The Ideal of Citizenship

THE IDEAL OF CITIZENSHIP By Dr Peter Critchley Developed further in The City of Reason by 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. The polis formed an expansive public sphere based upon the provision of a variety of public spaces for citizen interaction and intercourse in an intimate, everyday environment. The most important of these spaces was the agora, which M. I. Finley defines as ‘town square’, an informal meeting ground where the people could assemble whenever they needed to (p64 16). As Finley points out, the original meaning of the agora was a ‘gathering place’, indicating the most important aspect of town life that predates the forming of shops, stalls and temples. Later, the formal assembly of the people – the ekklesia – came to be located on a hillside (the Pnyx). The agora furnished the essential physical space for ensuring that citizenship functioned as a living, everyday practice rather than being merely a periodic institutional ritual. The Greeks were essentially public beings, making the details of private life the concern of the home and of no great importance. Life was not the atomised, privatised existence that it has become in the modern world but was lived in the public space of the agora. Here, citizens could meet freely to discuss the affairs of the community, exchange small talk, meet friends, and engage in vigorous political discussion on the main issues of the day. For all of the ritual with which they were enveloped, the democratic institutions of Athens were merely the structural forms through which everyday communicative interaction was articulated into the legislated expression of an unstructured and spontaneous popular politics conducted by the citizenry. With respect to Athenian democracy, there can be no question of divorcing form from content in order to theorise ideal structures and institutions. Athenian democracy was more existential than institutional. The everyday interaction of the agora formed the fundamental and fruitful basis for ‘libertarian’ structures that, without active citizen involvement, would have ossified into oligarchic institutions with a democratic veneer. Such is the fate of form divorced from content. The active citizenry formed the substance of Athenian democracy, creating and sustaining that democracy as a reality. Citizenship, in effect, involved a continuous process of educational, ethical and political unfolding. [autonomy = anarchism as a left individualist liberalism whereas autarky as public freedom requires an emphasis upon the principle of the state, eg authority, law, mutual bonds and codes and compacts] The autarkeia is most often translated as ‘self-sufficiency’. This fails to grasp the full meaning of the term as ‘self-rule’. The modern reading understands this concept as autonomia, the condition of living by one’s own laws. This renders the concept of autarkeia to mean independence in a juridical rather than a political sense. There is great potential for mischief and misunderstanding here. By autarkeia the Greeks meant self-sufficiency and self-rule as a collective or public freedom which requires an emphasis upon the principle of the state, eg authority, law, mutual bonds and codes and compacts. The modern understanding of ‘autarchy’ to mean economic self-sufficiency and ‘autonomy’ to denote personal liberty owes more to individualist liberalism and anarchism and is founded upon a dualism of private and public, individual and collective, material and political that is quite antithetical to the Greek ideal of independence. The reason that Aristotle argued that tradesmen, artisans, merchants, and servants should be denied the franchise had nothing to do with class based notions of a property franchise. Aristotle was not arguing against labour and trade as such but the way that material clientage in any form served to prevent independence of judgement on the part of the citizen. Without the substance of material self-sufficiency and personal autonomy, independence could only have been empty and merely formal. No matter how materially well-off, clientage ensured that a person would defer to exogenous authorities and interests rather than reason freely and render an independent judgement. In arguing for a classless society in order to realise true democracy, Marx was taking Aristotle’s critique of material clientage to its logical conclusion (Miller 1989). Greek thought and practice is characterised by its essentialism and organicism. Origin, history, potentiality and realisation form an integral whole. Whether one chooses to focus upon the universe, the polis, or the citizen, they are all aspects of the same substance and express the unity of civic, natural and social life. Autarchies in the sense of self-sufficient communities proceed inexorably to independence, competence, and isonomia. ‘The Greek polis has its arche in this germinal phasing of a highly competent farmer who, by an immanent process of socio-political development, found his fulfilment as a highly-competent citizen’ (70). The content created the form. The system of participatory governance was not an institutional form or ideal which was introduced to a passive demos. Rather, the body politic created the institutional structure most appropriate to its health and vitality. This is politics as an existential reality lived in the spaces of the everyday terrain, not the formal politics of lifeless institutions and structures, ‘offices’ occupied by professional elites. It has become customary for modern politicians, having had to accept the language of liberal rights, to lecture ‘citizens’ that rights are accompanied by duties. The implication is that rights are some form of private entitlement held against the state and need to be buttressed by some form of onerous duty towards the state. Both interpretations indicate the extent to which the modern citizen has become divorced from the institutions of government. In complete contrast, in Athens the everyday practice of paideia and the institutional structure of the polis were synthesised into an ideal of citizenship that the individual would achieve as a form of self-realisation. There is no notion of citizenship as an obligatory burden of self-denial as there is in rights based modern liberalism. Citizenship is an ethos, a creative art, indeed, a modus vivendi rather than the burdensome body of duties accompanied by a palliative body of rights to which it has been reduced in the modern world. The most fundamental difference lies in the public sense of happiness and freedom that is in complete contrast to the individualism of the modern world. The sense of a shared commonality and solidarity underpinned the classical conception of citizenship and ensured that any duty or obligation within the polity was actually a self-realisation achieved within a collective sense of responsibility . In stark contrast with modern liberalism, the Greek citizen ideal is collectivist rather than individualist. Individual self-realisation proceeded within and could be attained only within the realisation of the whole. The bourgeois conception of individual liberty would have struck the Athenian citizen as so partial and limited as to amount to an unfreedom. The autonomous individual as the monadic buyer and seller is not free but is in a condition of bondage to material and psychological necessity. The ‘free’ choices of this self-seeking atom are constrained by internal psychological and physical infirmities that can only be overcome by connecting self-realisation with the wider process of a realised public life. The pathos of this bourgeois self-deception has now become so gross as to be simply pathetic. Aristotle’s point concerning material clientage affecting judgement in politics is well-made. The Western ‘citizen’ is more materially well-off than any citizen has ever been and yet Western politics still speaks the language of necessity. Even faced with ultimate ruination through human-induced climate change, the Western voter refuses to abandon the ‘necessities’ of modern life. The self-identity of the modern individual as free is a pathetic delusion. The material clientage of the ‘free’ individual within class relations is accompanied by the clientage of all upon ‘the system’, condemning all to a nihilistic pursuit of material expansion, despite the evidence showing how this expansionary drive is rapidly depleting the resources of the planet and damaging the biosphere beyond repair. Politics ought to be about the realisation of life but, in the modern world, it expresses the reduction of life to the acquisition of things. Human beings are exchanging their inherent capacities for the possibility of buying freedom and happiness on the market. Such ideals are to be found only within. By pursuing an illusion, human beings find not freedom or happiness but a moira or destiny governed by ananke or necessity. Although classical citizenship is a collective designation, it comprised individuality. The connectedness of the individual and the collective ensured that the one could not be realised without the other. Thus, citizenship implied a personal wholeness that was grounded in tradition, a complexity of social bonds, richly articulated civic relationships, a shared experience of festivals, cults, rituals, philia, independence from clientage and freedom for collective self-determination through participatory structures and institutions rooted in the everyday practices of a living, creative body politic. Citizenship of this rich quality requires a polis, a city organised around an agora, with extensive and expansive public spaces with which to convene general assemblies of the people, the city as theatre dramatizing freedom as ideal and real, and the ceremonial squares, avenues and temples that unified the inner and outer landscape to give it reverential meaning. To isolate and identify any of these particular elements as ‘democracy’ or ‘citizenship’ is to destroy the whole intricate psychological and physiological fabric, perverting the ideal and destroying the real. It has to be emphasised once more that form and content flourish in a unity in the Athenian conception. The substance of the Athenian ideal of citizenship is to be found in the living, creative body politic whose essentialist and organic conception of politics as human self-realisation gave formal institutions and structures their content. Citizenship as paideia ensured individuals became citizens capable of apprehending public life as an extension of their own personality and humanity. Without this content, the formal structures and institutions would become empty and hollow and would soon atrophy. The Athenian ideal has continued to haunt Western politics and civilisation. From the practices of the medieval city-states to the township democracy of the American revolution and the radical communes of the various French revolutions, there has been a continuous harking back to the patterns of civic freedom of the democratic polis. This could easily be dismissed as nostalgia, as Connolly’s Foucaultian critique would have it. Of course, as Max Weber has shown, capitalist modernity and rationalisation systemically prevents the possibility of reviving the Hellenic Sittlichkeit pursued in various forms by Rousseau, Marx, Hegel and many, many socialists and radicals throughout history. The problem is that the extent to which the Athenian democratic ideal keeps returning throughout history indicates something essential rather than merely historical about the ideal. As one would expect from the classical conception. The conception is an organic and essentialist one