The city as a political community

Abstract

The contemporary American city as an open polity and an open economy is regarded as a trivial affair incapable of doing much to affect the lives of its inhabitants for good or ill. Judged by the standard of a Periclean Athens, the subordinate city of the modern nation state may seem uninspiring. Yet the subordinate cities of antiquity were far from trivial and they sustained a rich cultural life for centuries. Unlike the cities of antiquity, our cities do not have a rich common cultural life. They are not communities. Often, they are mere money mining camps, lacking in any commitment or solidarity on the part of the governing elite or the public. They are economic sites for combining and recombining atoms. As such, they are self-condemned to powerlessness and emptiness. But the subordinate position of the contemporary city need not render it powerless and empty of meaning. With an adequate, shared common purpose as a humane cooperative, the city could motivate a dedicated elite and a committed citizenry in the shared enterprise of building a common set of values to give the lives of the city's people meaning and warmth in the chill of an existentialistic world.