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Chapter 3 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley The purpose of this study is to recover politics as a creative and rational arena of discourse capable of uniting disparate individuals within a reasonable commonality. The citizen ideal as it was originally conceived and practised in classical Greece formed a complete contrast with modern notions of citizenship. The overarching ethic uniting citizens with each other within the polis was the organic and ecological conception of politics as integral to personal development. This is what the Greeks defined as paideia. As with so many of the classical terms defining politics, there is no adequate English translation with which to translate the meaning of this term in all of its richness. Paideia is normally translated as education, but the term connotes much more than this. By paideia the Greeks understood a formative and life-long process through which the individual became an asset to the polis, to his friends and family, capable of and willing to live up to the highest ideals of the community. The term is expansive and adumbrates a range of potentialities from the personal to the public. There is no English equivalent. The closest is the German concept of Bildung, which played a crucial role in Hegel’s political philosophy. This concept encompasses character development, growth, and a well-rounded enculturation so that the body politic is equipped with the knowledge and skills it needs to flourish. Bildung affirms the creative integration of the individual into the environment through the ability to shape, appreciate and transform that environment as his or her own world, an extension of one’s flourishing humanity. Educated thus, the individual acquires a comprehensive sense of duty as well as becoming capable of assuming ethical and political responsibility for the world around. The modern instrumental notion of means and ends is totally inappropriate in this context. The individual and the polis are simultaneously means and ends – the end of the polis is human self-realisation, the self-realisation of the citizen is the means by which the polis flourishes. Excellence in personal and public life are mutually conditional. The polis is the realised community of realised individuals. Education is therefore a unified process of self- and civic-development. Here is the answer to Marx’s question as to who shall educate the educator. If the polis is the ‘school’ in which the highest virtues of the individual as citizen were formed and given expression, it is also informed by the public commitment of the citizens. Politics was concerned not simply with administering the collective affairs of the polis but also with nurturing its members as public beings who were capable of assuming a citizen identity through developing the competence to appreciate and to act in the public interest. Paideia was both a civic schooling and personal training which cultivated both independence of mind and individual responsibility within an overarching civic culture and commitment. In comparison, modern notions of politics as the effective administration of public order and of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills are remarkably thin. To the Athenians, politics and education go together as social practices. The conception is inherently organic and holistic, ruling out any instrumental means-ends rationality and the strict demarcation of distinctive spheres which pervades the modern world. Hellenic politics is concerned not merely with the efficient transaction of public business and the making of laws but with the human growth of its participants. The process by which the Athenians gathered as an ekklesia to decide upon policies was simultaneously a mutual education in which each learned the judgement to act justly according to an appreciation of civic ideals of right and wrong. The political realm was not strictly institutional and administrative but was indeed a process in being a continuous, everyday framework for intellectual, ethical, and personal growth. Paideia nurtured the capacity of individuals to participate in public affairs in a creatively meaningful sense, engaging their best abilities to promote the development of the polis and ensuring their own self-development, succeeding in determining their private affairs in accordance with the collective affairs of the public community.
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This volume is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible.
Chapter 1 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley This study is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding politics at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is quite opposed to the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible. The principle of self-sufficiency or autarchy derives from ancient Athens. Yet Athens was not a closed city-state but engaged in a Mediterranean-wide trade in order to secure the resources it needed to satisfy its everyday needs.
Part 1 Cities and Citizenship This part is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible. Part 2 The Philosophical Idea of the City This part grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation. Proceeding from chapters on Plato and Aristotle, this part details the evolution of cities alongside changing conceptions of citizenship, up to and including the Hellenic world. Part 3 Universitas The City from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance This part examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance. The flaw in the attempt to establish the universal state is easy to identify: universalist theories and programmes have tried to impose beliefs, practices and identities from above and from the outside, from the centre outwards and downwards, which can only be achieved on an enduring basis by consent. These attempts pay insufficient attention to the need to identify the conditions and relations facilitating the individual grasp of the universal via social and discursive interaction. Part 4 The Rationalisation of the City This part traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification proceeding from the scientific and industrial revolutions. The argument establishes a concept of “rational freedom” through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Through these philosophers, freedom is defined as an interdependent notion connecting each individual with all other individuals. This defines an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. The modernist break with the “rational” philosophical legacy is located in a Weberian process of rationalisation, implying the commodification, instrumentalisation and bureaucratisation of the urban lifeworld. The city is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a rational telos but instead emerges as an instrument of force, of autonomy-denying alien power. This part locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation. Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region. Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities. Part 5 The Economic Concept of the City The critical focus of this part is upon abstracting and diremptive tendencies within the city, particularly with respect to new symbolic and informational economic geographies. Critical attention is paid to the iniquitous realities behind the provision of post-industrial infrastructures (convention centres, office developments, finance-insurance-real estate stations, consumer landscapes, gentrified downtowns) in contemporary urban development and regeneration. The argument concludes that the result of social division and exclusion is an “ecology of fear” generating the militarisation of urban space and the privatisation of residential and commercial space. This part examines the urban consequences of social and spatial injustice, paying particular attention to the work of Mike Davis (1990 1998). Part 6 The City as Social Movement This part addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This is achieved by locating the “rational” philosophical ideal within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the “politics of difference” (Young 1990) within a universal frame. The conception of urban justice builds upon the work of John Rawls (1973) but rejects Rawlsian universalism as abstract and disembodied in being identified with formal legal-institutional structures. Instead, an ethic based upon the responsive social intercourse of individuals within community is developed. This ethic draws upon essentialist (Nussbaum 1986 1992), feminist (eg Gilligan 1982), communitarian (Sandel 1982) and ontological liberal (Raz 1986) modes of thought to locate individual rights within a conception of human flourishing within expansive structures of community interaction and communication. This part proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community." Part 7 The Ecological Concept of the City Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This part shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human/anti-ecological) forms.
"This volume traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification proceeding from the scientific and industrial revolutions. The argument establishes a concept of “rational freedom” through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Through these philosophers, freedom is defined as an interdependent notion connecting each individual with all other individuals. This defines an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. The modernist break with the “rational” philosophical legacy is located in a Weberian process of rationalisation, implying the commodification, instrumentalisation and bureaucratisation of the urban lifeworld. The city is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a rational telos but instead emerges as an instrument of force, of autonomy-denying alien power. This volume locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation. Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region. Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities."