rooted in the human ontology and concerning politics as creative self-realisation to achieve freedom and happiness as an anthropological reality. That ideal will continue to return to the historical stage for so long as human beings remain human and seek to humanize their environment as a condition of their self-realisation. Classical Greece in general and Athens in particular gives evidence of popular self-governance as a real and practicable achievement rather than an appealing but utopian ideal. Overshadowed by the Roman Republic and Empire that came after, the achievements of Greece were very real and indicate the extent to which an active citizen democracy can flourish as a permanent form. The Athenian civic democracy suffered from many flaws (treatment of women, alien residents, the use of slave labour). These are problems of the particular and the universal, exclusion and inclusion and are to be addressed by the rational ethic that identifies the freedom of each and of all as mutual. This conception of politics is far from the contemporary statecraft which sees democracy as the management and manipulation of passive masses, citizens as voters and taxpayers who demand nothing more of politics than it interferes in their private affairs as little as possible and that it costs them even less. An organic, essentialist politics revolve around entities such as the cooperative, vocational communities and bodies intermeshed within society. Continuous activity within the social practices of this everyday terrain is a civic paideia, an education that fosters and ensures the spiritual and institutional empowerment of the citizen. The question is contemporary. In its own self-image, contemporary politics justifies itself in terms of administrative efficiency and fiscal probity. All parties seeking election sell themselves to the electorate in these terms. And the voters who form the electorate seem content in sufficient numbers to accept this self-image of state politics. The onerous business of politics should be undertaken by the professionals, should interfere as little as possible in the private pursuit of endless wealth, and should cost as little as possible. Against this, the Athenian ideal is alive in the community and grass-roots politics emerging in the perspectives of ‘localism’, ‘decentralism’ and ‘bioregionalism’. The strength of the Roman republic was a strong peasant population (p86 29). The institutions which were once so strong could only flourish and persist with the health and vitality of its social roots. The waning of the republic indicated a decay of these roots, something which institutional changes could not remedy. Once Rome ceased to be a city in the Hellenic sense of the term, the whole republican edifice crumbled within. As Rome became the centre of an emerging empire, it ceased to be a civitas, a republican term which owed much to its Hellenic origins in connoting a ‘union of citizens’ and instead became an urbs in the new Latin sense. The terminological shift is significant and is the origin of the loss of the Hellenic sense of scale, balance and proportion in defining a city. As early as the second century B.C., the Roman urbs had started on its journey of uncontrollable growth. And to the extent that the urbs sprawled outwardly in size and scope to encompass the known world, so the civitas diminished. Municipal democracy atrophied and died away under the Roman Empire. The Empire was not a civilisation as such but a purely parasitic growth that lived only by conquest and exploitation. The Roman Empire was extremely suspicious of municipal autonomy and frequently acted to raze cities to the ground, annihilating its peoples, in order to suppress the very idea of autonomy from Rome as a possibility. Rome provided cities with sufficient freedom to police themselves and extract tribute from subject populations but no more. Under Rome, the city ceased to function as a political entity and with it went the notion of civic culture. shrivelled disastrously, at least in Europe and the northern rim of the Mediterranean basin. It was only in the eleventh century that urban life began to revive in this area, the birthplace of western civilisation and politics. The ideals and achievements of Athens and Rome proved to be of enduring significance in effectively creating Western civilisation. The long decline and final collapse of the Roman Empire did not imply the end of Hellenic and Roman ideals and practices. The key issue is the extent to which the Greek and Roman heritage could be merged and treated as some homogeneous classical civilisation. The idea that there is some clear and distinct classical heritage is the cause of endless confusions and controversies. The one which is still to be resolved concerns popular government – the conflict between direct and representative notions of democracy. The ambiguity of modern politics – the formal shell of democratic institutions governing a fundamentally undemocratic civil society – can be traced to the ambiguous legacy of Greece and Rome. Those to be found arguing either side of the controversy can easily cite classical authority and precedent to justify their views. From the medieval cities and communes to the modern nation states, movements and parties have continued to swing between Hellenic and Roman conceptions as if caught between ideals and reality. Always, the ideal to be achieved, the more radical cause, is that of Hellenic democracy and citizenry, always the ideal is sacrificed for the more immediately practicable Roman republic. The verdict will always depend upon the extent to which the demos constitute themselves as an active citizen body capable of developing their moral, intellectual, and organisational capacities to such an extent that the institutions and structures of Hellenic democracy would have content and live as viable, organic, vital entities. Without that, on grounds of realism, the Roman perspective will prevail. What makes Machiavelli such an interesting theorist is the extent to which his thought constantly fluctuates between ideal and real. His model is that of the Roman republic but his claims for the indispensability of an active citizenry are Hellenic. Europe in the Middle Ages developed enduring patterns of civic freedom which were as rich and as vital as those of classical civilisation. It is from this period of communes and free cities that the urban character of Europe derives. The emergence of city-states from the thirteenth century in Italy and in the lowlands of modern Belgium and Holland represented the increasing abstraction of urban life from its rural environs. These city-states were structured around distinctively urban tasks – artisan oriented, financial, commercial, and industrial – and gave the town with an authentic civic life and identity of its own. Of course, the medieval towns and cities remained dependent upon the rural environment for food and raw materials. However, in time, the increasing wealth and power of the city in an increasingly commercial civilisation gave it the capacity to remake the countryside in its own image, thus entangling agriculture and landed wealth within new economic and political priorities. This is the origin of the dualism of town and country. At this time, the city came to impose its technology, economic imperatives, instrumental relationships, culture, and values upon rural communities. But, far from ensuring the victory of the city over the country, these same forces destroyed the city from within, emptying it of its civic content and replacing it with commercial and monetary concerns. In the war between town and country, both lost to the same forces of capital. For a time, the city recovered the political significance it had had in classical times. The famous medieval maxim “Urban air makes for freedom” referred not only to the freedom of trade and property but also to political freedoms of citizen participation, intellectual freedoms of thought and scientific-technological freedom to experiment and innovate. The expansion of personal and political liberty proceeded hand in hand within the medieval city-states– Flemish, German, French, and Swiss. This expansion witnessed the emergence of a clear pattern of civic freedom, not merely from territorial lords but also structurally, within the medieval civitas itself. The Italian city-states are distinguished by their ‘power and imagination’ (Lauro Martines) making them so institutionally, architecturally and artistically creative. The Italian city-states possessed a degree of organicity and roundedness that made them a beacon of the civic freedom which soon spread up through Europe into Flanders, northern France, and southern Germany until western and central Europe as a whole expressed a new municipality. The Italian city-states practised democracy in richly articulated forms, as an active practice on the part of citizens rather than simply representative forms of governance. Something of the character of the Italian city-state is expressed in the medieval Latin name of its locale – commune. This form of civic freedom covered most of the northern and central areas of Italy and counted the great cities of Florence, Venice, Verona, Pisa, Sienna, and Cremona in their numbers. At the heart of the city-state was the popular assembly and its centrality emerges almost parallel with the emergence of the commune itself. The commune was a community or town in the general civic sense of the term, but more specifically was an association of burghers united by an oath or conjuratio. The commune, therefore, was more than a community formed by force of circumstances and events, since the conjuratio undertaken by the burghers made the town a vital fraternity. The conjuratio was a means of placing shared practical concerns on the terrain of reasonable moral purpose. The oath was the means by which the burghers foreswore the personal self-interest that separated them in order to embrace a common interest that united them. This was a conscious act of mutual fealty that was given not to a local noble, cleric, military chieftan or distant monarch but to each other. The conjuratio was an act of citizenship on the part of the burghers, quite distinct from the undertakings of religious congregations in being an explicitly political act, pledging each member of the commune to respect the civic rights of all other members and to extend these rights to newcomers as well as to future generations. As a reasonable act of union, the conjuratio expressed the civic dimension of rational freedom, evincing the capacity of human beings as rational beings to morally order their environment so as to ensured the common good. The conjuratio committed the members of the commune to a broadly consensual mode of self-government. The citizens asserted their capacity to engender public order and govern themselves on the basis of a mutual respect for each other and a pledge for the mutual defence of individual liberty. The Italian city was not the recovery of the Athenian polis. The Italian city-state lacked the Hellenic respect for and training in balance, scale, proportion and harmony amongst the parts. On the contrary, these vibrant and innovative urban entities were characterised by excess and explosive political theatrics. With the expansion of the wealth and power of the city-state, the popular democracy that had accompanied the commune since its inception came to be displaced by republican forms of governance. Civic leadership came to be concentrated in the hands of the large, wealthy urban families who vested the powers of the city in a large legislature redefining the