate, indeed unmediated, community that enters so profoundly into the fashioning of our humanity. This is the community in which we genuinely encounter each other, the public world that is only a bare step above our private world, in short, our towns, neighborhoods, and municipalities. How we begin the great project of refashioning this, public world and articulating it institutionally, economically, eonfederally, and technically will determine whether we exist as public beings, interactively as discursive and rational human beings, or whether we disappear in the huge maw of modern-day urbanization.

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It is always tempting—and perhaps eminently human—to break away from abstractions about municipalism arid personalize them in the hard realities of one’s own experiences. I have hesitated to fix my general coriclusions in speculative details. Utopias have a bad way of becoming fixed blueprints—after which they degenerate into inflexible dogmas. But perhaps it would not be amiss if I take the liberty of fleshing out some of my speculations with my lived experience, notably in the urban area with which I am most fa mil iar at the present time—Burlington, Vermont—and in the “bioregion” I know best, the excitingly libertarian state of Vermont. Reduced to basics, it is in these two areas that my speculations may take on some concrete meaning that has relevance to problems that face many urban dwellers today.

Vermont, the fourteenth state to enter the original union of thirteen American colonies,‘was a free republic between 1777 and 1791, and it still retains many of the libertarian traditions, of that revolutionary era. This historical legacy may make it somewhat exceptional, but it does not make the area any less real. That Vermont exists is a fact that is existentially more real than many myths that have moved human beings over the ages to greater acts of nobility than reality itself. One thinks, here, of the Judeo-Christian tradition that kept the Jews intact for two thousand years of incredible persecution and also sent other millions—their Christian brethren—into bloody spiritual conflicts over the same span of time. This is true, too, for Moslems and men and women of other faiths. Here, I Would like to, repeat the caveat that what humans think of themselves, however fancifully, often determines their behavior more decisively than their “objective” material interests—many social thinkers, including Marx, to the contrary notwithstanding.

So it is with Vermont, or, for that matter, America and the rest of the world. If history would have it otherwise and people acted immediately, even ultimately, according to their “objective” or material interests, this world would long have been the best of all possible worlds—or maybe the worst, depending very much on what one regards as objective. Iriany case, Vermont thinks of itself as what America “used to be” rather than what it is today and often acts upon this self-conception as though it were true. Generally, this means that the state is remarkably unencumbered by the extravagant amount of statecraft that afflicts so many other American states. It has a citizens’ legislature in which no elected official apart from the executive branch (the governor, a modest bureaucracy, the police, and judiciary) receives a livable, full-time salary for public service and must answer for his or her public service every two years in contrast to the four-year terms that prevail in most of the United States. The accessibility of nearly all public officials, including the state’s governor, to the public has few equals in most Euro-American republics; face-to-face discussion, inquiries, and debates turn politics into a very intimate affair; Vermonters would not have it otherwise. They take for granted a wide array of political rights that would be regarded as deferential privileges in almost any sizable political jurisdiction.

Vermont is also town-meeting country—indeed vigorous town-meeting country notwithstanding the ritualistic articles that appear annually in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal that lament the decline of these remarkable democratic institutions. Having attended many town meetings over the past fifteen years, I can personally attest to their vitality. In fact, I have seen a remarkable resurgence of town meetirig democracy in Vermont, partly because the citizenry has begun to treasure the power this institution accords them in a period of growing centralism elsewhere; partly, too, because town meetings have intervened into international affairs such as the nuclear-breeze issue and have given these Yankee Americans an enhanced sense of “grass-roots” control over seemingly historic public affairs. This control, to be sure, is strictly moral; it does not carry the ponderous weight of law. But it is’ characteristically American that a republican national constitution, permeated by a countervailing revolutionary democratic tradition, has given rise to a state of mind that imparts a higher authority to a grass-roots moral movement than a legislative mandate. In this case, American politics can be credited with being more vulnerable to moral movements than its critics fully realize, Vermont’s town meetings, like those of its New England neighbors, are often more effective nationally than they truly realize, precisely because they are hallowed by moral traditions that give America its national identity. It is the enormous weight of their moral voice, their invocation of an ethically charged past that ha un ts the present with its ambiance of virtue and freedom, that gives them enormous potential power for social change.

This past affects the so-called “cities” of Vermont, not only its small towns and villages. Despite the fact that Vermont’s few sizable towns—particularly Burlington, its largest, with a population of 37,000—are structured around a mayoralty system with a typical board of aldermen, election day is still called “town-meeting day.” The possibility of restructuring Burlington’s “big city” apparatus around town meetings, each located in one of the city’s six wards, has been in the air for more than a decade. Personally, this writer raised such a proposal fifteen years ago, and it began to surface in the city’s political discourse in 1981, when a conference of Burlington’s neighborhood organizations passed a very strong “resolve,” taking up my proposal and voting it through almost unanimously. Thereafter, in September 1982, Burlington’s Board of Aldermen accepted a more attenuated structure of “Neighborhood Planning Assemblies” (NPAs) to implement citizen participation in the allocation of federal community-development block grants. NPAs were thereupon established in each of the wards and proceeded to formulate constitutions for periodic meetings, coordinating committees, and the like. They were open to all registered voters of a given ward, although their agendas were often presented by agencies in the mayor’s office.

