City and Regime in the American Republic PDF
Preview City and Regime in the American Republic
City and Regime in the American Republic Stephen L. Elkin City and Regime in the American Republic The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1987 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1987 Printed in the United States of America 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 5432 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elkin, Stephen L. City and regime in the American republic. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Municipal government-United States. I. Tide. jS341.E44 1987 352'.0072'0973 87-5964 ISBN 0-226-20465-0 ISBN 0-226-20466-9 (pbk.) Stephen L. Elkin teaches political science at the Univer sity of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Politics and Land Use Planning and the coeditor of The Democratic State. For D, my teacher The role of reason in politics is now generally obscured by the popularity in our time of political science as the study of power. Charles E. lindblom, The Intelligmce of Democracy Fruitful social science must be very largely a study of what is not, a construction of hypothetical models of possible worlds which might exist if some of the alterable conditions were made different. Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty Contents Preface IX Acknowledgments Xl 1. Introduction 1 2. City, State, and Market 18 3. Urban Political Economies 36 4. An Entrepreneurial Political Economy 61 5. Systematic Bias and Effective Problem Solving 83 6. City and Regime 102 7. A Commercial Republic? 124 8. The Commercial Public Interest and the Urban Citizenry 146 9. The Probable and the Desirable 170 10. Some Considerations on Political Judgment 189 Bibliography 201 Index 217 Vll Preface This book grows out of several intellectual impulses. One of these is the attempt to discover how political science can guide political prac tice. As are many other political scientists, I am embarrassed by the paucity of guidance for practical affairs that political science presently offers. I do not mean to imply that political science should be a kind of nuts-and-bolts enterprise that could serve to train the new recruit to a government bureaucracy, for example, although I confess to thinking that this might be a good deal more intellectually valuable than developing the propositions offered by many parts of the dis cipline. Instead, I am thinking of the intelligent citizen who might be gratified to gain a deeper understanding of what is required to create and maintain a political way of life that he considers worthy. Political science as it now stands has far too little to offer such a person. This book is, in part, designed to prompt the kind of thinking that will help to remedy this deficiency. A second impulse is to nudge political science away from what might be called the "organ" theory of politics-that is, that there are only parts and no wholes, that, in the happy (and somewhat altered) refrain of the popular song, we ain't got no body. This emphasis on parts leads to detailed and often very fine studies of the Congress and political parties, to take two examples, but surprisingly little attention is given to what the studies are for. Sometimes the more sophisticated practitioners of this approach make the claim that such studies are designed to determine how we match up against some normative standard. But what is puzzling about such claims is that they do not go far enough. After all, we as Americans are not pursuing an ab straction called liberal democracy but are trying to conduct a political life that is built on a specific institutional inheritance and on an in herited political vocabulary. Thus, political wholes, properly under stood, seem to me to be tied to circumstance and history as much as to philosophy. IX x PREFACE The other impulses can be more briefly described. I have long been interested in cities--and now I know why. There are two reasons, both of which are displayed in this book. One reason is that the study of cities affords an intimate appreciation of how state-market relations operate in a liberal democracy. Students of cities are less likely to believe that businessmen are simply another, albeit powerful, interest group. This is a useful foundation on which might be built more comprehensive thoughts about the place of business corporations and property in our national political life. The second reason is that the political institutions of the city are potentially crucial in helping to prepare the citizenry to operate the commercial republic that the founding fathers set in motion. Cities ate an organ of a particularly important kind in the larger political whole. The shape of the book reflects an amalgam of these impulses, and thus it is inevitably a compromise. Its organization and emphasis reflect the diversity of the intellectual starting points. Just as I have learned much from trying to marry the various themes, so I offer the results in the hope that others will gain something from its eclec ticism. The book is in the nature of a theoretical essay. The test of a good essay is whether it can build on what is widely believed to be true--and present it in illuminating ways. This is what I hope to have achieved.
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