"This volume addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This is achieved by locating the “rational” philosophical ideal within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the “politics of difference” (Young 1990) within a universal frame. The conception of urban justice builds upon the work of John Rawls (1973) but rejects Rawlsian universalism as abstract and disembodied in being identified with formal legal-institutional structures. Instead, an ethic based upon the responsive social intercourse of individuals within community is developed. This ethic draws upon essentialist (Nussbaum 1986 1992), feminist (eg Gilligan 1982), communitarian (Sandel 1982) and ontological liberal (Raz 1986) modes of thought to locate individual rights within a conception of human flourishing within expansive structures of community interaction and communication. This volume proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community."
Chapter 4 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley For political, social, cultural and sociological reasons, the future of the city is one of the most important questions facing the contemporary world. Since most of the world live in an urban environment and since even more people are likely to be living in an urban environment in the future, it follows that for ethico-anthropological reasons this environment needs to be humanised. The urban environment needs to correspond with rather than contradict the human ontology. This book addresses this question by reconstructing the philosophical conception of the city (Part I), proceeding to show how capitalist urbanisation has subordinated this conception to economic forces (Part II), going on to argue for the social conception of the city that integrates all aspects in a true public life (Part III). The purpose of this book, then, is to unravel the question of what the city is, what it ought to be and what it could be. This Introduction is concerned to lay the foundation of the argument by emphasising the extent to which the city is constituted by the urban associative culture and society. The argument rests upon a notion of the city as process. This is a relational conception that emphasises the reciprocity, exchange, interaction and solidarity between the individuals composing the city. The argument affirms the city as the essential physical terrain for the development of a viable commonality. The city is not the place of the individual, but the place of the individuals who together constitute a community; it is the relation between individuals that continuously draws together the threads of ideas and expanding information. The city supplies the physical, social and relational context for this information, facilitating access to the product of that information and ensuring the implementation of any public policy based on that information. There is no civilisation without these three factors and the city is crucial to their effectiveness. The city is not merely a physical entity or a site of economic activity but is the embodiment and expression of the human spirit. There is a connection between the processes of urbanisation and of humanisation. Where some, like Davis (1965), predict the end of urbanisation, this book defends the city as integral to human growth. The question, then, is not whether the process of urbanisation will end but how, as an ongoing process, urbanisation can be consciously controlled so as to respect the qualities of scale, balance and form constituting a viable urban order.
From The City of Reason vol 4 The Rationalisation of the City by Dr Peter Critchley The symbiotic relationship between the centralised nation state and the global capital system amounts to a system of alien control to which all human purpose is subordinated. The state and the capital system are, by their very nature, designed to appropriate, centralise and monopolise power, whether from labour, the community or nature. The state and capital expropriate and enclose human and ecological life systems together, commodify and privatise them in order to maximise the exploitation of scarce resources, expand production and consumption, and advance utilitarian self-interest. This expansionary, nihilistic system has generated the economic and ecological crises of the modern world. The alien control of the state and capital has been the principal agency for implementing the ideals of the Enlightenment. It is therefore crucial to comprehend the dynamic role that the state and capital have played in humanity’s attempt to achieve a material existence in autonomy from nature through the technological conquest of the environment. The new capitalist order redefined urbanism in ways which conflicted with older urban solidarities and which continue to block the emergence of new solidarities in the contemporary world. The modern city is the site of the capital economy. Capital is the principal agency of rationalisation, something that transforms the character of reason. Reason comes to concern less the realisation of human nature and more the realisation of the surplus value invested in commodities. The predominance of exchange value is an inversion of subject and object that results in the loss of substantiality. This substantiality pertaining to persons is replaced by instrumental, fluid relationships that reduce persons to means to external ends. The capital economy generates the predominance of instrumental over substantive rationality, with irrational results for the socio-urban environment. The systemic processes of private accumulation have caused social dislocation, inequality, economic crisis and ecological destruction within the city. And as systemic, these processes are non-discursive, not open to citizen interaction and discourse; they are non-negotiable. The resolution of the problems of urbanism lie in the future reappropriation of the social power alienated to the built environment and social processes of the capital city. The work of Max Weber is important in terms of the stress that he places upon the extent to which modern rationalisation has irrevocably changed the terms of moral argument. Max Weber may be considered the representative of the urban cosmopolitan conception of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberal world view. He argued for the superior rationality of the institutions of liberal industrial capitalism and the values of modern urban culture. Weber’s intellectual roots and moral concerns, however, are in the ‘rational’ tradition of philosophy dating from Plato and Aristotle. His concern with the ethical development of ‘Menschentum’ places him within German philosophical anthropology, demonstrating a normative concern with the most appropriate mode of life for human self-development. Weber thus shows how the social and cultural requirements of modern capitalism contradict the ontology of human beings, begging the question of the appropriate regimen for human self-realisation.
This book identifies the contemporary environmental crisis as a call to create a new biocentric civilisation. Proceeding from the identification of the constants of civlised life, the argument seeks to build constructive ecological models by relating Green politics to philosophy and ethics. This approach seeks to develop a practical, institution building orientation out of fundamental Green principles. In the process, the gap between the 'is' of the real world and the 'ought to be' of philosophy is closed via notions of cognitive praxis and ecological praxis. Ensuring the unity of subject and object is a way of recovering the original meaning of politics as creative human self-realisation. Eudaimonia in Aristotle and conatus in Spinoza are identified as crucial to human flourishing, identified as definitive of the good life. Reason is shown to be central to this conception of happiness and the constitution of the common good. The book criticises market society and its atomistic relations as a reversion to the lowest form of reasoning in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In relating ecological praxis to civilisation, the book calls for the extension of communicative and cooperative structures in order to foster and embed the rational restraint crucial to long term freedom for all in social relations and institutions.. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Habermas to this view are all emphasised.