By adding the word “planning” to the words “neighborhood assembly,” the city’s mayoral administration (which is headed by a fairly authoritarian “socialist” mayor for whom leadership often is equatable with a high degree of “paternalism”) limits the assemblies’ power to a largely consultative role. At this writing, the situation is very much in flux: the NPAs are occasionally “assembled” by agencies in the mayor’s office to rubber stamp or give legitimation to the mayor’s pet schemes. In still other cases, they do exhibit a certain amount of initiative. Generally, the life of the assemblies has been muted by the centralistic or paternalistic behavior of this highly self-centered “socialist” mayor who is committed, together with his “class enemy,” the business community, to economic growth, expansionist “planning” notions, and a presumably “radical” version of Reaganesque “supply-side” economics in which the “poor, the elderly, and the working people” (to use City Hall’s most favored nouns) are supposed to indirectly benefit from the construction of hotels, condominiums, boutiques, department stores, and the like. That this kind of “growth” has significantly changed Burlington physically and produced major economic differences between its poorer neighborhoods and more well-to-do ones is an experience that is not unique to the otherwise easy-going communities of northern New England.

What can be done in a city like this—and, for that matter, in a state like Vermont?

Minimally, Burlington could benefit enormously from a municipalist political movement whose candidates are ultimately mandated and recallable by citizens’ assemblies. I refer not to the NPAs, which are actually gerrymandered ward organizations, but to assemblies that are rooted in authentic neighborhoods where the citizenry shares common economic, cultural, and political interests. Such neighborhoods exist in Burlington, as they do in many cities and towns of America. But they have been shrewdly amalgamated with other neighborhoods, often very different in character, to produce a melange of conflicting interests that favor oligarchic control of municipal politics.

These mandated and recallable delegates—in no way to be confused with “representatives” who are free to make policy decisions—could initially form a “board of aldermen” or, if you like, a council of assembly delegates to parallel the official aldermanic board itself. The council, while legally powerless in its initial phases, could exercise a very effective moral influence on the official Board of Aldermen until it acquires increasing legal power of its own. It could track the agenda and business of the official board in every detail, expand it at will, or challenge such legislative measures that it finds unsuitable in the public interest. By the same token, it could run its own regular aldermanic candidates who, hopefully, would be expected to act as a voice for the parallel council within the city administration. All actions of the council, in turn, would have to be confirmed or could be altered by the assemblies so that each delegate would merely be the repository of his or her assembly’s views on specific issues.

Optimally, it would be the goal of the Council of Assembly Delegates to replace the Board of Aldermen and institute genuine town-meeting democracy in Burlington. There is no reason why, from a strictly administrative viewpoint, such a change would affect in any way the normal operations of the city. The only objection to this system of self-governance I have encountered is that it is “too democratic,” not that it is “disruptive.” Such objections generally imply that the citizenry of the city is “incompetent” to deal with public matters, an objection that could obviously be raised against town-meeting governance itself if its centuries of success were not compelling testimony to the contrary.

What I have described for Burlington could exist for Vermont as a whole. Actually, until the late 1960s, state government in Vermont was largely run by the municipalities. The state’s House of Representatives was chosen by townships, riot by electoral districts based on population numbers. Accordingly, large Vermont, towns had two representatives for example, and small communities had one. Towns thus directly controlled the House, not anonymous voters who were demographic ally agglomerated together with no political roots in a civic collectivity. Admittedly, a system so constricted to one or two representatives from a city or township favored a minority of voters, generally rural at the expense of urban populations, but politics was conducted in a more organic fashion than it is today. Town-meeting discussions favored a decent measure of public consensus and widespread public participation in a richer political process than mere “voting.” Voters were not mere spectators in a legislative duel conducted in the state capital; they came fairly close to being direct participants in it, placing their representatives under regular public review at town meetings or in the daily life of their communities. A 1966 U.S. Supreme Gourt decision, the famous “one vote for one voter” decision, swept this structure away as an “undemocratic” archaism. However faulty the original system—faults that could have easily been corrected by increasing the representation of larger communities, not by eliminating this kind of representation completely—Vermonters were not reduced to a mere electorate or its politically concerned people turned into mere constituqnts..

Federal law preempts state law—in Vermont, of course, no less than other American states, although the Vermont Senate, from its inceptioii early in the nineteenth century, has always been elected from couritywide voting,districts. Hence, there is a sense in which both systems, the strictly electoral one as well as the municipal one, coexisted throughout most of the state’s history and, balanced each other out. Short of changing the federal Constitution itsfelf, there is no way in which this balance can be restored or made more equitable. Nor would it be desirable for any legislative body to structure itself around a system that provides one vote in the House for a, sparsely populated township and the same for another that is densely populated. But there is no reason why a third house in addition to the Senate and House of Representatives cannot be established on a statewide basis, a Council of Assembly Delegates, from all the townships and cities of Vermont, which would function as a moral monitor of the official state legislature. This “parallel” ethical system of governance, legitiinated by the will of the people in yermont’s municipalities and corresponding to the “second chamber” in Burlington’s civic government, could “enact” its own “laws” and ordinances^ carefully scrutinizirig, criticizing, and correcting legislation that is under consideration in the Senate and House. It could function as the popular voice of the citizenry articulated into communities rather than anonymous voters. No less than in Burlington, the delegates of such a statewide council could be mandated and recallable by the communities from which they are chosen, and their choice would be more reflective of populatiori differences than the House that existed before the 1966 Supreme Court decision.

