Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference

312 Pages·2012·10.13 MB·English

by  Fred Lawrence (editor)

ETHICS IN MAKING A LIVING
The Jane Jacobs Conference
edited by
Fred Lawrence
Supplementary Issue of the Lonergan Workshop Journal
Volume 7
Fred Lawrence, editor
Scholars Press
Atlanta, Georgia
ETHICS IN MAKING A LIVING
edited by
Fred Lawrence
© 1989
Boston College
Library of Congress Cata1ogi~ in Publication Data
Ethics in making a living I edited by Fred Lawrence.
p. cm.
Supplementary issue of Lonergan workshop journal. v. 7.
ISBN 1-55540-368-9 (alk. paper)
1. Economics--Mora! and ethical aspects-Congresses. 2. Jacobs,
Jane. 1916- --Congresses. I. Lawrence, Fred. n. Lonergan
workshop. v. 7 (Supplement)
HB72.E785 1989
174'.4--dc20 89-10275
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Editor's Introduction
Our Spring Lonergan Workshop devoted to the work of
Jane Jacobs took place on April 10th and lIth, 1987, and was
entitled, "Values and Ethics in Making a Living." The work of
Jane Jacobs is of interest to anyone concerned with the analysis
of the real causes of urban decline, industrial stagnation, and
falling living standards. But she will also be attractive to people
intrigued with the thought of Bernard Lonergan, the mentor to
those at Boston College who were mainly instrumental in
organizing and speaking at this conference given so much
warmth and light by the presence of Jane Jacobs and her
husband, Bob; and by her talks and interventions throughout the
weekend.
Perhaps best known to the Catholic intellectual community
as the author of Method in Theology, Bernard Lonergan's most
characteristic achievement was to spell out the implications for
common sense, for mathematics and the sciences, for history,
for the humanities, philosophy, and theology of the statement
from Aristotle's On the Soul which is the epigraph for his other
most famous work. Aristotle asserted that human beings know
by apprehending forms or intelligibilities in images or
phantasms drawn from data we have sensed. Grasping the
intelligible in the concrete and the sensible is what allows us to
get from particular cases to general principles and from
universal theories and laws back to particular cases intelligently.
The title of the 748 page work in which Lonergan concentrated
on this is Insight: A Study oj Human Understanding. Lonergan
often said of Jane Jacobs, whose work he had read and followed
with immense interest and enthusiasm, "She's Mrs. Insight!"
Lonergan's avid reading of Jane Jacobs's books occurred in
conjunction with a life-long interest and labor for which he is
hardly known, namely, on the foundations of economics.
Iii
iv Editor's Introduction
Lonergan was inquiring about the structures of production,
monetary circulation, and finance associated with advanced
industrial economies: What is the underlying intelligibility that
relates capital formation to the production of a standard of living
within a national economy? Meanwhile Jane Jacobs has focused
on the economy and ecology proper to cities and regions that
supply the micro-conditions for the macro-phenomena studied
by Lonergan. Their work is complementary. And Lonergan
always felt deeply the commonality of their approaches. They
each seek to understand the intelligibility of concrete processes
by accumulating insights and judgments in ways that are
"functional. interrelated, and dynamic." They both desire to
reach a correct understanding of the concrete and mutually
conditioning character of technological, economic, and political
aspects of the good of order to promote free human flourishing
without yielding to the tyranny of planning in the sense of the
word they both despise: using prediction and control to
engineer results. So Lonergan esteemed Jane Jacobs highly, and
he taught his students to esteem her highly, too.
A few of those students have forged the more proximate
link between Jane Jacobs and Boston College as the site of this
conference. Fr. Joseph Flanagan, SJ, has ever been a true
believer in Jacobs's advice about the messiness and seeming
inefficiency of creativity, though he has been quite effiCient in
his role as Chair of BC's Philosophy Department for many years.
