Urbanisation and the genealogy of freedom in Marx and Tocqueville

Abstract

From 1789 to 1870, continental Europe’s largest city was also its privileged site of attempts at radical political and social transformations. For the great nineteenth century theorists of revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, the connection between great cities and radical political movements demanded theoretical elucidation. Elucidation means not only explaining the connection, but also assessing the prospects for human freedom in urban conditions. Yet for neither theorist does it suffice to define liberty and then to ask whether it can flourish in ‘a permanent localization, relatively large and dense, of socially heterogeneous individuals’, to follow Louis Wirth’s definition of the city.’ In this paper I show how Tocqueville’s and Marx’s opposite assessments of the relationship of city and freedom are inseparable from their different understandings of the genealogy of freedom itself. For Marx, bourgeois freedom and finally human emancipation necessarily mature and gain content in an urban environment. For Tocqueville, the conditions that he calls ‘free’ are rooted in a non-urban society, where the population is dispersed and where deliberation in internally homogeneous groups is the hallmark of public order. Marx and Engels first provide a theoretical framework for explaining the urban site of revolutionary action in 2%e German Ideology. A key assertion of their materialist method is that, with the growth of population and technological advances, societies divide labor ever more finely, in order better to meet their subsistence needs. As labor is divided, individuals with different functions are separated and set against each other. The crucial step in the division of labor is the separation of intellectual and material activity.* When this occurs, the evolution of productive processes finally takes on a distinctive geographical dynamic. ‘The greatest division of material and mental labor is the separation of town and country’.) Two features of modern cities make them especially representative of ‘mental’ labor. First, it is in cities that capital, as distinct from landed property, comes into being. In the accumulation of instruments of production under control of the master in the guilds or the accumulation of money in the first financial institutions, a distinction between those who think, direct, or control and those who toil is already clearer than on the land. Second, the movement of population off the land and into towns favors mental labor insofar as towns demand administration, police, taxes. ‘Politics in general’ becomes the activity of a substantial number of men who are not directly part of the productive