I would like to advance a more general argument: firstly, that the emergence of paralegal and morally powerful assemblies of delegates from the, townships and cities of Vermont as well as within the state’s cities could begin to create a radically new political climate, activating Vermont’s citizens and profoundly influencing the very nature of legislation and ways of legislating in the state. With a visibly grass-roots and institutionalized assembly of municipal delegates tracking a less representative state legislature, Vermont’s politics could probably change in a very crucial way. Governance by legislative command, with its panoply of penalties and coercion, would begin to yield to governance by moral suasion, with its evocation of public responsibility and individual probity. Statecraft, which has always been premised on the public’s incompetence to govern itself and its ultimate recourse to violence, would increasingly give way to politics with its classical vision of community life as an ethical compact. This conceptual framework, which sees human consociation as a distinctly human, and humane, attribute of individual socialization—so markedly in contrast to the egoistic and interest-oriented, indeed disciplinary image of the contemporary public sphere—would mark a highly significant turn in the way we conceive the management of society and the participation of its citizenry in the political process. A dual structure of municipal government, paralleling the state’s conventional legal structure, could open a creative institutional restructuring of the body politic—one that would not only countervail the centralizing and destructuring process of urbanization and growing state power but introduce a new principle of politics based on morality as well as cooperation and personal responsibility.

Secondly, I would like to point out that the leap from local to statewide forms of municipal control, even in so small a state as Vermont, may well open an institutional gap between town and state that could create a problematic area for a hybridized form of statecraft, neither political nor statist—one that would vitiate the entire project of a moral politics. What is worth recognizing is that the county system in Vermont provides a remarkable arena not only for closing this structural gap but also for enhancing this new kind of politics. Vermont’s seventeen counties, patched together by their quiltwork of numerous townships, provide an almost ideal jurisdictional unit for municipal confederations, each of which could be united by its own County Confederation of Municipalities and organized in all essentials like the councils of assembly delegates within the cities and the Council of Assembly Delegates for the entire state. These countywide confederations would have the extremely important function of pooling the resources of Vermont’s townships and cities to maintain roads, schools, public lands, and provide many other vital services that have been preempted by the conventional state government and legitimate its increasingly centralized powers. The countywide confederations would thus not only enhance the moral authority of Vermont’s municipal assemblies and form a connecting link between the townships and their statewide council; they would become the all-important material repository for reclaiming the financial control exercised by the legislature and executive branch over vital services such as road maintenance, services that cannot be dealt with alone by smaller communities in the state.

The municipalization of Vermont’s economy would have to occur in piecemeal steps, I suspect, and on many different levels, indeed in such a way as not to infringe on the proprietary rights of small retail outlets, service establishments, artisan shops, small farms, local manufacturing enterprises, and the like. Rather, this process might begin as a transitional measure with the reclamation of public lands by the municipalities, indeed where funds exist with the purchase of sizable enterprises, particularly those that are failing financially and could be managed more efficiently by their workers than by profit-oriented entrepreneurs. The use of land trusts as a means not only for providing good public housing but promoting small-scale, often artisanal production would occupy a high place on the agenda of a municipality’s economic program. Cooperatives, farms, and small retail outlets would be fostered with municipal funds and placed under growing public control—a policy that might very well command greater consumer loyalty than we would expect to find toward failing corporate enterprises.

Viewed in a still broader perspective, it is crucially important that a municipal movement foster a new psychological ambiance—a sense of civic loyalty and responsibility that would make each citizen feel committed to the success of a moral economy. Even more than the well-known “underground economy” that has revived barter and mutual aid in the exchange of goods and services, the municipality’s citizens would have to feel that they have a personal stake in the community’s welfare. This is a function of citizen empowerment, not of political rhetoric. A citizen’s stake in a moral economy has to be real and visible in the sense that the municipality’s economy has to be public business in a highly expressive and democratic form—the subject of vigorous discussion in neighborhood assemblies and town meetings, the object of voluntary services, stemming from a highly personalized knowledge of how the economy is functioning as well as how it can he enhanced by greater citizen participation.

A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative, use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in. any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life. The appalling failure of so many “progressive” movements in the towns and cities of America to recognize the need for civic paideia in the classical meaning of the term accounts for the repeated compromises that have made the heroic periods of their administrations so listless and routine after a few years in office. Doubtless, a full armamentorium of economic, fiscal, and administrative devices can be psed to make a municipalist politics workable; for example, Proudhon’s vision of a “People’s Bank” that will collect funds from the populace at large to finance municipal projects; the direct sale of locally grown food from farmer to consumer that will provide special price advantages for both; more barter, comprehensive mutual aid networks, and the use of public land to foster domestic gardening—these are only some of the many possible projects that could give tangibility to a moral economy. The fostering of civic voluntarism, such as unpaid public efforts to construct community centers, parks, squares, and other structures that would provide citizens with places for public discussion and personal intercourse, and efforts to collect funds (a sort of voluntary taxation, if you like) to beautify and improve the community—all can be viewed as moral challenges to the citizenry’s civic probity and its commitment to assume responsibility for its own community. But none of these efforts or projects are likely to succeed if a new politics is not educational, indeed if it is not a new form of civic enlightenment that challenges the citizenry to take control of its own community.