How can we avert ecological catastrophe and avoid social collapse? What is the practical relevance of ethics and philosophy? How can we build community? In the forthcoming book, Being and Place, I address the question of why, despite a wealth of knowledge and know-how, we are failing to respond to social and ecological crisis and bring about the ecological society. The book presents alternative ways of life that can help us create an ecological society. The solutions to our crises, I argue, are within our grasp and can be achieved through practising a notion of eco-praxis. The key question is this: Is humanity capable of creating institutions and sustaining practices that are geared to the long-range collective good, or are we irrevocably short-term thinkers? I do emphasise agency, meaning, will and values in a participatory and creative universe. My main purpose in this book is to provide a diagnosis of the social, moral and ecological failures of modernity, going on to emphasise solutions, transitions, practices and transformations bringing out the social-ecological society - the Ecopolis. I work in the tradition of virtue ethics and am developing the notion of ecological virtue. You can call the virtues qualities for successful/sustainable living, and such qualities are to be defined in terms of the ecological conditions for human and planetary flourishing. If that sounds arcane or abstruse think of it in these terms, our current form of socialisation is concerned with shaping people to be producers geared to the endless accumulation of material quantities and consumers forever running on the hedonistic treadmill. The truth is that the vices of endless production – production for the sake of production, accumulation of means for the sake of means is without end and is a nihilism - and overconsumption are undermining the social and ecological bases of civilised life. All of which begs the question of how to create the ‘happy habitus’ (eudaimonia = flourishing) which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues, construct the right character, develop the right habits and create capabilities. Within prevailing social relations, there is no necessary connection between the individual/private good and the social/ecological/public good. That means that the common good is something abstract and that all appeals to such a good are lacking in social relevance; they presume a social identity that does not exist. The kind of identity presupposed by the modern market society within which we live is that of the self-interested individual whose own good may well be achieved in ways detrimental to the overall social and ecological good. Any overall good that may result from such self-interested behaviour is indirect. To demand that such an individual serve the common good and live the virtuous life is to expect an altruism which, within prevailing social relations, is irrational, a sacrifice of a tangible and immediate individual self-interest for a vague and intangible general interest. The result, though, is that individual freedom and reason generates a collective unfreedom and unreason (call it the crisis in the climate system and looming eco-catastrophe). As social beings, our lives are governed by collective forces. The problem is that we lack appropriate mechanisms of collective control capable of governing those forces. We require a social identity that establishes a direct connection between individual and social good so that responding to appeals to the common good would indeed be rational and require no irrational sacrifice of self-interest. An identity of this kind is not available within the instrumental market relations upon which society is patterned. Here, individual identity is constituted by abstraction, and the good is defined in terms of private acquisition and enjoyment. Such identity is the polar opposite of the identity given by participation in the politics and culture of the public life we need in order to be ourselves. In my current work, I argue not only for a recovery of virtue ethics, but for its extension as a conception of ecological virtue. This alone is insufficient, creating just another socially impotent and irrelevant ethic to join the club of warring gods in the modern world. We are not short of competing moralities, value judgements with no claim on society other than personal preference. The attempt to rework an ethic of virtue can only succeed if the context has been created to enable the social identity required by that ethic, a social identity which connects individual self-interest and the social interest. Only such a social identity serves to check the problem of the free rider. Without that identity, there is no connection between individual action and overall good, something which inhibits the individual from engaging in action for the greater good.
Chapter 2 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley The bad odour into which politics has fallen in the contemporary world indicates the extent to which it is no longer conceived as integral to the realisation of the human personality and is instead identified with remote institutions of power and representatives. For most people, politics refers to techniques for the management and manipulation of the masses. Whereas in the original sense politics concerned the ethical end of the realisation and exercise of the power belonging to all by all as an attribute of their essential humanity, politics now designates techniques for the instrumental end of exercising power over human beings. Politics has become a means of mass management and manipulation. In its original conception, politics was integral to human self-realisation and associated with the health and well-being of humanity through the actualisation and exercise of essential power. In the contemporary world, politics is no longer ethical but instrumental, denoting the acquisition and retention of institutional and instrumental power – the power of some over others – and inherently corruptive of both its practitioner and people over whom it is exercised. That politics is considered to possess an inherent tendency to corruption indicates the extent to which it has been perverted to mean the precise opposite of its original meaning. Far from being corrupt and corrupting, politics in the classical conception denoted the means and ends of human health and well-being through the creative unfolding of immanent human power. The question arises as to where, when and precisely how politics came to be removed from the body politic, defined as an autonomous sphere and finally came to be appropriated and monopolised by the institution of the state. With the classical Greeks, politics and public life are still grounded in human association at the level of the polis. It is well known that democracy was born in the Greek agora, that the term is Greek, meaning the rule of the people. There is no word for the state in Attic Greek. What is significant is the lack of curiosity with regard to the origins of the term on the part of those who so readily proclaim the ideal. For such a universally trumpeted value, democracy is a remarkably little known and hugely misunderstood political ideal. The apogee of Athenian democracy came some time towards the end of the fifth century B.C. Athens at this stage had still to see any institution that even resembled a state conceived in the modern terms of a professionalised institutional apparatus exercised for purposes social control. Indeed, Athenian democracy is the complete antithesis of a bureaucratised system of governance organised strictly for social control, explaining why no modern political leader dares to investigate closely the actual meaning of the democratic ideal.
"The argument of this book attempts to show the relevance of Marx's work to the attempt to create a new politics of citizenship. This argues that Marx is engaged above all in an attempt to formulate a new politics - specifically, a communist politics based upon the reintegration of political and social relationships, the overcoming of the state and civil society dualism and the dissolution of both spheres. This means defining democratisation as a repoliticisation, implying the extension of public spaces through a decentralisation resulting from the relocation of power from the abstracted political realm to the social realm. The concept of on active citizenship rooted in society is distinguished from the abstract citizenship conceded by the state, reading Marx in opposition to centralised, bureaucratised elitist state politics. Public life – libertarian communalism – social power and the state – conscious control – free association – commune democracy – the lost traditions of anarchism and marxism – postmarxism – democratisation – radical democracy – democracy as method – Norberto Bobbio, democracy and socialism – the social public."
Political Philosophy and Ethics This part examines the emancipatory potentialities of reason and freedom to constitute the good life for human beings. The argument considers politics as creative human self-realisation to possess an ineliminable normative dimension concerning the appropriate regiment for the good. Green political theory is analysed in the context of a philosophical concept of ‘rational freedom’ drawn from the work of Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel.