But his creativity has made him the primum movens of two of
Boston College's most outstanding programs: the Perspectives
Program, a four-year alternative to BC's Core which features both
cross-disciplinary aspects and a well thought out design for the
renewal of liberal eductation; and the PULSE Program. He has
taught the PULSE Council course from its inception in the 60s,
making central use of Jane Jacobs's work. And indeed it was Fr.
Flanagan who first told Lonergan about Jane Jacobs and gave him
her books.
One of Fr. Flanagan's (and later Fr. Lonergan's) star
students, Prof. Patrick H. Byrne (Philosophy), played a crucial
role in founding the PULSE Program and was its first Director.
He embraced and helped formulate its approach to education
Editor's Introduction v
through joining concerns for moral and social justice with
academic reflection, since the days when he was doing his
Masters in Philosophy almost 20 years ago. After writing his
doctoral dissertation at SUNY Stony Brook on Einstein, Pat
returned to Boston College as a teacher with a unique set of
qualifications. He continued to be a guiding force in the PULSE
Program; he helped to establish and solidify the Faith, Peace,
and Justice Program at Boston College. But then too his
wonderful comprehension of mathematics and the natural
sciences fitted him to lead a several years long collaboration
among a group of faculty members from the diverse science and
mathematics departments that ended in The New SCientific
Visions component of the Perspectives Program.
A genial aspect of the Perspectives Program was that as
the teachers prepared and educated themselves to teach in it
they had an opportunity that they otherwise would not have had
to become liberally educated themselves. Nowhere is this
ongoing cross-fertilization between sections of Perspectives and
the PULSE Program more strikingly evident than in the way Pat
Byrne helped reshape PULSE's pedagogical strategy of letting
classic texts illumine the at least twelve hours per week of
experience in the field students are required to undertake. Like
Fr. Flanagan, Pat used Jane Jacobs's work to help PULSE kids
understand the city as the scene of their various field projects;
and he uses her in teaching Insight to undergraduates as well.
No one has had more to do with making Jane Jacobs's
presence at BC for this Workshop possible than Richard Carroll
Keeley. Dick too is blessed with a unique combination of diverse
gifts. He is an accomplished public speaker and writer. He has
been director of PULSE for more than a decade. His
organizational and managerial skills have enabled him to oversee
the many details and crises involved in the roughly forty field
placements for between 200 and 300 students each semester
throughout metropolitan Boston, and to coordinate as well as
teach in the academiC PuLSE courses. He also participated for
four years in the foundation of the Horizons in the New Social
Sciences part of Perspectives. His commitment to inter-
disciplinary and scholarly and theoretic work is constantly
vi Editor's Introduction
evident. Thus he has not only used Jane Jacobs's work for
guidance in his courses, but has become a genuine authority on
her work as well. Dick has corresponded with her for many
years, keeping her informed about doings here at BC and
repeatedly inviting her to come and share with us. At last she
graciously and generously accepted Dick's invitation by way of
rare exception from her usual mode of working quietly outside
the limelight. And so we are especially grateful to Dick, Pat, and
Fr. Joe, without each of whom this volume would have never
been possible.
Let us turn now to the overall contents of this volume.
Dick Keeley contributes two pieces to it: a shorter one that
conveys with remarkable clarity and brevity the vision animating
Jacobs's chief works prior to this Workshop; and a much longer
piece which reviews the critical literature on her work and
offers responses to these criticisms. In the first piece Dick
quotes an astonishing letter from Jacobs in which she expresses
her method of investigating and writing, once again
demonstrating how richly deserved the title of 'Mrs. Insight' is.
We are also deeply indebted to Dick for an in-depth interview he
had done with Jane Jacobs the previous summer at her home in
Toronto: it's a gold mine.
Pat Byrne's article shows forth the connections between
Jacobs's approach to social. economic, and cultural issues of
human flourishing in cities and the tradition of inquiry about
these matters under the head of the common good, or of
Lonergan's notion of the "human good."