It may well be that this civicisme, as the French called it two centuries ago, can no longer flourish in an urbanized world that has been so extensively commodified and permeated by a market economy. But it may well be that precisely because of the deep frustration this urbanized and commodified world has produced, the will to create a new politics, citizenship, ecologically viable habitat, and municipal economy lies directly below the surface of conventional behavior as we know it today, waiting to break through if creative and imaginative alternatives are developed. Much of this book consists primarily of accounts drawn mainly from the past that demonstrate how the hidden aspirations of ordinary people welled up and exploded into powerful localist movements that profoundly redefined politics and citizenship in ways that emphasized the authority of the community over the state and self-empowerment over statecraft. There is no reason to believe that the most human of impulses, the need for consociation and community support, can be irretrievably cast into a limbo from which there is no redemption. Indeed, once released, this impulse often tends to surge forward beyond all the prescribed boundaries we normally impose upon it. If state power begets state power, so too does self-governance beget self-governance. It has seldom failed that whatever power people gain from the state, the state, in turn, loses institutionally as well as legitimately. A historic verdict that will finally place the state over the municipality has yet to be rendered conclusively. The greater danger we, face is that even those localists most committed in theory may have lost the existential commitment to turn their visions into practice. Sweeping as urbanization may be today, it has still not swept the ideal of the free, confederally organized municipality from the agenda of history—and as long as it exists there, it is something devoutly worth fighting for.

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Never has it been so necessary to place every innovative practice in the light of a visionary ethical ideal. Ironically, this is the great edge that reaction has over progress: its shrewd emphasis on ethics and matters of spirit in an increasingly meaningless as well as materialistic world. It has been noted With irony that Nazism achieved much of its success among the German people a half century ago not because of any economic panaceas it offered in opposition to its competitors from the center and left but because of its mythic ideal of nationhood, community, and social regeneration. In more recent times, reactionary movements in America have won millions to their cause on such moral grounds as the integrity of the family, religious dogma, the renewal of patriotism, and the right to life—a message, I may add, that has been construed not only as a need for antiabortion legislation but as a hypostasization of the sacredness of the individual, born as well as unborn.

Characteristically, liberal and radical causes are still mired in economistic and productivistic panaceas. Their moral message, once a heightened plea for social justice, has given way increasingly to strictly material demands. Far more than the right, which avows egoism even as it emphasizes community virtues, the political middle ground and the left avow a solid bourgeois gospel of bread on the table and money in the bank. The spiritual emptiness that a market society produces in such large numbers of Americans has largely ceased to be a problem of the very people who profess to oppose that society, a failure in ethical vision that has left them isolated and puzzled.

The word “moral” must be repeated—not as rhetoric to match the claims of reaction but as the felt spiritual underpinnings of a new social vision. It must be repeated not as part of a patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people incorporate into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and triviality of life today must be filled precisely by those visionary ideals that sustain the human side of life as well as its material side, or else the coordinates by which the future should be guided will totally disappear in that commodity oriented world we call the “marketplace of ideas.” The more serious indecency of this “marketplace” is that these ideals will be turned into objects—mere commodities—that will lack even the value of things we need to sustain us. They will become the mere ornaments needed to garnish an inherently antihuman and antiecological society that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse.

A municipal agenda to countervail urbanization and all that it signifies is not a mere program, such as we expect from rival parties and electoral coalitions. Programs, whether “green” or “red,” radical or liberal, are shopping fists of demands, precisely suited for that “marketplace of ideas” we have misnamed “politics.” They are ideological agents for effacing crucial differences in outlook. The need for thinking out ideas and giving them coherence, which alone imparts meaning to an agenda for a new municipal politics, is lost and in that loss is replaced by the chaos of ideological confusion. A cranky pluralism replaces a stern appreciation of focused thinking; a confused eclecticism replaces the need for wholeness, clarity, and consistency. The ecology movement and movements for a new politics have been plagued by this indigestible fare for decades, a problem that has grown even worse due to the cultural illiteracy that plagues American society.