This volume grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation. Proceeding from chapters on Plato and Aristotle, the volume details the evolution of cities alongside changing conceptions of citizenship, up to and including the Hellenic world.
Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This volume shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human/anti-ecological) forms.
This book approaches the contemporary environmental crisis as a crisis of civilisation and as a call to generate a new way of life. The purpose of the book is to bring philosophical perspectives concerning reason and freedom to bear upon the moral, economic and ecological crisis of modernity with a view to constituting the good life. The book proceeds from a commitment to the good, the true and the beautiful as established by Pythagoras and developed by Plato. The attempt is made to overcome the bifurcation of culture and nature to show reason as the realisation of nature.
This volume challenges the limited character of freedom and democracy in liberal political theory by discussing the philosophical conception of ‘rational freedom’. This volume examines Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel and Kant to emphasise the communal and corporate character of freedom, locating the individual in a rich social-institutional fabric. The concept of 'rational freedom' is developed to challenge liberal-individualist conceptions of freedom. This concept embodies a principle of community and of a political authority that is legitimate in the sense that it is self-imposed.
This paper examines the anarchist roots of modern city studies and looks specifically at Howard, Kropotkin and Mumford. The attempt is to develop an ethical and political perspective that transcends individualism to establish and embed human freedom on a social basis. Anarchism is thus drawn into relationship with traditions of political philosophy which emphasise mutual self-assumed obligation, reciprocity and solidarity.
A chapter from Rational Freedom vol 3 The Critique of Alien Politics by Dr Peter Critchley This paper examines the institutional separation of the state from civil society with respect to what constitutes the boundaries of the political, who are to count as legitimate political actors and in what form their activity may take place. In comparison to the rich fabric of medieval guild life, modern politics is confined to the activity of career politicians concerned with the maximisation and prolongation of power. This is consistent with the institutional separation between state and civil society, which has been the centre of liberal politics and thought in the modern age. This paper considers the Hegel-Marx synthesis to offer an alternative way of conceiving the polity, its boundaries, its constituent parts, its participants and its spaces for participation. Hegel's organic concept of the corporation sought was criticised by Marx as a medieval solution to the problems of modernity. However, there is a strong case for arguing that Marx needed to pay more attention to the associative forms of civil life as themselves public spheres so as to check the temptation to crush civic autonomy under the Behemoth of the state. In contrast, Hegel gives associative values and aspirations a central place in political theory. This paper values Hegel for having acknowledged that solidarity and exchange - the poles around which the state and civil society rotate - are not antithetical to each other but are complementary. This paper argues that there is a need to renegotiate public-private boundaries so as to create a political texture as tough and complex as that of modern society itself. This is to develop a modern solution to the diremption and division of modernity.
2011
THE COMING ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION Abstract Part 1 The Emerging Ecological Consciousness This part connects the contemporary environmental crisis with the wider societal crisis. The environmental crisis is considered to be the product of a wider system failure. The perspective taken is that one civilisation is in the process of decay and another in the process of emerging. A fundamental critical self-examination of ourselves and our communities of struggle is necessary to locate and situate the choices, possibilities and strategies with respect to the circumscribed options within the system and the feasible alternatives to that system. This part examines the nature of the environmental crisis, paying particular attention to climate change and global poverty and inequality. Social and environmental justice are shown to be mutually supportive, the low-carbon economy which is a condition of the survival of civilised life also being socially just, egalitarian and democratic. The emergence of an ecological consciousness is shown to be part of the process of revolutionizing society, restructuring power, changing culture and emphasising the quality of individual lives over the quantity of material accumulation and possession. Part 2 The Coming Revolution in Economic Thought The environmental crisis is related to the crisis in economic thought and practice. The crisis in vision in economics is related to the economic system in general. This part exposes economics to be an ideology in the critical sense, that is, as not knowledge as such but a distorted knowledge concerning appearances which serves to conceal contradictions, material interests and power relations to the benefit of the dominant class. Conventional economics treats ‘the economy’ as an abstraction which functions independently of the political, social, moral and ecological context. This part restores economics to its true status as a means. Part of dealing with the future orientated problem of ecology involves examining in what direction economic thought must go in order to once more become relevant to human beings. The ecological problem is related to the globalisation of economic relations and the ‘free market’ economy. A distinction is made between price and value to reassert use value embedded in communities to the exchange value pursued on the market. The question of morality within market societies is addressed in terms of the need to secure the building blocks of a viable civilisation. The view is taken that the individual of Anglo-American liberalism an abstraction of market relations, a fictional person who exists only in the figure of homo economicus. Real individuals are shown to exist and flourish within a social matrix of reciprocal relations and trust. Part 3 Society as a Learning Mechanism Notions of knowledge and social transformation need to be reworked to take account of genuine change as a process rather than as event. It is a process because the new society only functions and flourishes if the individuals constituting it have developed their moral, political, intellectual and organisational capacities. In this sense, a social and ecological praxis is a form of capacity building which develops the know-how required to constitute the new social order. The argument draws upon the emergence of grass roots organisations and community organisations across the world and seeks to value the contributions that social movements can make not only to social provision but to urban governance. This part is organised around concerns for community, communication and the common good. Part 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics This part examines the emancipatory potentialities of reason and freedom to constitute the good life for human beings. The argument considers politics as creative human self-realisation to possess an ineliminable normative dimension concerning the appropriate regiment for the good. Green political theory is analysed in the context of a philosophical concept of ‘rational freedom’ drawn from the work of Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Part 5 Ecological Praxis This part goes from principles to practice to examine how the emerging ecological consciousness can be embedded in social practices and institutions. This is a question not only of how the ecological society can be created, but governed and made to work. This part looks at critical political issues and constructive models, identifies key tasks in organising for political change. Particular attention is paid to the political boundaries of change and the changing boundaries of politics. Part 6 Environmentalism as Politics This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.
