Social Theory and the Urban Question

Peter Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135685911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Social Theory and the Urban Question offers a guide to, and a critical evaluation of key themes in contemporary urban social theory, as well as a re-examination of more traditional approaches in the light of recent developments and criticism.

Dr Saunders discusses current theoretical positions in the context of the work of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. He suggests that later writers have often misunderstood or ignored the arguments of these 'founding fathers' of the urban question. Dr Saunders uses his final chapter to apply the lessons learned from a review of their work in order to develop a new framework for urban social and political analysis.

This book was first published in 1981.

1 Social theory, capitalism and the urban question

Most areas of sociology today are characterized by a certain degree of theoretical and methodological pluralism, and urban sociology is no exception. Thus there are distinctive Marxist urban sociologies, Weberian urban sociologies and so on, each differing according to the questions they pose and the criteria of adequacy or validity they adopt. What seems to be peculiar to urban sociology, however, is that these various approaches have rarely paid much attention to what the so-called 'founding fathers' of the discipline actually wrote about the urban question. Contemporary Marxist urban theories, for example, make considerable references to Marx's discussions of the method of dialectical materialism, the theory of class struggle and the capitalist state and so on, but rarely pay much attention to his discussions of the town-country division or the role of the city in the development of capitalism. Similarly, Weberian urban sociology has tended simply to ignore Weber's essay on the city and to concentrate instead on his discussions of bureaucracy and social classes. Whereas other branches of the discipline have generally developed directly out of the substantive concerns of key nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European social theorists (for example the debates within industrial sociology over alienation and anomy, the concern with the question of bureaucracy in organizational sociology, the discussions of the state and political power in political sociology, the recurrent concern with secularization in the sociology of religion and with ideology in the sociology of knowledge), urban sociology has continually underemphasized the work of these writers on the city, and has tended instead to take as its starting point the theory of human ecology developed at the University of Chicago in the years following the First World War.

The reason for this is not hard to find, for it is not that Marx, Weber, Durkheim and other significant social theorists had little to say about the city (far from it, for as Nisbet(1966) has suggested, this was in some ways a key theme in the work of all these writers), but rather that what they did say tends to suggest that a distinctive urban sociology cannot be developed in the context of advanced capitalist societies.

The central concern of all of these writers was with the social, economic and political implications of the development of capitalism in the West at the time when they were writing. The rapid growth of cities was among the most obvious and potentially disruptive of all social changes at that time. In England and Wales, for example, the 'urban population' (administratively defined) nearly trebled in the second half of the nineteenth century with the result that over 25 million people (77 per cent of the total population) lived in 'urban' areas at the turn of the century (see Hall et al. 1973, p. 61). This sheer increase in size was startling enough, but it also came to be associated in the minds of many politicians and commentators with the growth of 'urban' problems — the spread of slums and disease, the breakdown of law and order, the increase in infant mortality rates and a plethora of other phenomena — all of which attracted mounting comment and consternation on the part of the Victorian middle classes.

Of course, Marx, Weber and Durkheim were each fully aware of the scale and significance of these changes, yet it is clear from their work that none of them considered it useful or necessary to develop a specifically urban theory in order to explain them. In other words, all three seem to have shared the view that, in modern capitalist societies, the urban question must be subsumed under a broader analysis of factors operating in the society as a whole. While cities could provide a vivid illustration of fundamental processes such as the disintegration of moral cohesion (Durkheim), the growth of calculative rationality (Weber) or the destructive forces unleashed by the development of capitalist production (Marx), they could in no way explain them. For all three writers, what was required was not a theory of the city but a theory of the changing basis of social relations brought about through the development of capitalism, and it was to this latter task that they addressed themselves.

When they did discuss the city, they did so only in one of two ways. First, all three saw the city as an historically important object of analysis in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in western Europe. In his essay on the city, for example, Weber showed how in the Middle Ages the towns played a highly significant role in breaking the political and economic relations of feudalism and establishing a new spirit of rationality which was later to prove crucial for the development of capitalist entrepreneurship and democratic rights of citizenship. Similarly, Durkheim showed how the medieval towns helped break the bonds of traditional morality and foster the growth of the division of labour in society, while Marx and Engels saw the division between town and country in the Middle Ages as the expression of the antithesis between the newly developing capitalist mode of production and the old feudal mode in this period. However, it is clear that all three writers agree that the city was significant only at a specific period in history, and that neither the ancient city nor the modern capitalist city can be analysed in these terms. The city in contemporary capitalism is no longer the basis for human association (Weber), the locus of the division of labour (Durkheim) or the expression of a specific mode of production (Marx), in which case it is neither fruitful nor appropriate to study it in its own right.