Any attempt to countervail urbanization and replace it with a new politics and authentic citizenship must not only be a movement for ethical renewal, clearly focused in its analysis and goals; it must also be a movement that has a sense of “home,” as it were, as well as a sense of mission. Most movements that derive from the liberal center or the left are notable for their lack of any roots in traditions that are dear to Americans or articulate the best in their history. Given the emphasis of these movements on centralism, planning, coordination, and mass mobilization, they stand inherently at odds with a creative American legacy that formulated its ideals of freedom around decentrafism, popular initiative, confederation, and individualism—ideals that admittedly can be degraded by manipulative reactionaries for authoritarian ends but can also be enlarged and given a more responsive, humanistic meaning for more emancipatory goals. That decentrafism can mean local parochialism, even racism; confederation, a denial of any rational coordination of resources and services; and individualism, a psychology of rampant egotism—all are simply the most negative way of viewing a constellation of notions whose logic can yield genuine freedom. That these very ideals of freedom guided the radical movements of heretical Christianity centuries ago, nourished the English, American, and French revolutions in a more recent time, inspired the Communards of 1871, and surfaced again in Spain during the 1930s as well as among various citizens’ and civic movements during the past two generations should be enough to give the most sectarian radicals pause before denouncing them. It remains to the great credit of early populism, not only in America but in Russia and Spain, embellished by their own anarchistic traditions, to have extracted the diamond of radicalism from the rubbish heap of reaction. A new politics and sense of citizenship in America still awaits a movement that can occupy itself with the difficult process of separating the jewel from its matrix and making it glitter as it once did.

It will not do to live on a diet of hating America because of its adventures abroad or its mistreatment of ethnic minorities at home any more than it will due to immunize the country from criticism by dressing it in a flag and perverting its revolutionary origins in a struggle for freedom. Indeed, it would be a far more worthy and historically sound enterprise to disengage the democratic traditions and institutions of the country such as its town meetings and its Bill of Rights from a very mistaken notion that they are, entangled with the “bourgeoisie,” whatever this word means these days. The words “bourgeois democracy” turn history into a canard: the real bourgeoise of the past never favored democracy in any form. A more searching account of the great democratic revolutions of two centuries ago reveals that they were committed primarily to a constitutional monarchy and only resigned themselves to an oligarchic form of republicanism whose model was senatorial Rome. It was the people, often of varied class origins, who foisted the liberties we enjoy today on the possessing classes, classes that consistently tried to pervert them and are still in the business of perverting them. Tragically; reaction has been permitted to appropriate the “American Dream” and give it a chauvinistic meaning while liberals arid radicals have mocked it, degrading it in their own way for ends that are often no less authoritarian than those of their opponents.

Yet this “American Dream” has many faces, and it still remains to be seen whether its most liberatory, visionary, and utopian aspects will find expression in the credo of a new politics. One face of the dream was born in yeoman New Erigland, where community acquired ascendancy over privatism; individuality over egotism; decentralism over the concentration of power; direct democracy over republicanism. Another face was born in the cowboy west, where the privatism of the ruggedly individualistic “lone rider” was hypostasized over the “fence-rearing” farmer and his family; where egoism was enclosed by the perimeter of the lonely campfire; where to be armed was a token not of the free citizen but the marauding gun slinger; and where social chaos prevailed over democracy and republicanism,alike. Still another face of the “American Dream” was added by the late-coming immigrant for whorri American cities were not only refuges from European oppression but, as the maxim has it, where “the streets were paved with gold.” This face featured no particular virtues beyond personal security from arbitrary rule and material well-being. History has scrambled these faces together so that they now appear a blur, not a unified tradition in which one face stands at odds with the others.

A municipal agenda that does not piece together the emancipatory features of the “American Dream” such that this agenda can speak in a clear and unqualified voice to the American people will not be worth the paper on which it is written. Americans, no less than Europeans, must recover, a whole that has been served up to them in fragments: their history as a story of human freedom, not merely as the history of the freedom of property, trade, and the unbridled egoism of greed. For decades, social innovators have talked to the American people in German (Marx), Russian (Lenin), Chinese (Mao), Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh), indeed in virtually every language but English—which is to say, in the language of traditions and “isms” that are largely incomprehensible to Americans. An ethical and visionary case can now be made, perhaps more than at any time before, that community, individuality, decentralism, and direct democracy are ideologically more “homelike” than “rugged individualism,” egoism, gun slinging, and chaos. Arriericans have welcomed this yeoman American message eagerly—as the cynical right and one of the country’s oldest presidents have clearly demonstrated—only to see it betrayed into a cowboy parody. They no longer believe that their “streets are paved with gold,” if only because the immigrant generation that accepted this myth has already passed into history. The political landscape is open again for the revival of a dream that emphasizes community, decentralism, individuality, and direct democracy. The yearning to render it applicable to a modern America is intense, if only it can be properly articulated and earnestly advanced. It will be an unpardonable failure in political creativity if a movement that professes to speak for a new politics does not try to occupy that landscape but rather, in a self-indulgent “hate America” mood, debarks to a “Third World” ideological ghetto abroad with shrieks about the ‘‘mad dogs of imperialism,” snarling perpetually at its most natural allies at home—the ordinary citizen desiccated by his or her own spiritual poverty.

Nor can a new politics ignore the most essential attribute of that dream: its molecular nature and its gradual development from neighborhood and town to county and region. Dreams are more than party platforms, which are normally violated or ignored. Attempts to reconstruct an authentic politics—not another ensemble of statecraft techniques—involve a remaking of the body politic itself: politics conceived as the recovery of citizenship and civic education. This kind of politics has an almost cellular form of growth, a process that involves organic proliferation and differentiation such as that of a child in a womb. To “engineer” a politics into existence the way one puts together an automobile engine with its engine block, gaskets, cylinders, spark plugs, and the like is to desecrate the meaning of the word “politics,” itself, not to speak of the disdain it exhibits for the human freight that this engine is meant to bring to polling booths and the “citizenry” or “voters” it is meant to mobilize. Until the social innovators of our day discard the notion that the “political process” is a matter of mobilization rather than education, of charismatic leaders rather than participatory citizens, of “bread-on-the-table” panaceas rather than visionary ideals charged with ethical meaning, their politics, far from being “new,” will be the old authoritarian statecraft garnished with mere rhetoric.