2001
""This thesis approaches 'Marx's politics' from its 'rational' origins in ancient Greek thought. Stated briefly, ‘rational freedom’ affirms a socio-relational and ethical conception of freedom in which individual liberty depends upon and is constituted by the quality of relations with other individuals. Marx only used the term 'rational freedom' the once, in his early journalism, articulating an explicitly Hegelian view. However, the concept remains implicit in Marx’s critical perspectives throughout his later work.This thesis argues that Marx retained Hegel's principle of the state as ethical agency whilst rejecting the actual institution of the state. The argument of this thesis is that Marx both transforms and incorporates the 'rational' themes and values developed by Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Whereas the contemporary trend is to go 'beyond marxism' (Schecter 1994), the approach that this thesis takes is to go before Marx in order to locate communism as a 'true' public within a normative philosophical concern with the appropriate regimen for the human good. This reconstructs a tradition and a concept of 'rational freedom' around principles of reciprocity, mutual respect, communication, communality, solidarity. The 'rational' here comprehends subjectivity as an intersubjectivity which secures the unity of the freedom of each and the freedom of all. This tradition rejects the atomistic model of freedom as self-cancelling in equating freedom with unrestricted individual choice and the unregulated pursuit of self-interest (Marx Gr 1973:163/6). The 'rational ‘ conception defines freedom as conceivable only by locating individual interactions within a network of relationships. The failure of marxism to generate a true public life is part of a wider problematic - the failure to actualise 'rational freedom'. This failure is considered not to be a problem of the universal values and ideals – which traditional conservative and contemporary postmodern thought target – but existing relations, institutions and practices. Marx certainly realised that the automatic connection between reason and freedom under law could no longer be assumed in class society. But this led him less to abandon the 'rational' conception of freedom than to seek its material foundation in a classless society which has dissolved the abstracted legal-institutional form of reason into a self-organising democratic society. This thesis argues that Marx radicalised the 'rational' principle of collective and reciprocal freedom beyond the state in a new associational public. In transcending the legalistic and moralistic framework of the 'rational' tradition, This thesis demonstrates how Marx actualises rational unity of each individual with all individuals within the social world of everyday exchange, reciprocity and solidarity. Ch 1 The Conception of Rational Freedom Philosophy as the Rational Utopia – Ancient Greek Origins – Plato and Aristotle – The Good Life and the Common Good - Rousseau’s Democratic Social Contract - The General Will – Autonomy and Rational Authority – Sovereignty and Representation. Ch 2 Kant’s Community of Ends The Categorical Imperative – the Universal Law – the Realm of Ends – Political Peace – The Critique of Kantian Rationalism. Ch 3 Hegel’s Embodied Freedom The Grounding of Kant’s Morality and Rousseau’s Democracy – the Philosophy of Right – the Associative Civil Public. Ch 4 Marx’s Normative Democratic Community The Critique of Hegel’s State – the Critique of Atomistic Society – the Ontology of the Good Community. Ch 5 The Ontology of Reason – the Concept of Active Materialism Social Citizenship – Michel Foucault: Reason and Repression – the Realisation of Philosophy – Ontology: Praxis, Power and Nature – the Democratisation of Politics, Power and Philosophy. Ch 6 Reason and Rationalisation Weber: Modernity and Morality – Alienation and Separation as Key Figures – the Dialectic of Alien and Common Control – Individuality and Communality. Ch 7 Human Organisation - The Cooperative Commonwealth The Cooperative Mode of Production – The Political and the Public – The Democratic Transformation of ‘the Political’ – Commune Democracy as Social Self-Government. Ch 8 Reason and the Communicative Community Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity - The communicative Reformulation of the Graeco-Germanic Conception of Rational Freedom – System World and Life World – the Ideal Communication Community – the Discursive Public Sphere Ch 9 Rational Freedom and Contemporary Political Theory Double-Democratisation and the Recovery of Liberalism (Held and Keane) – ‘Liberal Socialism’ (Norberto Bobbio) – Liberalism and Communitarianism – (Rawls, Sandel, Raz, Walzer, Finnis, Galston) – the Relational Turn of Feminism – Radical Democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, Hirst, Heller)..""
2001
This thesis examines the idea of freedom in the thought of Karl Marx in relation to a philosophical tradition concerning the appropriate regimen for creative human self-realisation dating from Plato and Aristotle. The thesis consists of nine parts. Part One examines the work of a number of postmarxist democratic theorists in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Marx’s conception of democratisation as a singular process that overcomes the dualism of the state and civil society. The overemphasis upon institutional separation as a condition of democracy is shown to be mistaken. Instead, democracy is shown to be capable of being achieved only as the result of a singular process in which the power of control alienated to the state and capital is practically reappropriated and reorganised by society as a social power subject to conscious democratic control within everyday life. Part Two challenges the limited, ‘protective’ character of freedom and democracy in liberal political theory by developing the philosophical conception of ‘rational freedom’. This part examines the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel and Kant in order to emphasise the social and communal character of freedom, locating the individual in a rich social-institutional fabric. Part Three examines Marx’s critical relation to Hegel. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political philosophy is shown to reveal the state to be an alienated social power arising from the contradictions of civil society. In condemning Hegel for his idea of the state as an hypostatized abstraction, Marx is shown to turn the critical focus upon the abstracting tendencies of modern society. This part therefore establishes the basis for transcoding the process of abstraction into a fetishism of politics and production which runs through the whole capitalist social metabolic order. Marx's materialist problematic of reification is thus opposed to an idealist discourse on 'rationalisation' and the 'realisation of reason in history', given that the contradictions are located not in reason but in an alienated system of production. Part Four focuses upon the subversion of the universal and communal character of the principle of ‘rational freedom’ by a capitalistically structured civil society. Having dealt with the political implications of reason taking repressive form, suggesting how the future social order is to be organised, this part examines the moral questions raised by the 'bourgeois' character of capitalist modernity. The critical focus will, therefore, fall on Marx's critique of rights-based liberalism. Human emancipation as the practical reappropriation of social power is considered as asserting the priority of the good over the right, thus inverting contemporary Rawlsian liberalism. Part Five provides the ontological and socio-structural framework sustaining the conception of communism as the good society. Marx's praxis is defined as an affirmative materialism which forms the basis for asserting a democratic social control dissolving the institutional-systemic apparatus raised over the life world. Praxis as the core of Marx's ontology provides the basis for an analysis which comprehends a dynamic, multifaceted reality. The argument underlines the centrality of the notion of conscious, practical, creative and sensuous activity in Marx's affirmative and active materialism. Part Six addresses the question of mediation, arguing for a conception of social control as a form of self-determination and social self-mediation. In formulating the question in terms of the alienation of control within what Marx, calls a 'system of general social metabolism' (Grundrisse 1973:158/9), this part apprehends capital as a mode of alien control which is fundamentally uncontrollable. The commitment to abolish reified social relations directs Marx's project back to its premise of rooting society and social powers in the interaction of real individuals, establishing a new framework for free individuality and for addressing the problems of organisation and administration of post-capitalist society. Part Seven develops a conception of communist individuality. Whilst individualist liberals have accused Marx of attempting to foist an 'artificial unity' upon humanity, this part demonstrates that this is precisely what Marx considered the ‘objective dependency’ of the capital system to do. Marx argued against liberal notions of individual freedom precisely because he appreciated the extent to which individuals have come to be enslaved to their own powers under the capital system. This part shows that Marx's demand for communal control was designed to achieve individual freedom in a supra-individual world. The social control of individuals is opposed to the objective control of 'things'. The final two parts (Eight and Nine) seek to tie together the themes of true democracy, social control and self-mediation, affirmative materialism, community and communist individuality within a conception of commune democracy. Part Eight defends Marx’s early definition of ‘true democracy’ as entailing the dissolution of the state and of (capitalistically organised, inegalitarian, unpluralist) civil society as a single process. The argument delineates Marx's definition of democratisation, seeking its realisation outside of and against the abstract form of the state. Making a distinction between state and government, it is possible to develop the anti-statist character of democracy without thereby being committed to an antipolitical stance. By recognising plural identities and enabling participation, the notion of the communist public sphere comes into its own as a political society. Part Nine recognises that the need for constructive models of the socialist society has tended to be overlooked in marxist analyses in favour of the critique of the capitalist mode of production. This part shows that whilst Marx may be weak with respect to the institutional means of the socialist economy, he is strong at the level of principle. Taking an Aristotelian view that first principles are a strong foundation for any architecture, this part sets about filling in the details of a viable socialist economic order.
