Table Of ContentCity and Regime in the
American Republic
Stephen L. Elkin
City and
Regime
in the
American
Republic
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1987 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1987
Printed in the United States of America
96 95 94 93 92 91 90 5432
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elkin, Stephen L.
City and regime in the American republic.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Municipal government-United States. I. Tide.
jS341.E44 1987 352'.0072'0973 87-5964
ISBN 0-226-20465-0
ISBN 0-226-20466-9 (pbk.)
Stephen L. Elkin teaches political science at the Univer
sity of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of
Politics and Land Use Planning and the coeditor of The
Democratic State.
For D, my teacher
The role of reason in politics is now generally
obscured by the popularity in our time of political
science as the study of power.
Charles E. lindblom, The Intelligmce of Democracy
Fruitful social science must be very largely a study
of what is not, a construction of hypothetical
models of possible worlds which might exist if
some of the alterable conditions were made
different.
Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty
Contents
Preface IX
Acknowledgments Xl
1. Introduction 1
2. City, State, and Market 18
3. Urban Political Economies 36
4. An Entrepreneurial Political Economy 61
5. Systematic Bias and Effective Problem
Solving 83
6. City and Regime 102
7. A Commercial Republic? 124
8. The Commercial Public Interest and the
Urban Citizenry 146
9. The Probable and the Desirable 170
10. Some Considerations on Political Judgment 189
Bibliography 201
Index 217
Vll
Preface
This book grows out of several intellectual impulses. One of these is
the attempt to discover how political science can guide political prac
tice. As are many other political scientists, I am embarrassed by the
paucity of guidance for practical affairs that political science presently
offers. I do not mean to imply that political science should be a kind
of nuts-and-bolts enterprise that could serve to train the new recruit
to a government bureaucracy, for example, although I confess to
thinking that this might be a good deal more intellectually valuable
than developing the propositions offered by many parts of the dis
cipline. Instead, I am thinking of the intelligent citizen who might be
gratified to gain a deeper understanding of what is required to create
and maintain a political way of life that he considers worthy. Political
science as it now stands has far too little to offer such a person. This
book is, in part, designed to prompt the kind of thinking that will
help to remedy this deficiency.
A second impulse is to nudge political science away from what might
be called the "organ" theory of politics-that is, that there are only
parts and no wholes, that, in the happy (and somewhat altered) refrain
of the popular song, we ain't got no body. This emphasis on parts
leads to detailed and often very fine studies of the Congress and
political parties, to take two examples, but surprisingly little attention
is given to what the studies are for. Sometimes the more sophisticated
practitioners of this approach make the claim that such studies are
designed to determine how we match up against some normative
standard. But what is puzzling about such claims is that they do not
go far enough. After all, we as Americans are not pursuing an ab
straction called liberal democracy but are trying to conduct a political
life that is built on a specific institutional inheritance and on an in
herited political vocabulary. Thus, political wholes, properly under
stood, seem to me to be tied to circumstance and history as much as
to philosophy.
IX
x
PREFACE
The other impulses can be more briefly described. I have long been
interested in cities--and now I know why. There are two reasons,
both of which are displayed in this book. One reason is that the study
of cities affords an intimate appreciation of how state-market relations
operate in a liberal democracy. Students of cities are less likely to
believe that businessmen are simply another, albeit powerful, interest
group. This is a useful foundation on which might be built more
comprehensive thoughts about the place of business corporations and
property in our national political life. The second reason is that the
political institutions of the city are potentially crucial in helping to
prepare the citizenry to operate the commercial republic that the
founding fathers set in motion. Cities ate an organ of a particularly
important kind in the larger political whole.
The shape of the book reflects an amalgam of these impulses, and
thus it is inevitably a compromise. Its organization and emphasis
reflect the diversity of the intellectual starting points. Just as I have
learned much from trying to marry the various themes, so I offer
the results in the hope that others will gain something from its eclec
ticism. The book is in the nature of a theoretical essay. The test of a
good essay is whether it can build on what is widely believed to be
true--and present it in illuminating ways. This is what I hope to have
achieved.