The second context in which the city appears in the work of these writers is as a secondary influence on the development of fundamental social processes generated within capitalist societies. The city, in other words, is analysed not as a cause, but as a significant condition, of certain developments. The clearest example here concerns the argument found in the work of Marx and Engels to the effect that, although the city does not itself create the modern proletariat, it is an important condition of the self-realization of the proletariat as a politically and economically organized class in opposition to the bourgeoisie. This is because the city concentrates the working class and renders more visible the stark and growing antithesis between it and capital. In rather different vein, Durkheim's concern with the effects of an advanced division of labour on the moral cohesion of modern societies similarly takes urbanization as an important precondition of the development of functional differentiation. In both cases, therefore, a developmental theory (the growth of class struggle, the growth of new forms of social solidarity) is made conditional upon the growth of towns.

We can now appreciate why urban sociology has tended to pay so little attention to what Marx, Weber and Durkheim had to say about the city, for it is apparent in their work that the city in contemporary capitalism does not itself constitute a theoretically significant area of study. It is hardly surprising, then, that subsequent attempts to establish an urban sociology have drawn upon other aspects of their work while generally bypassing their discussion of the urban question. We shall see in later chapters, for example, how Durkheim's work on the social effects of the division of labour came to be incorporated into ecological theories of city growth and differentiation in the 1920s, how Weber's writings on political domination and social stratification formed the basis for a conceptualization of the city as a system of resource allocation in the 1960s, and how in the 1970s Marx's analysis of social reproduction and class struggle was developed as the foundation for a new political economy of urbanism. The influence of these three writers over the development of urban sociology has been pervasive yet selective.

The aim of this chapter is to retrace the way in which Weber, Durkheim and Marx and Engels all came to the conclusion that the city in contemporary capitalism was not a theoretically specific object of analysis. The paths followed by their respective analyses are divergent, yet the end-point is the same. In other words, although these writers differed radically in their methods, their theories and their personal political commitments and persuasions, their application of their different perspectives and approaches nevertheless resulted in conclusions that are broadly compatible. In each case, therefore, we shall consider first the methodological principles that guided their work, and second the results of the application of these principles to an analysis of the urban question.

Marx and Engels: the town, the country and the capitalist mode of production

Marx's method arguably rests on two key principles. The first is that no single aspect of reality can be analysed independently of the totality of social relations and determinations of which it forms an integral part. His commitment to dialectical analysis — to the principle of the unity of opposites — led him to reject any mode of analysis that failed to relate the part to the whole, for although it was both possible and necessary to abstract elements from the whole, these had always to be reintegrated or synthesized in order to arrive at a scientific conception of the totality. As Swingewood argues, 'The dialectical approach in Hegel and Marx is pre-eminently a method for analyzing the interconnections of phenomena, of grasping facts not as isolated, rigid and external data but as part of an all-embracing process' (1975, p. 33). It is precisely because of this claim to be able to analyse the totality that Marxism has remained so intellectually attractive and powerful within the social sciences. It is also this that explains why it is that, in contemporary urban studies, geographers, sociologists, political scientists and economists whó have adopted a Marxist method have tended to converge in their interests and concerns to the point where disciplinary affiliation has become virtually insignificant (see, for example, Chapter 7), for the application of a dialectical method must result in a mode of analysis that denies the very basis on which such academic boundaries are drawn.

The second key principle is that the material world exists prior to our conceptions of it, and that the way in which this world appears to us may conceal or distort its essential character. Marx recognizes that our ideas about the world must bear some relation to what that world is actually like, but he denies that reality is directly reflected in consciousness. Indeed, he suggests that there would be no nedd for science if this were the case since there would be nothing for it to discover beyond immediate experience. Consciousness is thus not a reflection of material reality but the mediation of it, and it follows from this that the essential reality that science attempts to discover may be obscured by the phenomenal forms through which this reality is represented in our everyday experience: 'Unlike phenomenal forms, Marx holds, essential relations need not be transparent to direct experience. Phenomenal forms may be such as to mask or obscure the relations of which they are the forms of manifestation' (Derek Sayer 1979, p. 9).

For Marx, therefore, the task of science is to penetrate the realm of appearances in order to discover the essential relations that give rise to these appearances. Unlike ideology, which takes the phenomenal forms as given, science goes beyond the world of commonsense experience: 'The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must first be discovered by science' (Marx 1976, p. 682). Any theory (such as bourgeois political economy) that remains at the level of appearances (for example formally equivalent exchange) and attempts to explain reality in terms of the categories of everyday experience (say, land, labour and capital as three factors of production) will inevitably fail to provide scientific explanations (for instance of the process of valorization of capital), but will simply formalize and legitimate existing ideological modes of thought.

All this, however, raises the obvious question of how Marx's dialectical method can discover essential relations when other methods cannot, given that the essence cannot be known through its phenomenal forms. There are basically two different interpretations of Marx on this key problem.