2014
In this book I shall develop the urban regional thought of Lewis Mumford in terms of a civic environmentalism concerned with the achievement of a public life fitted to the contours of an ecological civilization. I shall examine Mumford’s conception of ecological regionalism, democratic planning and the regional garden city as giving us both the ideal of a decentralized, balanced and humanly-scaled eco-public, and the means to achieve it. I shall show how Mumford sought to reconstruct public community aesthetically, politically and ecologically, integrating the urban and rural environments in the process. Defining Mumford’s view in terms of civic environmentalism, I connect the task of ecological restoration and preservation to a reinvigorated public life constituted by a democratic pluralism and civic mindedness. I will argue that the writings of Lewis Mumford on the garden city and regional planning suggest a conception of Ecopolis sustained by a vision of civic environmentalism. I will show how Mumford developed a planning intervention that not only countered the destructive consequences of over-urbanization but served also strengthen the civic capacity of the community and infuse political culture with an active democratic content. Mumford’s ecological regionalism combines planning, design and a biocentric understanding of natural processes within a politically grounded and civic-minded environmentalism. His work expresses a commitment to restore the health of democratic public life in the process of tackling the problems of urban life. I will therefore develop Mumford’s idea of regional planning and ecological regionalism in terms of a political or civic concern with environmentalism, in the process lifting the question of the human relation to nature out of academic confines and locating it in the public realm. In fine. Mumford envisions an Ecopolis constituted and sustained by a civic environmentalism.
This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.
This book traces the connection of ecology, regionalism and civilisation in the life's work of Lewis Mumford. The argument demonstrates Mumford's ecological regionalism as being grounded in a moral sense of place, Mumford offering an ecological civilisation as an alternative to the false imperatives of the megamachine. Mumford is shown to offer an alternative future based on organic plenitude as against the 'aimless dynamism' of endless material quantity within the megamachine.
From The City of Reason vol 2 The Philosophical Ideal by Dr Peter Critchley Throughout the centuries, Athens functioned as the ideal model of civic freedom and democracy. This model is a very idealised portrayal of Athens at a certain time. The which was dominant in ancient Athens was one of aristocratic freedom. At the time, the intellectual and political elites of Athens in the late fifth century were reactionaries, vociferous critics of democracy. There is a tendency to think of the polis as having an exclusively urban character. This is encouraged by the definition of the polis as a city-state and the conception of the city as an urban environment. The truth is that the ancient polis possessed an intrinsically rural character. Certainly, the polis did have its urban centres. Whilst many citizens lived near the agora, most Athenians lived scattered over the countryside and came to urban centre only to do political, religious or other business. And Athens was the most urban of the city-states. Other places had a much smaller proportion of its inhabitants engaged in mercantile, artisanal, intellectual, and similar activities. The point is that Greek citizenship, in both its celebrated Athenian and Spartan forms, is not an exclusively urban product but inheres in the countryside. Many of the key characteristics of citizenship which have endured throughout the ages reflect geographical considerations that are independent of the political organisation of the polis.
Please see the later revised version, "Beyond the Limits of the City." This earlierversion was published in Andrew Light, ed., _Social Ecology After Bookchin_ (NewYork: Guilford Publications, 1998), pp. 137-190.
2019, Harvard Journal of the Legal Left
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, many movements have emerged across the world not only to criticize the state and capitalism, but also to create a space for direct democracy. Whether it is Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados movement in Spain or Nuit Debout in France, these calls for the physical occupation of public squares have connected social movements from different horizons. While these spaces have given people a glimpse of how power could be exercised in a horizontal and non-hierarchical way, the fundamental issue is that they had no power to exercise. These occupations of public spaces eventually vanished due to the lack of institutionalization of their project of social transformation. Attempting to remedy both the lack of power and institutionalization, many municipalist movements have arisen throughout the world. They have created citizens platforms, run for municipal elections, were elected and are now trying to change the game of traditional representative democracy from city hall. This paper primarily intends to create a conceptual framework to capture the relation of these movements to the existing legal and political order. It will analyze the tensions inevitably generated when movements adopt the reformist strategy of winning municipal elections in order to advance a revolutionary project, that is creating a society in which the main political unit and the locus of self-government is the municipality, and not the state.