character and contours of civic politics for centuries to come. A characteristic of the Italian city-state which represented an advance over Athens and Rome is the many neighbourhood communes that flourished within the larger urban commune. These formed the strength of the Italian city-state and have no precedent in classical civilisation. Regardless of the forms of governance that prevailed within the city, its neighbourhoods had an autonomy in civic governance that was quite without precedent. The popolo were not the people as such but men with a degree of material substance. These could be master craftsmen, professionals, notaries, well-off tradesmen, and, of growing importance, financiers and the commercial bourgeoisie who were rapidly accruing fortunes from foreign trade. Whilst there was some connection of the nobilia with the more wealthy popolo so that it is difficult to establish precise class boundaries in their conflicts with each other, in the main the popolo were excluded from the political life of the city and were treated like resident aliens, the metics of Athens. Whilst the popolo paid taxes, served in the militia, they lacked the right to hold public office or to participate in its civic councils. “The popolo’s breakthrough into politics was the result of revolutionary organisation” (Martines p102 42). As the thirteenth century progressed, the popolo increasingly assumed the reins of power the Italian communes – Bologna by 1231, Pistoia in 1237, Florence in 1250 – and to become increasingly influential in the governance of Piacenza, Lodi, Bergamo, Siena, Parma, and Genoa. The key to this revolutionary organisation and its effectiveness was the highly localist and organic mode of political action, something which is the very antithesis of modern concepts of party politics. The Marxist-Leninist conception of ‘the party’ as the vanguard of the proletariat are quite puny and empty in comparison, lacking in activated and energised social and civic roots. The popolo had formed themselves into a neighbourhood movement, intermeshed and interlinked with each other. The specific structures the organisation showed great variety but distinctive forms emerged from the neighbourhood base. Most important here are the vocational guilds and the way that they established a pattern for connecting individuals from different neighbourhoods into a common organisation according to occupation. These guilds are the earliest forms of popular organisation according to vocation on record and their range covered the social composition of the popolo as a whole - merchants, physicians, jurists and notaries, smiths, cloth finishers, butchers, bakers, furriers, tanners, leather makers and so on. The conception is functional and organic, grounded in neighbourhood and work, the everyday lifeworld of individuals. In time, the conciliar system and popular assemblies were transformed into oligarchies. However, for a period, the ancient civitas as an association of active citizens lived again, forming the culture and character of the European citizen body to an extent that ensured that its civic spirit endured long after its institutions had ossified and been overtaken by oligarchic forms. Time and again, the source of corruption is wealth and power held by some in independence of the many others. The more powerful sections of the popolo would soon lose interest in a shared and reasonable commonality of citizens and would express a clear preference for elite rule and territorial centralism. The emergence of the nation-state had powerful support from the rich merchants. Paradoxically, the supporters of local autonomy were members of the nobilia, the barons who had once held superiority in the class hierarchy. The centralised power of the nation-state was essential to overcome local feudal interference with the free movement of trade and ensure the subordination of the labouring classes. The cities had been taken over by civic oligarchies whose priorities of wealth and power brought them into alliance with the centralised authorities over against the city. The first indication of these new developments came as early as the late fourteenth century, when Philip van Artavelde, the son of the great champion of Flemish liberty, Jacques van Artavelde, led the Flemish communes to comprehensive defeat by Count Louis in the Battle of Roosebeeke in 1382. “Henceforth, Flanders was to give up the dream of government by a league of independent towns and submit to the ever more and more centralised rule of powerful territorial lords, whose model was naturally the aggressive monarchy of France… the Low Countries were drawn into the politics of France, the Empire and Spain. The cities, still great and powerful, enjoying very wide privileges, were to be only incidents in the larger relations of the country” (p108 45). From being integral to the new city-states, civic freedom became a subterranean current in antagonistic relation to the increasingly dominant nation state. The abstracting, bureaucratising and centralising trends and tendencies of capitalist rationalisation and modernity worked to suppress this civic freedom. Nevertheless, the ideal of civic self-government through popular assemblies and of the city as the nuclear area an active citizenry constituting the political real endured. The rising power of the centralised nation state, the expansionary and universalising dynamic of capital, the demographic boom all worked against the scale, balance, proportion and harmony upon which civic freedom depended. That it continued to reappear, in the township democracy of New England or in the Parisian communes, is indicative of the essential need that human beings have for an expressivist mode of politics as a form of self-expression. Hence the tendency for politicisation to take the form of face-to-face decision making and direct democracy. For Daniel Guerin: “The bourgeois philosophers who had pronounced direct democracy unworkable in large countries, on the grounds that it would be materially impossible to bring all the citizens together in one meeting, were thus proved wrong. The Commune had spontaneously discovered a new form of representation more direct and more flexible than the parliamentary system and which while not perfect, for all forms of representation have their faults, reduced the disadvantages to a minimum”. Indeed, so direct and flexible was this form of political expression that it could not be considered as a form of representation at all, not in the sense that representation implies the alienation of sovereignty. The Commune form of self-expression establishes complete control over civic affairs through the confederation of face-to-face neighbourhood assemblies, free communes as the nuclear unit of the new politics. The Commune form of self-governance is characterised by a politics which is co-extensive with social life, and expresses a popular politics with deep roots in guild systems of mutual aid, a civic militia, and the strong awareness of a shared commonality. The medieval guild combined the functions of the ancient collegium, the modern trade union and much more, undertaking material purposes within a moral commitment. The guilds combined economics, politics and ethics in being a sworn, covenanted brotherhood that imposed sanctions against members who sought to lower the quality of goods or charge higher than prescribed prices. The guilds were a form of education or training in regulating not only the production of material goods but of personal, moral, and religious character to ensure good behaviour. Members were punished for usury, blasphemy, gambling and other cases of immoral behaviour. The medieval guilds also exercised extensive social and civic functions in caring for members’ widows and orphans, the ill and infirm but also in giving alms to the poor, performing charitable works, and in celebrating feast days. Of the greatest importance is the extent to which medieval guilds acquired legislative and governing authority to an extent that they became the principal municipal institution of many communes. Thousands of European towns exercised a degree of autonomy that only the greatest cities had had in the past and which remains a goal which modern cities, for all of their material wealth and power, can only aspire to in relation to the dominant forces of national states and global capital. The commune’s autonomy was achieved as an organic process within a decentralised agrarian society that was feudal rather than capitalist. Growth and elaboration proceeded from the localised world of small artisans, craftsmen, and merchants, giving it a corporate rather than a commercial character. The commercial imperatives that accompanied the expansion of foreign trade – more precisely the capitalistic carrying trade that emanated from the Italian city states and the Flemish communes – served to network Europe’s towns and cities whilst undermining their communal autonomy. The independence that each possessed apart from the others was replaced by a union of dependence of all upon commerce. The potential for a Europe-wide system of self-governance through interlinked confederal institutions based on local community control remained latent. Instead, the commercial network created by trade between cities facilitated the rise of civic oligarchies who favoured the formation of centralised nation states, monarchical and later republican systems of government working hand in hand with capital. The intercity carrying trade that absorbed Europe within an all-encompassing commercial network from the twelfth century onward shredded the intricate patterns and solidarities of the many personal and communal dependencies through which production and personality was carefully regulated. Rapidly, the expanding trade between cities generated a new social infrastructure of institutions and media more appropriate for a commercial order – regional rather than local, and then overwhelmingly national. Far from ensuring the assertion of civic and communal autonomy of the city, the expansion of intercity trade drew all cities in subordination within an extra-urban commercial network that established the infrastructure for the nation state and nationalism. The Europe-wide commercial interlinking of towns and cities generated new material dependencies for goods that severed the intimate and grounded relationships and solidarities fostered by corporate society. With its legitimacy codified on paper in legal and administrative documents and compacts, the nation state achieved pre-eminence more as a social contract than as an organic historic phenomenon. Behind the small print and the legalese of the ‘contractual’ state is a history that contradicts its rationalistic claims to authority. Reason, clearly, was a contested claim. The legalistic rationalism of the state is one form that reason could take over against the ontological and anthropological claims of human beings that their reason is more properly embodied in the corporate entities of the body politic. The state’s reason, in contrast, is an empty formalism, a legalistic casing or shell imposing one form of reason upon other, more humanly rationalistic claims. The state proved to be parasitic upon these rational aspects of social and community life, those forces which human beings create in the process of promoting their self-realisation. To defetishize the authority of the state as the institutional embodiment of reason is to begin to revalue and recover the rational dimensions of public activity as coextensive with social life as constituted by an active citizenship. This is to return politics to its