The American Spectator

Templeton Essay

Freedom and the City

By Brian C. Anderson from the October 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

First, free cities are often hothouses of economic growth. Urbanist Jane Jacobs has contended, plausibly to my mind, that virtually all economic development since the dawn of time has been generated in cities. By packing together so many people, often from different backgrounds and boasting a great variety of skills, urban agglomerations offer radical economic efficiencies—in a big city like New York, you can quickly get your hands on almost anything. Dense populations also fire creativity and invention, the true engines of wealth. Think of the fusion foods, the cultural inventions, the technological marvels, and the cornucopia of new goods that dynamic cities regularly produce. These urban advantages of efficiency and creativity are key reasons people continue to flood into cities, despite the higher costs, both financial and stress-related, of urban life. More than half of the world’s population is now urban, and this for a very good reason.

But there are other significant factors besides scale and variety. The Italian city-states transformed themselves into the West’s first economic dynamos largely because of the invention of effective, neutral institutions: banks, contracts, joint-stock companies, letters of credit, courts of appeal, and so on. These inventions established the framework for modern capitalism, by permitting trust between strangers, cooperation outside the family, and the ability of investors to secure assets.

That raises a second question, however: Why did these institutions arise first in the West? Greif, a professor at Stanford and a rising star of contemporary economic thought, argues that Western culture— the Western emphasis on the individual, born of Christianity—encouraged such innovations. Comparing the Christian Genoese with the Maghrebis, Jewish traders from North Africa who competed fiercely with the Italian city-states for economic control of the 12th-century Mediterranean, Greif shows how the Maghrebis’ thicker tribal relations held them back economically. They could raise money only from within the community, not in a credit market, like the Genoese, and their trading networks were familial as well, which limited their size compared with their Christian competitors, whose beliefs allowed them to extend far wider networks of trust. Maghrebi conflicts were not adjudicated in neutral courts like those of Genoa, and often culminated in violence and permanent banishments. Over time, the Maghrebis’ communitarian approach to economic life proved less efficient and more fragile than the Genoese fidelity to rational institutions and the rule of law. In Greif’s view, the West’s institutional history is a long story of creating substitutes for the ties of the tribal family in just this way. This process is unthinkable without Christianity’s trust-creating and culture-forming influence.

A few years ago, social scientist Rodney Stark concluded his book The Victory of Reason by quoting a Chinese scholar, the Communist Party had tasked with leading a study group to understand the West’s pre-eminence. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective,” the researcher said. “At first, we thought it was because you [the West] had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubts about this.”

A closely related component of the West’s civilizational genius was brought to life in the trading cities of northern Italy: urbanity. “City air brings freedom,” went an old saying, dating from feudal times. In the nascent bourgeois cities, the personal bondage of feudalism dissolved, replaced by a new kind of solidarity among the traders and artisans, and soon among the lawyers, bankers, and others providing services to the proto-capitalist economy.

This solidarity based itself, not on familial or religious obligation or on land ownership or birth in a caste or race, but instead on rational economic interests and a demand for autonomy that soon translated itself into political terms. This solidarity was the matrix of modern civil society, and the foundation of our democratic way of life.

This urban economic and civic culture offered citizens the chance to pursue material interests, to realize new rights and liberties, and to develop richer, more diverse personalities. We find this culture, at least a degree of it, wherever or whenever a Western city has since flourished. It arose only in the West, and Christianity’s universalizing power is again the explanation. (Dutch social theorist Anton Zijderveld traces this story artfully in his 1998 book, A Theory of Urbanity.) That the culture of urbanity might also work to loosen city dwellers from the duties of Christian faith—from faith in general— and thereby undermine its own foundations has been an irony of Western history. To talk about the culture of urbanity is to talk of the bourgeois virtues. These virtues—prudence, enterprise, fairness, hard work, sociability, honesty, thrift, self-possession, civility—are not those of the saint or the warrior. They stand to the warrior virtues as humility stands to pride. But by influencing and shaping the movements of the free economy, they have brought unprecedented prosperity, cooperation among strangers, social peace, and scientific and cultural progress. In a fallen world, they are more than defensible; from the standpoint of social order, they are the best we have yet devised.  which is not to say that the virtues of the saint and the warrior are obsolete, for these too are needed if a society is to confront natural disasters and external threats.