A new political agenda is necessarily a municipal agenda—or it is neither an agenda for remaking society nor politics in any meaningful sense of the term. The living cell which forms the basic unit of political life is the municipality from which everything else must emerge: confederation, interdependence, citizenship, and freedom. There is no way to piece together any politics—old or new—unless we begin with its most elementary forms: the villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities in which people live on the most immediate level of political interdependence, the only level that is the next step beyond private life. It is on this level that they can begin to gain a familiarity with the political process, a process that involves a good deal more than “voting” and “information”—a term that has become the modern substitute for wisdom. It is on this level that they can go beyond the privateness and parochialism of family life—a life that is celebrated for its inwardness and seclusion—and improvise those public institutions that make for participation and consociation. In short, it is from the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into a creative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic, civic life that has institutional form as well as civic content: the block committees, assemblies, neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, citizens’ action groups, and public arena for discourse that go beyond such episodic acts as demonstrations and retain a lived as well as organized continuity. To ignore this irreducible civic unit of political life is to play chess without a chessboard, for it is here that the coordinates exist for playing the game in its most direct, basic, and intimate sense.

I have tried in this book to formulate a body of ideas that have meaning for the political restructing of our times, not another handbook that offers recipes for how to make a “revolution” in one’s backyard or front lawn. I have tried to suggest a political philosophy that lends itself to modification, extension, and a decent regard for the great variety of needs that distinguish one community from another, not a blueprint that dogmatizes and rigidifies the idea of freedom into an inflexible credo. But I do not seek to rarify this political philosophy of civicism into a mere intellectual duel with abstract philosophies that stand in opposition to it. This book has been thoroughly informed by history—not because I seek lived “precedents” for truths that deserve to rest on their own intrinsic worth rather than “expediency” or, to use what has become a synonym for that term, “efficiency.” Political life is not legitimated by how well it “works.” If it were, totalitarianism could be more successfully legitimated because it is generally more “efficient” than democracy, just as business techniques are more “effective” than that “wasteful” process involved in’ debates and free forms of decision making. Doubtless, “time is money,” but freedom is a way of life that even money cannot buy—or certainly should not.

My recourse to history and to speculations about my own community, Burlington, and its Vermont setting is primarily an endeavor to show that living human beings, not their science-fiction replicas, actually engaged in and continue to involve themselves in a political process that may initially seem visionary when it is presented abstractly. I have tried to show that our contemporary market society; only three or four decades old at best, and our two-centuries-old market economy were preceded by a far more mixed society and economy, possibly four centuries old, that phased out of a rigidly structured feudalworld, later to phase into a chaotically destructured capitalist world. What men and women have done in the past and, in some degree, continue to do today can certainly be recovered again. These people were no less real than we—all rhetoric about the fixidity of human nature to the contrary notwithstanding; If they went from a highly structured world through a centuries-long “transition” formed around a highly mixed, almost ecological economy and society, to a very recent destructured market society, who is to say which of the three is merely “transitional,” “climatic,”’ or constitutes evidence of a steady ascent in history? It may well be that our present-day market society is evidence of social regression, not of social progress; indeed that the insane proliferation of commodity relationships that embodies all human ties in mere objects constitutes a cancer of social life as such, not, as Marx would have it, a “precondition” for a free society in an idealized, Eurocentric image of social progress.

This book has also been informed by another belief: power that is not retained by the people is power that is given over to the state. Conversely, whatever power the people gain is power that must be taken away from the state. There can be no institutional vacuum where power exists: it is either invested in the people or it is invested in the state. Where the two “share” power, this condition is only temporary and extremely precarious. Sooner of later, the control of society arid its destiny will either shift toward the people and their communities at its base or the professional practitioners of statecraft at its summit. Only if the whole pyramidal structure is dismembered and turned from a vertical hierarchy into a horizontal ecocommunity—modeled more on what ecologists diagram as a “food web” than a “food pyramid” (with humans invariably at its apex)—will the issue of power and domination as such disappear and be completely replaced by participation and the principle of complementarity.

Power, however, must be conceived as real, indeed solid and tangible, not only as spiritual and psychological. To ignore the fact that power is a muscular fact of life is to drift from the visionary into the ethereal and mislead the public as to its crucial significance in affecting society’s destiny. What this means is that if power is to be regained by the people from the state, the management of society must be deprofessionalized as much as possible. That is to say, it must be simplified and rendered transparent, indeed, clear, accessible, and manageable such that most of its affairs can be run by ordinary citizens. This notion, with its emphasis on amateurism as distinguished frorn professionalism, is not new. It formed the basis of Athenian democratic practice for generations. Indeed, it was so ably practiced that sortition rather than election formed the basis of the polis’s democracy. It was to resurface again repeatedly, for example, in the very simple constitution written by Vermont’s yeomanry two centuries ago, a constitution that is still notable for the brevity of its articles and the minimal amount of statute law that clothes it.

