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Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference PDF

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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 ...

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