"Part of The Coming Ecological Revolution Pt 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics by Dr Peter Critchley This paper examines the Green claim that society - indeed, civilisation as we know it - cannot survive on the current basis and that a sustainable society must now be built on ecological principles. For O’Riordan, greens offer a ‘simple binary choice’ between two opposing 'world-views' (O'Riordan 1981: 300). Except that there is no real choice between survival or self-administered destruction. The argument contrasts the 'Life Necessities Society (LNS) to 'the 'Industrial Growth Society (IGS)' (Kvaloy 1990) in terms of competing 'Bioregional’ and 'Industrial-Scientific' paradigms (Sale 1985: 50). These are not choices but alternatives, with green values or principles as imperatives demanding a fundamental reconstruction of political society. For Ophuls, 'liberal democracy as we know it ... is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of institutions' (Ophuls 1977a: 3). This means that incremental reform and a piecemeal gradualism within existing political institutions is merely part of the general crisis of the existing techno-industrial system and not a coherent response to it. The paper argues that the Green failure to develop a new political philosophy and a new institutional framework derives from on an internal fracture within Green politics, split between an authoritarian vision based on fundamental green values and ecological imperatives on the one hand, and a democratic vision which, within an unchanged parliamentary and electoral politics, is based on people’s own opinions. Without a transformation of political institutions, green politics is extremely vulnerable, having to dilute its principles in order to widen electoral appeal, thus risking accommodation and absorption within the existing system, or even coming to supply the rationale justifying authoritarian government when the impact of ecological crisis starts to be felt. To accept the horizons of the existing political system is to limit aims to incremental tinkering within the system, with green politics reduced to little more than the attempt to manage and administer a mounting ecological crisis and disaster. The alternative to Green politics as a rescue squad is ecological praxis bringing about the ecological society, the idea that the practical transformation which brings about the ecological society is at the same time a political transformation in which the individuals composing the demos come to be capable of participating within communitarian direct democracy, thus uniting means and ends, form and content. As a goal abstracted from the constitutive praxis that brings it about, the ecological society is a utopia, incapable of realisation and lacking in electoral appeal. The same applies to all other ecological values. The notion of ecological praxis identifies the individual members of the demos as change agents bringing about the future sustainable society."
"Part of the PhD thesis Marx and Rational Freedom by Peter Critchley Plato and Aristotle defined the concept and established the philosophical foundations of what may be called ‘rational freedom’. Plato and Aristotle defined the key themes of ‘rational freedom’ and sought to show how these could be embodied in the polity. The most important question discussed by Plato and Aristotle concerns the nature of the relation of the individual to the political community. The human being as a zoon politikon or social animal is not an isolated, autonomous entity but a part of society, living in a social context. It follows that the flourishing of the individual required a social context that is devoted to realising the good life. Individuals as social beings realise their essential human potentialities in and through the political community, in relation to rather than as against each other. The principal concern of Plato and Aristotle was to discover the norms and rules that govern the life of the political community as the good life enabling the flourishing of the human individual."
This paper looks at the revival of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, paying close attention to the distinction between ascending and descending themes of power and government. In the process it is shown how the recovery of Aristotle was a powerful stimulus to civic urbanism and democratic politics. Aquinas is shown to develop a powerful synthesis that managed to combine Christian supernaturalism and Aristotelian naturalism. Whilst this could buttress existing hierarchies in the short run, the implications for a more populist representation of power in the long run are developed.
Democracy and Nature
An incomplete draft of this text was published in Democracy and Nature; the final version was published as Ch. 10 of John P. Clark, _The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism_ (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
"From the City of Reason vol 3 Universitas by Dr Peter Critchley Freedom was not the product of the modern world. Throughout medieval society, at parish and village levels, it is possible to find diverse elements of civic freedom embedded within the corporate framework of organic freedom. Medieval society exhibits a continuous struggle on the part of peasants to secure minimal ‘customs’ and privileges or liberties. This paper examines urban communities as the mainstays and citadels of medieval freedom. The urban communities secured their charters of liberties within the framework of lordly organic freedom and these functioned as the institutional bases of the burghers, the free citizens of the towns."
This paper considers the possibilities opened up by the new social movements for the social transformation of politics beyond the unitary public sphere of the abstract state towards a public that incorporates plural identities and facilitates participation so that individuals achieve an actual citizen identity.
2001, Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
Chapter 10 from the City of Reason vol 3 Universitas by Dr Peter Critchley This paper examines the work of Thomas Aquinas in assimilating naturalistic Aristotelian thought within a supernaturalist Christian framework. His two Summae are considered to be the high water mark of medieval humanism, Aquinas exhibiting a mastery of the intricate Aristotelian corpus to create an intellectually satisfying edifice affirming the unity of reason and nature. Aquinas is shown to be more optimistic than Augustine and is credited with restoring the idea of the state as a positive instrument. Through his assimilation of Aristotle, Aquinas recovers the notion of the political community as a natural institution based upon human reason and as an integral part of the good life. Thomism is shown to develop a Christian Aristotelianism, building a Christian superstructure upon an Aristotelian substructure.
As a democratic institution, compulsory voting has its origins in the oldest European democracy, Athens. Greek philosophy is known for the significance it attaches to political engagement, which forms the backbone of the classical republican tradition. Despite the widely held view that political participation in Athenian democracy was mostly voluntary, ancient sources do provide evidence that such participation was in some cases legally enforced. Similarly, an institutional obligation to participate directly in the decision- making of small-scale political units survived in medieval and early modern communities. Later on, as modern democracies grew larger and became more representative, participation in indirect structures of decision-making contin- ued to be thought of as enforceable, or at least as a moral duty.
2008
The critical focus of this volume is upon abstracting and diremptive tendencies within the city, particularly with respect to new symbolic and informational economic geographies. Critical attention is paid to the iniquitous realities behind the provision of post-industrial infrastructures (convention centres, office developments, finance-insurance-real estate stations, consumer landscapes, gentrified downtowns) in contemporary urban development and regeneration. The argument concludes that the result of social division and exclusion is an “ecology of fear” generating the militarisation of urban space and the privatisation of residential and commercial space. The volume examines the urban consequences of social and spatial injustice, paying particular attention to the work of Mike Davis (1990 1998).