original meaning against its contemporary redefinition as statecraft, the preserve of professional politicians, officials, and bureaucrats. The legal and contractual self-image and legitimation of the modern state owes a great deal to the fact that its emergence could not be organic and socially rooted in a genuine social and civic rationality. The centralised nation state emerged in alliance with the commercial forces of capital in and against a social milieu that was distinctly customary, solidary and organic in character. An organic development favoured a Europe-wide interlinking of confederal communes. The state and capital proceeded in alliance against these organic forces, systematically suppressing alternative bases of social and civic autonomy to force all upon the market. These forces for communal autonomy were systematically suppressed in order to secure the power of capital within state authority. In the process, the state suppressed the intricate, evolved loyalties and solidarities of a highly decentralised, localistic, and organic society, canalising the rich diversity of cultural, economic, and communal attributes into the increasingly homogenized forms of the state bureaucracy. The localist politics which once contained the potential for a corporate confederalism of interlinked towns and cities was transformed into nationalist statecraft concerned with imposing civil peace upon a society fractured by market relationships and with creating the appropriate public order for the private accumulation of capital. What we now recognise as the modern world emerged in the next two or three centuries through the struggle for popular government, rights, representation and democracy. The problem is that this struggle proceeded within inherently narrow and flawed parameters. This is where the conflation of direct and representative forms, Athens and Rome, becomes decisive. For the state which emerged at this time completely redefined politics as the statecraft of professional elites, emptying citizenship of its active and participatory content and thus supplanting energetic, empowered, and self-realising, self-governing citizens with passive, disempowered, and politically obedient ‘subjects’. Politics became the management and manipulation of the excluded and passive masses. No amount of democratisation, extended franchise, rights etc could compensate for the basic hollowness of the new state politics. The familiar picture of ever quarrelsome, continually warring city-states is an extremely misleading one in that it focuses narrowly upon some city-states at certain periods in their history. What lends credence to this reading is the historical triumph of the nation state, encouraging a tendency to read this development as a necessity written into the fabric of civic oligarchies quite happy to give up communal autonomy to the state in return for being allowed economic freedom. Against this narrow view of historical inevitability, there is plenty of evidence that, far from always being at war, cities were inclined to form leagues and confederacies with each other, networks of mutual aid and protection which sustained an infrastructure of communal liberty counterposed to the state. Histories of rebellions and revolutions pay scant regard to patterns of civic freedom and communal autonomy capable of producing confederations with which to supplant the state. The congregations and sects of Protestantism, the movements of the English Revolution, how these came to democratic fruition in the townships of New England, the clubs and societies of the French Revolution, and the many unions, councils and communes of proletarian politics have been examined. The Marxist approach naturally focuses upon a class analysis. Unfortunately, one always gains a sense of human agents struggling vainly against the forces of historical necessity. The civic roots of historical rebellions and revolutions and of proletarian politics are rarely appraised from the perspective of containing the potential for constituting a confederal municipal order independent of class politics. This despite the evidence of impressive political creativity on the part of popular movements. The democratic ideals and practices of the English Revolution may have been dashed by the return of the monarchy and rendered safe by being placed on a constitutional and legal basis, but were to have an active fulfilment in the townships of New England. Could the radicals have altered the course of the French Revolution to ensure that France came to be governed by a confederation of autonomous, interlinked communes rather than by the centralised apparatus of the state functioning for the benefit of capitalism as a private regime of accumulation? If that is a politically loaded question, then it is no less true that history, social reality, is always loaded. The Marxist approach can tend to reduce human agents to a struggle over pre-determined outcomes. The ideal of communal confederation was once more invoked in the popular demands that arose during the French Revolution. Lacking the infrastructure of communal autonomy ensured that the Revolution issued in one of the most centralized nation-states in Europe through first the dictatorship of the Jacobins and then the rule of Napoleon. Whilst the ideal remained, it was forever in search of the social and civic substance that would enable it to create the infrastructure against the state and ensure its permanent reality. The ideal continues to return in all popular upsurges. The Paris Commune of 1871 sought to organise France through communes or ‘city councils’ unified in a huge civic confederation. The ideal, however easily it may be expressed at the level of popular demand, requires content and substance, the actual infrastructure which trains and educates citizens to ensure its enduring significance. This is the real damage that state politics has inflicted upon citizenship and the citizen body. Excluded from public life and political activity other than voting in a periodic election, people have lost the habits and mentalities of citizenship. They can press their citizen identities in a vague, spontaneous sense at a time when the state is suffering a crisis in its legitimacy and authority, but the state always retains an institutional power with which to face the citizens down. Centralisation at the top is associated with civic deterioration at the base of society. Divested of its political significance, society ceases to foster a civic culture and instead becomes a panoply of bureaucratic agencies that are charged with the task of imposing unity upon monadic individuals within a strictly legal and administrative structure. Where once civil institutions fostered a civic culture, educating people into citizenship, the instrumental relationships and possessive individualism of market society fosters the dissolution of the self into mere egoism. Unity is possible only through the imposition of an impersonal legal-administrative bond whereas once the city could generate its own unity from within as an ethical bond. Society thus ceases to be a public life united by a range of collective purposes and solidarities and instead disintegrates into a market, a formless economic unit lacking civic structures and loyalties. Hobbes’s portrayal of the state of nature as the war of all against all was a purely fictitious justification of the need for a strong central state authority to impose civil peace upon the emerging market society of his day. This antagonism subverts society’s organic tendency toward communal diversity, complexity and solidarity. This is an ontological problem in that the city, as the most elemental form of human consociation, is crucial to human self-realisation. The city is the place where being is realised, where individuals learn to extend the kinship bond to a public awareness of the connection between each and all, expanding as human beings by coming to produce, share, and develop the material and cultural means of life, sharing the good life as truly human beings. This is to ascend to a reasonable commonality, a conscious state that transcends immediate bonds. This is to achieve humanitas as distinct from ‘folk’. Returning politics to its original meaning is to recover its ontological and indeed ecological aspects. Capitalist urbanisation destroys the diversity, variety and participation upon which the stability and the creativity of human consociation depends. Society loses its capacity to continually evolve and innovate richer, well-rounded social forms and instead is overwhelmed by an urban homogeneity and formlessness. This urbanisation is the product of the symbiotic relation between the state and capital, the abstract institutional-systemic apparatus of alien power pursuing its own imperatives at the expense of a living human culture and social ecology. Capitalism has had a disastrous impact upon the city, turning a political and civic entity into nothing more than an economic unit for accumulation. Handing over the city to the expansionary dynamic of capital has ensured that urbanisation proceeds by swallowing up its surroundings. The expansionary dynamic of capital translates into urban form in terms of the continuous extension of concrete over town and country alike, with pavements, streets, houses and industrial, commercial and retail structures encompassing the whole landscape. The result of this amorphous development has been that cities have ceased to be humanly scaled and comprehensible politics units and have thus lost their form as distinctive cultural and physical entities. In the original conception, the city is an ethico-political arena which provided the civilised form of consociation which human beings require to realise their human potentialities to the full, above and beyond kinship ties and family loyalties. The dehumanisation of capitalism has invaded the city and has hollowed them out from within until they function as no more than impersonal centres of accumulation and valorisation. This economic reductionism has indeed extended to the culture of cities, culture being objectified to assume commodity status. Capitalism’s economic reductionism does not imply that production and consumption have become ends in themselves. The situation is far worse than that. The whole process is endless. Social life and the biosphere have been objectified within an expansionary economy that is literally nihilistic or meaningless. The process is endless. The purpose of production and consumption is accumulation and valorisation in order to generate the resources for further accumulation. As against the diverse identities of the pre-modern age, the modern individual is a strangely anodyne and simplified being, a passive consumer and taxpayer, a bystander of political and economic processes they neither control nor comprehend. Citizenship requires that individuals be active participants in the processes by which their lives are governed. This implies the existence of political, economic and organisational capacities and communal solidarities, autonomies and roots that foster participation in social life and enable self-assertiveness against entrenched power. Whereas citizenship and politics once had the function of character formation and training into the appreciation of a shared and reasonable commonality, its economic reduction has resulted in an individualism characterised by private egoism and a personal indifference to the public purpose. The supplanting of the citizen by the bourgeois and the disappearance of the individual personality in an anonymous mass society has been accompanied by an expanding