Power is also a solid and tangible fact to be reckoned’with militarily, notably in the ubiquitous truth that the power of the state or the people eventually reposes in force. Whether or not the state has power depends upon whether or not the state exercises a monopoly of violence. By the same token, whether or not the people have power depends upon whether or not it is armed and creates its own grass-roots militia, not only to guard itself from criminals or invaders but also from the ever-encroaching power of the state itself. Here, too, the Athenian and Vermont yeomen knew only too well that a professiorial military was a threat to liberty and the state was a vehicle for disarming the people.

A true civicism that tries to create an authentic politics, an empowered citizenry, and a municipalized economy would be a vulnerable project indeed if it failed to replace the police, the professional army, even that pseridomilitia, the National Guard, with an authentic militia, a civic guard, composed of rotating patrols for police purposes and well-trained citizen military contingents for dealing with external dangers to freedom. Greek democracy would never have survived the repeated assaults of the Greek aristocracy without its militia of citizen hoplites, those foot soldiers who could answer the call to arms with their own weapons and elected commanders. The tragic history of the state’s ascendancy over autonomous municipalities, even the history of the rise of oligarchy within free cities of the past, is the story of armed professionals who commandeered power from unarmed peoples or disarmed them presumably (as so many liberals would have it today) from the “hazards” of domestic and neighborhood “shootouts.” Typically, this is the cowboy or “gunslingers” image of the “American Dream,” often cynically imposed on its more traditional yeoman face.

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Beyond the immediate agenda i have presented thus far lies another one: a political world in which the state as such will finally be replaced by a confederal network of municipal assemblies; the corporate economy reduced to a truly political economy in which municipalities, interacting with each other economically as well as politically, will resolve their material problems as citizen bodies in open assemblies, not simply as professionals, farmers, and blue- or white-collar workers. Not only will they then transform themselves from occupational beings into public beings, but they will create a world in which all weapons can indeed be beaten into plowshares and ultimately a human ecocommunity that will be exquisitely tailored psychologically and spiritually as well as technologically, archictecturally, and structurally to the natural eco-communities that compose our planet.

I would hope that such an agenda would offer an image of a nonhierarchical as well as a classless community in which differentiation, natural as well as social, is respected without that divisive sense of “otherness” that has produced such disastrous effects—on our relationship with our own kind and the life forms that share the planet with us.

This second agenda for a more distant future embodies the “ultimate” vision I have elaborated in greater detail in my previous writings. Its achievement can no longer be seen as a sudden “revolution” that within a brief span of time will replace the present society with a radically new one. Actually, such revolutions never really happened in history as the litany of their failures so dramatically reveals. Even the French Revolution, which radicals have seized upon as a “paradigm” of sudden social change, was generations in preparation and did not come to its end until a century later, when the last of the sans culottes were virtually exterminated on the barricades of the Paris Commune.

Nor can there be any myth today that barricades are more than symbols and a civic guard is little more than a first step toward disarming the state, a feeble step at that, albeit a crucial assertion of where the “monopoly of violence” should really repose—if violence can be mitigated in a world that is overstocked with nuclear bombs. What links my minimal agenda to my ultimate one is a process, an admittedly long development in which the existing institutions and traditions of freedom are slowly enlarged and expanded. “Revolution” originally meant the restoration of.traditional rights in the context of a changed world, a legitimation of emancipation by the power and dignity of tradition. For the present, we must try to democratize the republic, a call that often is simply defensive and consists of preserving and expanding freedoms we have earned centuries ago together with the institutions that give them reality. For the future it means that we must radicalize our democracy, imparting a utopian and creative content to the democratic institutions we have rescued. Admittedly, at that point we will have moved from a countervailing position that tries to play our democratic institutions against the state into an aggressive attempt to replace the state with municipally based confederal structures. It is to be devoutly hoped that by that time, the state power itself will have been hollowed out institutionally by local or civic structures, indeed that its very legitimacy, not to speak of its authority as a coercive force, will simply lead to its collapse in any period of confrontation. If the great revolutions of the past can be used to provide us with examples of how so major a shift is possible, it would be well to remember that seemingly all-powerful monarchies that the republics replaced two centuries ago were so denuded of power that they crumbled rather than “fell” much as a mummified corpse turns to dust after it has been suddenly exposed to air.

Another ultimate vision also faces us: one in which urbanization will so completely devour the city and the countryside that the word “community” will become an archaism; a market society filtering into the most private recesses of our lives as individuals and effacing all sense of personality, much less individuality; a state that will not only render politics and citizenship a mockery of these words but a maw that will absorb the very notion of freedom itself.

This “vision,” if such it can be called, is still sufficiently removed from our most immediate experience so that its realization can be arrested by those countervailing forces—that dual power—I have outlined in the previous pages. Given the persistent destructuring of the natural world as well as the social, more than human freedom and autonomy are in the balance. The proliferation of nuclear reactors, like that of nuclear weapons, is a reminder that we are reaching a point of almost cosmic finality in our affairs on this planet; that the recovery of an authentic politics and citizenship is not only a precondition for a free society. It is also a precondition for our survival as a species. Hanging over us is the shadow of a completely destructured and simplified natural world as well as a completely destructured and simplified urban world—a natural world so ossified and divested of its variety that we, like all other complex life forms, will be unable to exist as viable beings.