Chapter 5 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley The modern world is suffering from a crisis of political socialisation and representation. So many people in so many parts of the developed world are disengaging from politics as now practised and expressing increasing levels of dissatisfaction with the way that politics is currently being conducted. At the same time there is a participatory revolution underway. More and more people are getting involved in issues that, by any definition, can be considered political. With these developments comes an increased interest in what politics is, has been and ought to be. What are the origins of political concepts and how have they come to be what they now are? This book takes a philosophical and historical approach to the origin and evolution of political ideas, attempting to reveal the how and why of politics, continually tracing the unfolding of the ideal within the real, the rational within the actual with a view to its complete fruition in the future. This book is not another history of ideas on the subject of freedom. Rather, it is an historical socio-philosophy of rational freedom with an explicitly political purpose and goal. The aim is to understand how individuals are capable of becoming citizens through socially constructing freedom as a public value. In the course of this inquiry the extent to which freedom is a contested concept becomes clear. Freedom means different things to different sections of society at different times and in different places. Since the value of freedom has been a staple of philosophy, there is a need to examine the works of political philosophers to see how far they have clarified or obscured the potentials of the value. The question concerns how this freedom, which emerges in the social practices of the people, comes to be reconstructed politically and philosophically in order to provide norms for the state and law. The arguments of philosophers have influenced the valorization, articulation, comprehension, dissemination, and institutionalisation of the value. The question is whether codification and institutionalisation represents the realisation of freedom or its denial.
Now written as a chapter in Rational Freedom vol 2 Philosophical Origins by Dr Peter Critchley This paper presents socialism and active theories of democracy as the realisation of classical political philosophy, incorporating motifs that were central to the study of politics that originated in Greece but which were superseded by the modern revolution in political theory. This 'restored classicism' is not a nostalgic project but is better conceived as a new politics emerging on the basis of modernity. The paper draws attention to the inherently 'political' nature of the critique of the economic reductionism of capitalism. Whereas the positive theory and normative superstructure of capitalist institutions rest most easily within the language and methodology of economics, socialism presents itself in terms of a political discourse. Socialism advances political arguments, abolishing exploitation and class conflict to achieve a democratic and egalitarian order. Add the classical image of citizenship in which the individual is ruled and rules in turn to the principle of self-legislation as introduced and developed in the works of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and one can understand how the Greek political community informed Marx's attempt to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of modern politics.
2012
""LEWIS MUMFORD AND THE MORAL ARCHITECTONICS OF ECOLOGICAL CIVILISATION This book traces the connection of ecology, regionalism and civilisation in the life's work of Lewis Mumford. The argument demonstrates Mumford's ecological regionalism as being grounded in a moral sense of place, Mumford offering an ecological civilisation as an alternative to the false imperatives of the megamachine. Mumford is shown to offer an alternative future based on organic plenitude as against the 'aimless dynamism' of endless material quantity within the megamachine. The book seeks to develop the moral and critical purpose at work behind the varied writings of Lewis Mumford. The attempt is made to identify the contours of Mumford’s ideal city as a city of human dimensions enabling and encouraging a vigorous reciprocity and interaction between inhabitants as citizens; a city which brings the touch, sense and smell of the countryside into the core market life of the city, brings neighbourhoods in close connection with each other, brings all city dwellers within close walking distance of parks and green spaces. Mumford’s objective, it is shown, is to make the city a communal theatre, a collective experience in which city dwellers are actors rather than mere spectators in the unfolding drama of urban life. Mumford is shown to offer a unique insight into the myriad political, social, cultural, urban, moral, psychological and ecological problems of a rationalised modernity. Reason has not brought freedom in the modern world. In many ways, human beingshave come to be enslaved to their own powers, institutions and ideas. Mumford offers a means of explaining this paradox of bondage through liberty. The solutions that Mumford articulates bring the soundest features of past cities to bear upon present forms. The awareness of the past enables Mumford to address thefundamental problems of rational modernity. Although Mumford wrote on a wide variety of topics, his purpose possessed a unifying thread concerning the mode of life within modern technological society. This book emphasises Mumford's concern to put the constituents of modern urban life on a sustainable basis in relation to new technologies and techniques. The key to Mumford's vision is the scaling of social life to human dimension and proportion, thus producing a life of balance and harmony with respect to the moral and technical capacities of human beings. ""
These final two volumes (8 and 9) seek to tie together the themes of true democracy, social control and self-mediation, affirmative materialism, community and communist individuality within a conception of commune democracy. This volume defends Marx’s early definition of ‘true democracy’ as entailing the dissolution of the state and of (capitalistically organised, inegalitarian, unpluralist) civil society as a single process. The argument delineates Marx's definition of democratisation, seeking its realisation outside of and against the abstract form of the state. This is where the conception of the proletarian public sphere (or spheres) becomes important and its absence in socialist theory and practice becomes evident. Such a notion entails not the end of politics but its realisation in the everyday affairs of the demos within a conception of self-government. Making a distinction between the state and government, it is possible to develop the anti-statist character of democracy without thereby being committed to an antipolitical stance. By recognising plural identities and enabling participation the notion of the communist public sphere comes into its own as a political society.
2007, Communalism: International Journal fo ra Rational Society
Part of The Coming Ecological Revolution Pt 3 Society and Learning by Dr Peter Critchley The argument draws upon the emergence of grass roots organisations and community organisations across the world and seeks to value the contributions that social movements can make not only to social provision but to urban governance.
This paper appraises Jurgen Habermas’ attempt to reclaim the emancipatory philosophical connection between reason and freedom on the modern terrain, paying particular attention to possibilities for a democratic public sphere generated out of Habermas' lifeworld in contradistinction to the system world of money and power. Habermas is firmly part of the tradition of 'rational freedom'. Looking to realise the freedom of each and all within community, Habermas is concerned to reject the postructuralist and postmodern accusation that 'rational’ unity necessarily entails the totalitarian suppression of difference and autonomy. Arguing that the social and philosophical grounds of both individualist liberalism and orthodox marxism have dissolved, Habermas is shown to argue that a critical theory of modernity is more adequately grounded in the suppressed traces of Reason as embodied in communicative structures. Habermas' 'rational' ideal is shown to adumbrate and justify a post-capitalist 'good' society characterised by the greatest possible happiness, peace, and community.
The conception of Hegel in this paper builds upon the themes of participation, reciprocity and community. The attempt is made to extract the potentials for participatory public life contained in Hegel’s system of differentiated representation.