institutional and structural giantism that has inflated the means of social existence way beyond human scale and proportion. The world is beyond human comprehension and control. Defenders of rational modernity argue that its complexity makes democracy impossible in other than representative forms. The vacuum left by citizen participation comes to be filled by a growing bureaucracy. Whereas society was once a richly articulated, sinewy organism, it has become a simplified, one-dimensional machine for accumulation. Modern capitalist rationalisation stands condemned for the degradation of the ontology of human beings and the ecology of cities. The promised proletarian transformation of politics never quite materialised. However, it possessed the potential to recover classical conceptions of politics and reinvigorate citizenship by means of an added social content. Proletarian clubs, trade union centres, cooperatives and clubs, mutual aid societies, and educational groups contained the potential to reconfigure the public sphere along the lines of everyday social reality. Socialists obsessed with ‘the party’ – parliamentary reformist or revolutionary – display a remarkable myopia here and fail to see the public significance of proletarian self-activity. Incredibly, although proletarian self-activity and self-organisation has covered the range of material, civil and educational issues, working class politics has been condemned for its economism and trade union consciousness. All the evidence is that it is the professionals of ‘the party’ who suffer from narrowness, displaying a complete lack of imagination and insight in continuing the identification of the state with public life and politics. Against this, proletarian clubs and corporate bodies generated a holistic organisational, moral and political infrastructure which would have enabled them to generate a public life in autonomy from the state. The workers created libraries, produced periodicals, gave lectures, and organised discussion groups in order to educate workers into a public consciousness as well as creating the organisations capable of mobilizing workers for political and economic ends. This proletarian activity pertained to a way of life, with picnics, athletic pursuits and games, trips into the countryside ensuring that educational and political purposes were well-rounded. Just as participatory public life was an everyday training that fostered citizenship, so the psychological impact of being confronted by vast blocs of economic and political power has been to induce passivity on the part of the individual. Everywhere, the individual in market society is confronted with impersonal powers than emphasise the reality of human disempowerment. Confronted with institutional giantism and systemic necessity, the individual becomes passive, inert, and introverted. Politics is redefined as a technology of power in the service of elites. Democracy becomes a means of manufacturing public consent. Public life dissolves into private life. Capitalist economic reductionism is characterised by the extension of economics into all areas of life. Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all demonstrates an early awareness of the extent to which a market economy has a tendency to become a market society organised around purely instrumental relationships. The nexus of callous cash payment is the most obvious manifestation of an all-encompassing commodification. Relations between human beings have come to be mediated by objects. This is Marx’s condition of alienation. Human beings have been reduced to the status of things to the extent that things have acquired existential significance. The significance of the dissolution of the city through urbanisation is indicated by the concept of urban regeneration. The economic model is simply assumed by not merely business interests and conservative politicians but politicians and governmental officials as such, with even trade unionists and labour parties in agreement. Towns and cities should be considered as growth machines to be ‘managed’ by ‘entrepreneurs’. The regenerated town or city is one that has succeeded in growing through being able to attract private investment. Towns and cities are to be measured by their capacity for generating ‘revenue’. That city has a civic dimension does not enter the argument, unless one refers to the way that even the culture of cities is now being objectified and marketed. Capitalist urbanisation destroys the form and function of the city as a civilising and humanising arena. The city was once the essential arena for the unfolding of human potentialities. It follows that the dissolution of the city is simultaneously the dissolution of the personality. Urban sprawl is accompanied by the privatisation of city space, an increasingly impotent bureaucracy coming to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of an active community life. The destructuring of social life from home to community, the disappearance of heterogeneity, and decline of interaction, and civic creativity means that society ceases to exist as a civic order and community. Human beings lose the capacity to order their own existence and hence are forced to rely upon artificial and coercive institutional machinery. The state, the very institution which is responsible for disempowering society, is called in to prop up a failing social order. Armed police become the last guarantor of order in neighbourhoods that are rapidly unravelling just as the social worker becomes the last custodian of order in a disintegrating domestic life. In order to support a faltering order, the state is forced to intervene in every sphere of society, coming to approximate a totalitarian state. The result is that society becomes something inert and inorganic. The passivity of human beings as a consequence of the destruction of citizenship makes totalitarianism not only possible but impossible to resist. Withdrawn into a privatised and passive existence, the individual lacks the capacity to resist and to constitute an alternative order. Self-identity has been dissolved, the means by which individuals were educated into public awareness and collective solidarity have been eroded. Mass impotence makes the ersatz collective power of totalitarianism plausible. Nostalgia tends to take the form of nationalism, selective reminiscences for a time and place that never were. There is a need to look deeper and further than this so as to appreciate the extent to which nations comprise cities, towns and villages. It is upon these that human well-being, culture, and security have always depended, long before the nation state emerged and proceeded to empty them of content. Jane Jacobs makes it clear that economic well-being depends on cities rather than nation states. Although nations may be ‘political and military entities it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth… We can’t avoid seeing, too, that among all the various types of economies, cities are unique in their abilities to shape and reshape the economies of other settlements, including those far removed from them geographically’ (p203 79). Despite the wealth of historical evidence supporting this argument, there remains a reluctance to consider the state as anything other than the central institution in politics. Not only is this assumption questionable, the very character of state politics is open to challenge. The state stands condemned for not only monopolising politics but for reducing politics to a mockery. Politics as the pursuit and retention of power on the part of parties and politicians has systematically destroyed the idea and practice of the individual as a public being, as a citizen playing a participatory role in communal affairs. By perverting politics in this way, the nation-state has served to obstruct the development of essential human potentialities. The state is parasitic upon the community. It exists only by divesting the community of its material and cultural resources and hence of its capacity to order its own existence and engender a public life in opposition to the state. The state preserves its own existence by disempowering civil society in such a way as to prevent the emergence of forms of local self-management and civic autonomy capable of offering an alternate public order to the state. The key to recovering the connection between politics and the realisation of personality is the achievement of municipal freedom. For most of its existence, the city functioned as a public sphere for politics and citizenship and for a while struggled to preserve its autonomy against the encroachment of the nation state. The city retains the capacity to engender forms of civil association with which to resist the imperatives of the state and capital and to create a public order based upon municipal freedom, communal autonomy and civic loyalties. The argument for the necessity of the state as against municipal freedom and participatory citizenship refers to ‘complexity’. Yet, in comparison with the richly articulated interlinking communes and cities of pre-modern times, capitalist modernity is a remarkably simplified and homogenised civilisation. Moreover, all the evidence is that the state is incapable of managing ‘complexity’ efficiently and gives all the appearance of a doomed bureaucratic intervention from the outside. History is full of examples of pre-modern solidarities and connections between cities and communes ensuring an economic and political coordination far beyond the capacity of the state. The individuals who formed the township democracy of New England in the seventeenth century not only restored Christianity to its ‘pure’, ecclesiastically untainted, biblical form but also re-created society itself according to a pristine, egalitarian, and devoutly communalist pattern derived from the ethical and social covenants that appear in Acts. As against the liberal contractarianism which looks upon society as an association for personal and collective security, each community was conceived as an ethical compact to achieve a ‘good society’. The concern was as moral as it was material. The individual and the collective were therefore conceived as two sides of the same coin by the New England colonists, just as they had been at the time of the classical polis. In this conception, the church ceases to be a rigid institution and instead becomes a spiritual concern. This supports the idea of a self-governing congregation that is capable of extension into the civil world as an equally self-governing political body, the town meeting. Puritan religious belief and forms of organisation led logically to the practice of the periodic meeting of the entire male population of a community for the purposes of governing its own affairs. The Founding Fathers created a relatively centralized republic on the basis of a basically confederal, face-to-face municipal democracy which they had no choice but to accept. The American Revolution and Constitution is incredibly ambiguous, poised between the objective of a centralised nation state and the reality of municipal democracy. The fracture is between popular experiences of agrarian commitments to freedom, a participatory politics, and an involved citizenry on the one hand, and the vision of an acquisitive individualism represented by ascending capitalist forces in the ports and inland market towns. This possessive individualism constitutes a social malignancy that threatens to destructure society and unravel social ties. Its most basic impact lies in simplification and homogenisation so that individuals are stripped of richly articulated