[1] See Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982), pp. 62–88

[2] How paradoxical can be judged by the fact that “statified” is a word I have had to create for my own needs to denote the extent of the state’s penetration into social and political life. It does not exist in the English language. This term, which I used extensively in my Post-Scarcity Anarchism, produced numerous tiffs with a dedicated editor and repeated misprints with a knowledgeable printer.

[3] Quite often, in fact, the word polis, for which there is no comparable term in English, is translated as state.

[4] I use the word “civilized” throughout this book to mean literally the world of the civitas or city in the broad Latin sense this term was used, not in any culturally pejorative sense. Readers of my book, The Ecology of Freedom, will know that the word denotes no monumental advance in the human condition over so-called “primitive” societies—apart from certain technical and scientific amenities that may have lightened humanity’s material burdens.

[5] Literally, politea. The word republic—the Latin for res publica, literally public things—has no meaning or analog in Greek, and, in this writer’s view, no place in the title of Plato’s famous dialogue.

[6] For a more detailed discussion of the decline of Rome and the problems the empire created, the reader should read my book, The Limits of the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973, pp. 32–35).

[7] This is a feature that existed even in New York during the 1930s, which I distinctly recall as a young man. This great city, at one time an agglomeration of a thousand ethnically unique neighborhoods, seemed to have been stopped in time, for a generation or two, and created much the same degree of neighborhood loyalties and distinctive accents. I have encountered such differences in New Orleans today, although they are rapidly disappearing. The emergence of civic variety, loyalty, and cultural diversity even in modern American cities is an important theme to which we shall return later in this book, and the consequences of its loss will be fully explored as a consequence of contemporary urbanization.

[8] France, it is worth noting, had extended its newly adopted decadenal metric system from weights, measures, lengths, and areas directly into the calendar with the result that a week was measured in ten days. This did not displease the French bourgeoisie, which was only too glad to have a longer work week than existed under the older religious calendar.

[9] Hence my strong objections to the way European, particularly German, city confederacies are treated in the mainstream historical literature of the time, particularly by Toynbee and Mumford. In this respect, Kropotkin’s writings are still exceptional for their sympathy, although they are not given sufficient attention in his work.

[10] Which is not to say that grain, that all-important import of the Greek cities and Rome, was not a major staple in the Mediterranean basin and along European water routes. But the inland transportation of grain by carts was quite secondary to luxury objects once we look beyond a regional economy in Europe.

[11] I find it fascinating that so many radicals, socialists and anarchists alike, almost intuitively rally to the support of small-scale farmers against agribusiness and small family enterprises against giant supermarkets, this despite their hostility to private property of any kind. Americans seem to suspect that domestic forms of society, however propertied, are a desideratum in themselves and foster individuality in a mass society. This Jeffersonian legacy acts as one of the most important inertial elements against the full colonization of society by corporations and big business, even though its historical context in the making of the free city and free citizen has not been fully understood; so, too, for our appreciation of craftsmanship.

[12] Put bluntly: there was no “transition” from feudalism to capitalism in the simple sense presented by most Marxist and liberal historians and theorists. Nor is it true to say that capitalism developed “within the womb” of feudalism and then “emerged” as a dominant social order through a series of “bourgeois-democratic revolutions” whose “paradigm” is the French Revolution of 1789–94 (in the view of some historians, the span of the revolution is expanded to included the Napoleonic era, notably up to 1814!). The remarkably mixed, diversified, and complex society that is often presented to us as a “transitional period” was, in fact, an era in its own right that social ecology can describe and interpret more insightfully than economistic interpretations. We shall see that the view of this remarkable era as merely “transitional”leads to a host of errors, particularly its depiction of the revolutionary era and its democratic aspirations as “bourgeois,” an imagery that makes capitalism a system more committed to freedom, or even ordinary civil liberties, than it was historically.

[13] This I believe probably accounts for Karl Marx’s strongly productivist bias in economic theory over the more consumptionist biases of contemporary economists. Marx, I believe, was quite correct when he pointed out that under capitalism, at least, it was production that created demand, not demand that created production, although there is an obvious interplay between the two at a surface level of economic life. Where he was most lacking was in his failure to recognize the cultural constraints that limited production and profoundly influenced the vulner· ability of a society to technological innovation. In this respect, ancient society was always a mystery to him, and its development was often explained in surprisingly conventional ways.

[14] That Engels’s commitment to a harsh concept of technological progress, indeed, the whole Marxist theory of “historical materialism,” was meant to slap not only the face of philosophical idealism but also of the high spirit of European romanticism is an issue that has yet to be fully explored. Gray became a favorite color of Marxian socialism as part of its deliberate endeavor to disenchant the world and relegate the past, with all its humane as well as barbarous traditions, to a historical “junk heap.” Eventually socialism, like Puritanism, was to be deprived of all its ethical content and turned into a doctrine very much like the egoistic political economy of the industrial bourgeoisie itself.