The 20th century witnessed a brutal war on this social order and its imperfect decencies.

The most destructive part of that war had its first stirrings much earlier, with Rousseau and the German Romantics, who despised the commercial pursuits and private interests of the modern city, seeing them as corrosive of organic community and its moral and symbolic traditions. For such critics bourgeois virtues were not virtues but corruptions. Even some of the American Founders were not exempt from these anti-urban suspicions. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, extolled farmers as “the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people,” the rock of republican government, very different from the urban “mobs,” who “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” (Late in life Jefferson recognized America’s need for cities if the nation was to become a great manufacturing power and militarily protect its freedoms—nothing ever got built in the country—and he certainly knew how to enjoy Paris.) By the 19th century “bourgeois” had become, in the words of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, “the most pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouths of socialists and artists, and later even of fascists.” The bourgeois is the villain of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. And, as we know from the subsequent “anti-bourgeois” crimes of the communists and Nazis, this fomenting of hatred toward ordinary urban life had dreadful effects.

Leading the anti-bourgeois reaction have been many of the bourgeois themselves. Consider how many Marxists were the sons or daughters of bankers, lawyers, merchants, and others raised in the culture of urbanity: Marx and Engels themselves, then Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse—and many more, including today’s innumerable tenured radicals. Modern bourgeois democracy has a seemingly infinite capacity to produce offspring who detest the social and political regime that has secured their privileges.

François Furet addressed this paradox in his 1999 book, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, arguing that communism and fascism exploited two weaknesses in the civilization against which they rebelled. The first is the ideal of equality promised by the “bourgeois city,” as Furet dubbed the modern political and economic order. The bourgeois freedoms—to pursue wealth, to strive for happiness, and to forge one’s destiny—erode equality. We are not all born with the same propensities and talents, and not all of us have the same luck or the same family circumstances.

Hence, although individual freedom means equal opportunities, it will for that very reason produce unequal outcomes. Communism promised to reach equality in a way that bourgeois society never could. All that was necessary was to crush a few political obstacles, and to eradicate the multiplicity of private ends. Contemporary left-liberals like John Rawls promise something similar, albeit in a less bloodthirsty way. Rawls even raises the prospect of genetic engineering to overcome natural differences, thereby building an egalitarian society on the principles of Huxley’s Brave New World.

The second fundamental weakness of the bourgeois city, Furet argues, is moral indeterminacy. The liberal political order that has emerged in the West downplays any extra-human dimension, whether natural or supernatural, that might provide firm answers to the ultimate questions of existence. Such existential questions instead become privatized, displaced from the governing sphere to that of culture.

This frustrates a natural, but under modern conditions dangerous, impulse in man to see his highest aspirations and deepest meanings completely embodied in the central political authority, as they were, for instance, in the political institutions of Calvin’s Geneva.

Furet is keenly aware of the liberations secured by the bourgeois city, its unprecedented freedom from political tyranny and the dictatorship of poverty. But by contrast with movements that have sought to establish their highest ideals politically, such as communism, fascism, and Nazism, the bourgeois city has seemed to many to be thin, boring, alienating, and cold. Furet’s wise book warns the citizens of the West to live with bourgeois imperfections. The alternatives, though perfectionist, are worse then imperfect; they are lethal. And the bourgeois city has never been as alienating, as empty of meaning, as its critics on the left and right have charged. On the contrary. Consider Chicago. It is no utopia: it remains crime-plagued, its economy struggles at times, it has a stubbornly entrenched black underclass, and its politics are legendarily corrupt. Yet it is a functioning, living place, filled with the kind of meaningful community— the gemeinschaftlich attachments—that antiurbanists claim the city invariably destroys.

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