relationships to become merely anonymous buyers and sellers. The personal is rendered impersonal, the organic inorganic, with the result that community atrophies and the individual ossifies. Far from being capable of recreating public life, the political party is merely the state in miniature, formed in the image of state politics in being a structured hierarchy of descending purposes. Insofar as the political party has its roots in the state rather than in the body politic, it merely reconstitutes state power whenever it achieves its goals. The political party is no more political in the classic civic sense than is the state. Like the state, the political party operates to parasitize and constrain the power of the body politic, to manage and manipulate the citizens rather than enabling them to autonomously express their will. Political parties are formed to mobilize and command the masses in order to acquire state power and ensure the rule of an elite. The political party like the state is an excrescence of society, that parasitizes society but has no roots within it. Politics in the classical conception is an organic phenomenon in being the activity of the body politic, citizens actively constituting and participating in a public life as a condition of their self-realisation. By recovering the connection with the human ontology, politics comes to be conceived as an activity which involves reasonable communication and citizen discourse, public empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and the actualisation of rationality in a shared commonality. The attempts of political parties to engineer public life are manifest from this perspective, revealing the lack of deep roots in the community. In contrast to parties, genuinely political movements are social movements which emerge as a spontaneous creation of the body politic, their conceptions being drawn from the lived experiences and traditions of the citizen body. These movements are capable of engendering communal autonomy through the municipal association of people, broadening out through the confederal interlinking of surrounding communities networking on a local and regional scale. The failure to interlace with grass roots forms and organs reveals that the political party is not political in the classical sense of the term. Rather, the party is an administrative entity abstracted from the body politic and quite antithetical to the development of a participatory and expressivist mode of politics through an active citizenry. The authentic unit of public life is not the state but the city, the municipality, the neighbourhood. To articulate a public life that is connected to ontology and ecology is to define a concept of politics and citizenship that is capable of transforming cities ethically and politically as well as spatially and economically. Any city that has definable neighbourhoods is capable of reconstituting politics as popular assembly. This politics proceeds from the neighbourhood to envisage an ever-broader confederation of neighbourhoods. Delegates from a number of neighbourhood assemblies participate in confederal councils. Coordination is therefore achieved by mandated delegates who are subject to rotation and recall and act in the confederal councils according to instruction in written form. The major stumbling block is not political but administrative: how to produce the material amenities and provide the infrastructure necessary to city life. Those seduced by ICT have raised the prospect of ‘computocracy’, direct electronic participation in which citizens push buttons in support of policies. There is no reason why political debates cannot be settled by electronic voting conducted in the privacy of the home. But this scenario leaves politics untransformed and is merely an easy and facile way of conducting existing politics. A privatised politics conducted by autonomous individuals who neither meet nor interact does not constitute public life. There are crucial issues concerning the nature of citizenship and public life and the connection of politics with human self-realisation which need to be addressed here. To accept the equation of political participation with the act of voting represents a failure of the imagination and nerve given the possibilities that are currently opening up. The electronic conception of participatory democracy continues the error of identifying the citizen with the ‘autonomous’ individual qua ‘voter’. Confined within the private sphere, the ‘autonomous’ individual is an isolated being lacking the public life which is required for true freedom. In order to be truly human, individuals require a living social and political matrix, a relationship to other individuals through which individuality acquires its meaning. From this perspective, the autonomous individual celebrated by individualist liberal philosophy has neither autonomy nor individuality. The autonomy referred to here is actually the separation of each from all others combined with the subjection of all to external forces and necessity. And since human beings need each other in order to be themselves, the autonomous individual is incapable of achieving individuality. As Max Horkheimer has argued, ‘individuality is impaired when each man decides to shift for himself .. as the ordinary man withdraws from participation in political affairs, society tends to revert to the law of the jungle, which crushes all vestiges of individuality. The absolutely isolated individual has always been an illusion. The most esteemed personal qualities, such as independence, will to freedom, sympathy, and the sense of justice, are social as well as individual virtues. The fully developed individual is the consummation of a fully developed society. The emancipation of the individual is not an emancipation from society, but the deliverance of society from atomisation, an atomisation that may reach its peak in periods of collectivisation and mass culture’ (p225 95). Human beings are social rather than solitary beings, with capacities and needs for solidarity and reciprocity. Human beings require collective institutions and warm affiliations for the mutual enhancement of our self-development and creativity, and for the flourishing of our abilities. Freedom is attained within a socially supportive and institutionally rich collective life. Detached from the community of others and placed only in instrumental and antagonistic relation to others, the individual becomes passive and impotent. In this degraded condition, the individual lacks the self-assertion required for citizenship but is dependent. The masses composed of such individuals are easily controlled and manipulated, and form the fodder for the mass media, the market for the corporations and the electorate targeted by the parties. Both individuality and community are denied by the dissolution of public life as the common ground through which the relationship between each and all proceeds. The essential and genuine attributes of the rational and free society are communal and individual at the same time, revealing two aspects of the same human nature. Conceived in an institutional sense, the urban public realm forms the setting for the free and rational society and is the irreducible ground for a genuine individuality and commonality. The importance of the urban public realm lies in the way that it constitutes the discursive arena in which individuals can intellectually and emotionally interact with one another, engage in dialogue, and communicate in the fully human sense of body language, personal intimacy, and face-to-face modes of expression. Communication is more than words and ideas but is a physical interaction that involves the body, the integral personality. This is communication as communising, an act of social intercourse that proceeds at many levels of life and that fosters solidarity, mutuality and reciprocity, the very qualities that make organic interpersonal relationships meaningful. Voting which is conducted in the privacy of the booth or in the electronic isolation of the home privatises democracy and hence undermines it. Democracy as the counting of individual preferences represents the quantification of citizenship, the reduction of politics to numbers, and is the complete antithesis of debate and deliberation as a mutually informative process. The act of voting represents a poll of perceptions and values in relation to predetermined positions, not the free and full expression of rational judgement. Again, modern ‘complex’ society is distinguished for its simplification. Voting represents the reduction of views to preferences, replacing ideals spontaneously formulated in rational discourse with taste and image fashioned by the opinion makers, the quantification of comprehension so that aspirations and principles are reduced to numbers. Most important of all, the autonomous individual is detached from the support systems, affiliations and organic intercourse which are provided by the community context and which are crucial to fostering citizen identity and personality, the paideia and the Bildung which form are integral to politics as an educative process. An authentic politics and a genuine citizenship involve the continuous formation of personality through the growing awareness of public responsibility and commitment. This character building creates the citizen and gives the body politic an existential reality. The end of paideia as an educational and self-formative process is philia or solidarity. Philia involves a sense of public commitment which is generated by knowledge, training, and experience. Political participation therefore possesses an inbuilt educative function which ensures freedom as the triumph of rationality. This politics as self-realisation of personality and public life requires a city-state which is scaled to human proportion and is therefore accessible to human reason, comprehensible and institutionally controllable. In an era of vast alien power concentrated in the state and capital, when bureaucracy, property ownership, production, investment and trade are entrenched in centralised institutions, it would seem that a localist, municipally-confederalist society is as impossible as, for instance, conciliar government in the Middle Ages and commune democracy in eighteenth and nineteenth century France. The tendency of capitalist rationalisation is plainly towards increasing abstraction, concentration and centralisation of instrumental and administrative power, bureaucratisation. In such conditions, ‘democracy’ is easily canalised into the forms of public massification. The prospects for a decentralist, and participatory vision of urban self-governance and personality seem distinctly dim. The problem of dealing with the vast alien power of the state and capital is a question of power and control. As against Michel Foucault, who equates power with force, it makes more sense to identify power as something essential and organic, residing in all living beings and as crucial to their self-realisation. From this perspective, the power of the state is revealed to be the sovereignty it takes from the people and the commonality it takes from society. Similarly, power of capital is the surplus value it extracts from labour. This alien power is power that can be reappropriated by its agents and exercised socially. The reempowerment of communities and of the people is simultaneously the disempowerment of the state and capital. The practical reappropriation of alien power and its reorganisation as social power makes it possible for people to reconstitute their power in popular and democratic forms. Since the