The first suggests that science involves two stages: first, an analysis of a general conceptualization of the world into its simplest elements, and second, a reconceptualization of the world in terms of a synthesis of these elements. McBride summarizes this method as 'A movement from broad generalizations to endless specifics to generalities qualified by facts' (1977, p. 56), and shows how this corresponds to the familiar dialectical schema of a development from thesis to antithesis and thence to synthesis. To cite an example given by Marx (1973) himself, science begins with a 'chaotic' concept such as population, analyses this down into its simplest elements (for example, the population is broken down into classes, which in turn necessitates a conceptualization of the relation between wage labour and capital, which itself rests on a concept of exchange and division of labour, and so on), and then reconstructs reality in terms of this conceptual system in order to render it intelligible. The outcome of this dialectical method is that the essence of reality comes to be known through the application of analytical abstractions to concrete cases: 'The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind' (Marx 1973, p. 101). The further this procedure is carried, the closer scientific conceptions of reality come to 'mapping' the material reality itself: 'Progress in science is essentially progress towards an ever closer approximation to objective truth'* (Collier 1978, p. 15).

Now there is some debate among Marxists as to whether this method of rising from the abstract to the concrete was intended by Marx as a statement of his mode of investigation or simply as his mode of exposition. Certainly the structure of Capital corresponds to this formula (Marx sets out his argument by starting with the simplest abstraction — the commodity — and then gradually builds up to the full complexity of actual capitalist societies), yet in the Postface to the second edition of that work he states explicitly that 'the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry' (1976, p. 102). Furthermore, just two years after he wrote the 1857 Introduction in which this method is most fully elaborated, he rejected this formulation on the grounds that 'any anticipation of results still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing', and he argued instead that 'the reader who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend from the particular to the general' (1969, p. 502). In other words, the prescription given in the 1857 Introduction is reversed, and the method of analysis is described in terms of a movement from particular 'concrete' cases (i.e. specific capitalist societies) to more general abstractions.

This leads us to the second interpretation of Marx's method as a mode of analysis based upon careful and rigorous empirical investigation. Derek Sayer, for example, argues that a mode of investigation that began with abstractions would have to be premised on the assumption that Marx had some magical and privileged insight into the essential reality of capitalism before he actually studied any existing capitalist societies, and there is clearly no justification for such a view:

Marx's historical categories . . . are generated neither from 'simple abstractions' in general, nor from transhistorical categories in particular. They are emphatically a posteriori constructs, arrived at precisely by abstraction from the 'real and concrete'. Marx has no mysteriously privileged starting point.

[D. Sayer 1979, p. 102]

But if Marx begins with the 'concrete' and generates his abstractions through the study of existing societies, how does this method manage to penetrate phenomenal forms and reveal the essential relations which lie behind them? Sayer's answer is that Marx's method is, in a sense, conjectural. In other words, he posits the existence of certain relations which, if they did exist, would account for phenomenal appearances: 'The "logic" of Marx's analytic is essentially a logic of hypothesis formation, for what he basically does is to posit mechanisms and conditions which would, if they existed, respectively explain how and why the phenomena we observe come to assume the forms they do' (D. Sayer 1979, p. 114). This method is neither deductive (since there are no a priori covering laws or trans-historical generalizations from which essential relations can be deduced), nor inductive (since the discovery of regularities in the world of appearances cannot itself imply the necessity of certain underlying essences). It is, rather, a 'retroductive' method.

The logic of retroductive explanation involves the attempt to explain observable phenomena by developing hypotheses about underlying causes. It cannot support any conjecture, since the hypothesized causes must be able to explain evidence at the level of appearances, but it is equally a weak form of inference since the hypotheses can never be directly tested. In other words, it is never possible finally to demonstrate that a posited 'law' of capitalist development is actually true since such a law refers to processes which, even if they do exist, remain hidden. Furthermore, it is never possible to demonstrate that the essential relations posited by the theory are the correct ones since there is always the possibility that other essences could be put forward which could explain phenomenal forms equally as well.

Marx's method, understood as a method of retroduction, thus carries no guarantees of truth and no privileged insight into the inner workings of society. There is no warrant in this method for dismissing alternative theories that can also explain phenomenal appearances, nor for claiming a monopoly over the 'correct' scientific mode of analysis. Equally, of course, it makes no sense to attack this method on the grounds that its results cannot be directly tested against experience, since its very purpose is to theorize processes that by definition cannot be amenable to direct observation. The results of the application of such a method must be evaluated on its own terms (for example, does the posited essence explain phenome...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Social theory, capitalism and the urban question
• 2 The urban as an ecological community
• 3 The urban as a cultural form
• 4 The urban as a socio-spatial system
• 5 The urban as ideology
• 6 The urban as a spatial unit of collective consumption
• 7 Political economy and the urban question (with John Lloyd)
• 8 On the specificity of the urban
• Appendix A note on the empirical testing of theories
• Further reading
• References
• Index