Anthony Cichello, now a Masters student in Philosophy at
BC, offers us a portion of his senior thesis in which he considers
Jacobs's chief works and the main standard objections by her
critics in light of Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm-change in
science and of Bernard Lonergan's cognitional theory.
The papers "Systems of Economic Ethics I and II"
represent Jane Jacobs's first public efforts to articulate the
latest theme in her research into economics: raiding and trading
as two basic models of economic life. With startling freshness
she both describes and begins systematically to correlate the
relationships within and between these autonomous and
Editor's Introduction vii
complementary ways of making a living. The bulk of the
question and answer periods is devoted to the contents of these
papers. But Mrs. Jacobs has also let us publish a paper that gives
concrete examples of the dynamics of import-replacement in
Cities and regions.
We are also publishing a letter to Jane Jacobs soon after
the conference from a graduate student in philosophy who was
then writing a dissertation on Eric Voegelin's thought, and is
now a lecturer at Simmons College, Chip Hughes, together with
Jacobs's response. In Chip's letter one can see the sympathetic
assessment of the strengths and possible shortcomings in
papers so typical of the Workshop; and her reply indicates how
her mind is still changing as she continues to work on this novel
set of ideas about the way we make a living. My own response to
her papers along with her response to all questions and
suggestions show how open and flexible her mind is as she
develops her insights and judgments.
This volume would not have seen the light of day were it
not for the transcribers of the tapes from our four seSSions,
Paulette and Paul Kidder. As always I am grateful to Charles
Hefling and Pat Byrne for all their help to me. But above all I
want to express my gratitude to Pat Brown. who has been so
painstaking in word-processing, editing, and reading proof, as
welt as in the seemingly endless leg-work involved in bringing
out this iss'.le.
FRED LAWRENCE
9 April 1989
CONTENTS
Editor's Introduction iii
An Interview with Jane Jacobs
Richard Carroll Keeley and Jane Jacobs 1
Some Paths Through Jane Jacobs's Thought
Richard Carroll Keeley 29
The Vision of Jane Jacobs: An Overview and
An Interpretation
Richard Carroll Keeley 39
In Defense of Jane Jacobs: An Appreciative Overview
Anthony Cichello 99
Jane Jacobs and the Common Good
Patrick H. Byrne 169
Systems of Economic Ethics: A Response
Fred Lawrence 191
Some Further Reflections and Comments: A Letter
Patrick H. Byrne 203
Systems of Economic Ethics, Part One
Jane Jacobs 211
Systems of Economic Ethics, Part Two
Jane Jacobs 251
Exchange of Letters: Hughes and Jacobs
Glenn Hughes and Jane Jacobs 287
Cleveland and the Wealth of the Nation
Jane Jacobs 293
Ix
AN INTERVIEW WITH JANE JACOBS
Richard Carroll Keeley
Boston College
This is an edited transcript of an interview which took
place in Toronto on July 4, 1985.
What I'm astonished by is the range of things that you draw
on to make your case. For instance, in The Economy of
Cities when you begin to think about "new work" and where
it originates, your first point of reference is Herodotus and,
then, Martial. The contemporary way of approaching these
things is to say, "let's look around and see what's
happening now." But here you are ranging back to the
Greeks and Romans. Why would you suspect that there'd be
something to learn from ancient history, from Greek
historians and Roman poets?
It's well recognized in fiction and in poetry and in history that
there's much to learn from them! There are certain universals
that run through human life, certain puzzles, certain sadnesses
and triumphs, whatever. We don't have to reinvent the wheel in
every way: there's a lot of experience behind us. And I think this
is true in economic life. In fact, our economies are built on what
people did before us. To act as if they come full blown from
when the steam engine was invented-that kills me! There was a
lot of time leading up to that sort of engine.
Sort of the way that if you're reading a history text in high
school you learn that the Industrial Revolution "started" in
the middle of the 19th century ...