state and capital are supra-individual powers, there is a need to innovate supra-individual forms of social control. Power of this kind must be collective in order to be effective. Democracy requires form and content. That is, it needs popular organs and institutions such as assemblies that furnish the permanent structures for the continuous direct participation of citizens in public affairs. Without such a project creating the infrastructure of the civil public, political protest is merely a futile guerrilla warfare that challenges the existing totalitarian concentration power with sporadic demonstrations, occasional riots, eye-catching gestures and permanent protests – all of which lacks and fails to generate the power necessary to really contest the issue. There is no political education other than a living and creative public life that fosters a capacity for citizenship on the part of participating members, enabling them to assume the management of collective affairs. In an age of concentrated alien power, the task is to recover the connection of politics with human ontology and social ecology, to re-establish the connection of freedom with an increasing rationality, and to create a public sphere that will inculcate the values of reciprocity, solidarity, communication, community, and public service within everyday social practices. The class issues of capitalism have not been resolved. The proletarian transformation of politics has been blocked by the buying off of the wealthier sections of the working class. The crisis tendencies of capitalism are still evident. But the lamentable attempts of socialist parties to engineer the public life – and continued proletarian passivity in face of crisis – demands a renewal of radical politics. If the levers of class politics no longer work, then there is little to be gained by nostalgia for a revolution that never was. What is striking about the contemporary world is the extent to which popular participation and mobilisation is inspired by post-materialist cross class issues such as ecology, the deteriorating urban fabric, community and neighbourhood politics, things which are of immediate, everyday concern to people and which affect all as human beings regardless of class. In this sense, the attempt to project and realise public life becomes a radical movement aimed against entrenched forces operating to block the public realm. There are plenty of cross class public issues with which to mobilise the people against the state and capital – war, terrorism and the increasing militarisation of the planet, growing authoritarianism and encroachment upon civil life on the part of the state, the degradation and militarisation of the urban environment, the destruction of the biosphere. At a time when the old monological modes of politics have become clearly outmoded and unable to deal adequately with the new issues, there has been a participatory revolution underway. Political parties struggle to attract and retain members, elections struggle to get the voters out, yet in a myriad of ways on a wide range of issues through a wide range of organs, individuals are acting as citizens. There are any number of community organisations and citizens’ groups involving individuals from all class backgrounds in common projects to resolve problems that concern the social, material, environmental and ecological welfare of the community as a whole. This movement contains the potential for an active citizenship pressing demands for communal autonomy and civic self-government, a demand for a genuine public life that pertains to self-realisation as a radical need that embraces all humankind above and beyond class politics and material interests. Aristotle here defined the Athenian ideal of the politically sovereign citizen who is capable of making a rational judgement in public affairs on account of being free from material need or clientage. On this assumption, a genuine citizenship that is democratic in embracing all is predicated upon the abolition of class relations. The case for a civil public does not imply the false and transitory unity of alliance politics. The Left has displayed a tendency to embrace a shallow and uncritical pluralism that falls far short of serious pluralists like Dahl and Lindblom. The result has been to underscore the intellectual and political irrelevance of the Left. The shallow relativism of identity politics and of ‘no necessary relations’ between anything has dissolved critical rationality into a vague eclecticism. Issues and problems have to be clearly identified and traced to their sources. Projects must be taken to their logical conclusions. The nuclear unit of public life is the municipality from which politics emerges. Citizenship, community, communication, confederation, and freedom originate from the elementary forms: the villages, towns, neighbourhoods, and cities in which people achieve a public life and establish connections with each other beyond private life. This is the everyday terrain upon which individuals can apprehend the political process and begin to emerge as active, informed, empowered citizens. It is on this terrain that individuals acquire a public awareness that enables them to transcend the insularity of their private existence and to innovate those public institutions that facilitate extensive community participation and consociation. The broad historical and philosophical scope of this paper has the purpose of identifying real ideals immanent in the human ontology, in social practices, and in political institutions. It is easy enough to engage in wishful thinking and define a never-to-be-realised utopia that pays scant regard to realities. The point is, however, the ideals of the civil public, active citizenship, commune democracy, participatory modes and scaled units of self-governance can all be traced in the realities of human nature as manifested historically in different times and places. Realisation may have been partial and transitory but history, as the progress unfolding of rationality into a universal freedom, identifies rational practices in lived experience as stages in the process towards the end of rational freedom. That these practices were overwhelmed or checked by irrational developments in history does not contradict the overall progress towards rational freedom. There is process in this history as the story of human self-realisation. This view takes its stand on reason as evidenced in anthropology and ecology, in the health, preservation and unfolding of the natural conditions of life. Democracy is indeed the truth of politics, as Marx argued, in that the self-realisation of all humankind logically implies self-government as the direct management of social affairs by the people. Letting power unfold as a condition of health and vitality requires democracy as a public empowerment. It remains to show how this argument from power embraces all life forms within nature. The question is one of power. Power exists, it is natural. Power must originate somewhere and must reside somewhere. In simple terms, power is either retained and exercised by the people or it is alienated to some alien institution or organisation. In the contemporary world, the state and capital possess power that properly belongs to the demos. There can be no system of dual power here. The one or the other must have this power. The state exists by parasitizing society and can prolong its existence only by divesting the people in society of their power. It follows that popular control exercised through society must disempower the state as a condition of reempowering the people in their communities. Only if the whole hierarchical organisation of rational modernity is uprooted and power radically dispersed throughout the social body will exploitation and domination be replaced by participation and the principle of cooperation. The reappropriation of power from the state – and capital – and its reorganisation as the social power of the people implies the deprofessionalisation of the institutions by which society is managed. This is to refuse to accept the ‘complexity’ of modern society as a given. For ‘complexity’ read overscale. Society must be simplified. The common conscious control of citizens requires that collective affairs be transparent, accessible, and manageable. Amateurism as distinct from professionalism was practised in Athenian democracy for generations. Indeed, so ingrained and well-developed was this principle that Athens practised sortition rather than election. For the practice to have worked so well over so lengthy a period required the existence of an active, informed citizenry willing and capable to assume public office. The principle continues to resurface at times of popular radicalism and participation, in the early medieval city charters and confederations, and in the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this context one can see how the attempted proletarian transformation of politics came to be hindered by the colonisation of socialist parties and movements by the professional middle class and the way that they would quickly assume leadership roles. This subverted the revolutionary process – the praxis – whereby the proletariat developed their organisational, intellectual and moral capacities and constituted themselves as a revolutionary class capable of assuming conscious control of society. Marx’s crucial point concerning praxis is that in transforming society human agents would transform themselves. This process is continually short-circuited by the intervention of professional leaders, politicians, intellectuals etc. The presentation of the civil public envisages a political society which has which replaced the state by a confederal network of popular civic assemblies; all socially productive forms of property would be socialised into cooperative forms within this public to form a truly political economy in which publics would coordinate their economic and political affairs through citizen discourse and interaction in open assemblies, not only in terms of professional functions and sectional interests, but as citizens. People would then create a complete citizen identity for themselves that transcends their occupational identity. No longer would human beings be defined by their work but would instead be capable of presenting themselves in a public realm as communally-oriented citizens, public beings capable of appreciating and contributing to the common good. In due course, a series of networked civic communities emerge that are carefully fitted – technologically, architecturally, institutionally, structurally, psychologically and spiritually – to the social and natural environments in which they exist. Involvement, participation and practice are all important, drawing people into ever widening processes of development. This activity is educative. Revolution is not an event but a process in which the human personality grows to the extent that existing institutions and ideas of freedom are slowly enlarged and expanded. The recovery of the classical meaning of politics and citizenship is a precondition for a free and rational society and for the survival of the species. For the destructuring and homogenisation that human practice is inflicting upon the urban environment – divesting society of its variety so that, as a complex life form, human beings will be incapable of functioning as viable beings – is also being inflicted on the natural world. The most frequent argument employed against demands for face-to-face participatory democracy concerns the fact that modern ‘complex society’ is simply too large and too sophisticated to allow for direct decision making at a grassroots level. Paradoxically, the argument is applied only to politics and not to economics. For the liberal argument against state planning in the command economy was always that the economy is too complex to allow for central decision making and instead human agents should be trusted to make their own choices and decisions on a free market. Centralised control of decision-making is inefficient compared to decision-making by the agents themselves. The same argument applies to politics. The professionals are remote from the people they represent; they represent communities but have no roots in them. At this distance, professional parties and representatives are lack the knowledge to unravel the intricacies of issues arising in communities. In a vain attempt to compensate for inadequacy and ignorance, the preferred option is not to decentralise politics but to extend the reach of bureaucratic institutions, thus compounding the problem. To continue to ignore the fact that the ‘complex’ world is the product of the expansionary dynamics of alien power out of human control is plainly ideological in Marx’s sense of the term. To trace the problem of overscale to its source in specific social relations is to expose asymmetrical relations of power and resources within society. This would be quickly followed by demands for social transformation. Inequalities in power are best preserved by being concealed behind claims of necessity, inevitability, the general interest and so on. There are many sound ecological reasons for pursuing the classical goal of self-sufficiency as a sustainability. Far from being efficient, the national and international division of labour is extremely wasteful in the literal sense of that term. The globalisation of economic relations has generated overorganisation through the expansion of vast bureaucracies and requires exorbitant expenditures of resources in transporting materials over great distances. At the same time, the possibility of recycling wastes, reducing pollution, and of making sound use of local or regional raw materials is drastically reduced. The biggest impact of these wasteful, excessive, overscale systems is upon the human character and psyche. Human beings in such societies are characterised by their egoism, narrowness of outlook, shallowness, passivity and dependence. The self-sufficient community in which industries, crafts, and agriculture serve wider communal networks expand and enrich the range of opportunities to which individuals are exposed and foster the development of more rounded personalities with an enhanced sense of selfhood and competence. What then is the civil public sphere as distinct from a state? It is a network of administrative councils whose delegates are elected from popular assemblies practising face-to-face democracy and decision making. These exist in the most basic units of society, in the various villages, towns, and even neighbourhoods of large cities. The members of the civil public are mandated and subject to instruction, continually accountable, recallable and responsible. Their function is an administrative and practical one rather than a policy-making one as in systems of representative government. This is a functional democracy in which assemblies send people to a higher level for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves. Coordination and administration are the responsibility of higher levels in the network of villages, towns, neighbourhoods, and cities. This affirms the ascending as against the descending theme of power and government. Power flows from the lower levels and ascends upwards so as to find the effective level of competence. An integral part of giving reality to the civil public is the interlinking of communities through the practise of mutualism involving shared resources, produce, and policy making. This interdependence establishes the institutional foundation of the rational unity between each individual and all other individuals. Interdependence widens the scope and ensures inclusivity and broad-mindedness. A community that interprets self-sufficiency in an insular sense, does not engage with others to satisfy important material needs and realize common political goals risks degenerating into exclusivity and parochialism. Only by interpreting self-sufficiency in a holistic sense of an expanded, interlinked common purpose is it possible to define decentralisation and localism in such a way that the good of each community is enhanced by being drawn into ever wider areas of human consociation. Networking is therefore a way of democratising the interdependence that is necessary to expand, enrich and enhance the good without losing the principle of local control. The point is that there is no need to choose between centralisation and decentralisation, as though these terms are necessarily antithetical. The crucial principle is appropriate scale. The ascending theme of power affirms the rationality of the continuum from decentralisation to centralisation. It all depends upon whether power flows from the bottom up or is imposed from the top down and at what level this power comes to rest. Confederation is therefore the rational framework that encompasses decentralization, localism, and self-sufficiency through the functional interdependence of the parts. Further, the location and exercise of power at its appropriate and most effective level creates spaces and opportunities for paideia and Bildung, for the moral education and character building that fosters active citizenship in a participatory democracy capable of apprehending and promoting freedom as a shared and reasonable commonality. The passive consumers and voters of the modern world have so little of this citizenship that one is entitled to argue that politics as classically understood barely exists in the modern world. Liberal critics of radical democrats have frequently made reference to the ‘End of Politics’ (Polan, Schwarz etc.). Radicals who draw their models from classical civilisation can easily respond by arguing that politics ended some time ago. Certainly, the way that capitalism split the state and civil society and asserted the primacy of economics – the private realm – over politics – the public realm – has been experienced as a depoliticisation. Politics is no longer co-extensive with the everyday lives of the people but proceeds from a distance. On the everyday terrain people are absorbed in their private lives, governed by material necessity within instrumental relationships. The only education and character-building that proceeds in this context produces idiotes rather than polites, individuals absorbed into private affairs and unable and unwilling to appreciate the public good. Once one goes beyond the modern state-civil society dualism to realise politics in the classical sense of managing the affairs of the polis or community, the individual can be transformed from an egoistic individual governed by necessity into an active citizen, from a private being into a public being. Activity within extensive public spaces renders the citizen a functional being who is capable of participating directly in collective affairs. Here, power is a more intimate phenomenon, more closely bound up with the realisation of personality, than is the case with representative forms of governance, where the collective power of the people is transformed into alien power invested in a few individuals. These highly populated, sprawling, and overscale entities must be rescaled structurally and institutionally to function according to human dimensions. To transform the modern city into authentic municipalities and ultimately communes requires a physical and institutional decentralisation that must take time. It can only be achieved by a process which is driven by citizens themselves. It cannot be a programme or an agenda imposed from the top-down but must be part of a process by which individuals reclaim and redefine their communities, creating new identities for themselves as citizens in the process. The pursuit of the civil public is concerned to render politics ethical in character through its connection with ontology and ecology. There is need for a rational reconstruction of our relationship to each other within society and of the social world to the natural world. The concern is to reclaim public life as the sphere in which a rational, active citizenship flourishes. Such a politics makes a clean break with the demoralising cycle of In’s and Out’s that characterises a failing parliamentarism. The contemporary world is suffering from a crisis of political socialisation and representation. The ‘party’ form is not an appropriate means for engendering public life but, rather, is an administrative tool for denying public life to people. The civil public is grounded in an unfolding and flourishing human nature and conceives power as immanent in all living beings, as something that much expand outwards and be realised in a wider society. This is to envisage power as latent democratic potentiality that, as an ascending theme, is capable of achieving a radically new configuration of society itself – a communalist public life which is oriented toward realising human potentialities and satisfying needs, creating an order which corresponds to the human ontology as appreciative of ecological imperatives, creating an ethic based on sharing and cooperation. Capitalism is a social order that not only contradicts the human ontology but also ecological imperatives. By restoring harmony between social and natural worlds human beings will find themselves at peace with each other and with themselves, with their own nature within and with nature without. This implies not the end but the recovery of politics in the original Hellenic sense of the management of the community or polis by means of direct face-to-face popular assemblies respecting the ethics of complementarity and solidarity. Liberal critics are sceptical of the notion of the common good and are wary of active conceptions of citizenship. They distrust ‘the people’ and would prefer that they are shackled, given limited participatory possibilities and be rendered subordinate to an elite of professionals. And then they are mystified when public life dissolves into a privatised war of all against all. Having denied the educative process by which individuals learn to become citizens, they then scorn the people for their limited capacities. There is a common good, certainly with respect to the conditions human beings require to realise their potentialities and live as human beings, and certainly with respect to the conditions of life as given by the biosphere. In the most limited sense, there is a need to secure our relationship with each other in society and our relationship in society to the natural world. This is certainly a common good, a good that embraces all equally. The common good, with its postmaterialist, cross class, distinctively political orientation, may be the only radical politics left. It is too soon to say farewell to the working class. Large sections of the working class are too happy to be bought off and are quite unapologetic about. Who gave them the task of transforming society and redefining politics? Why should they? With the globalisation of capitalism, the working class is increasing in strength and numbers. But to punch its structural weight requires a moral and political praxis, a vision or ideal of a future public life. The same applies to the degeneration of the Left into identity politics. A genuinely Left politics must be ‘public’ first and foremost. 40