Social Theory and the Urban Question

Peter Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134875108
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1986. For this new edition of Social Theory and the Urban Question Peter Saunders has updated the text to take account of major theoretical developments in the 1980s and has also considerably developed his own approach. Three chapters have been completely rewritten and others have been appropriately revised. The revisions ensure that Social Theory and the Urban Question will retain its position as a major textbook in urban sociology and an important contribution to the development of urban social theory. The book begins with a review of the ways in which Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Engels approached the analysis of the city. It goes on to consider the four major theoretical approaches which have been developed in twentieth-century urban sociology - those of human ecology, cultural theories, neo-Weberianism and neo-Marxism. Recent innovations and new directions arising out of the work of contemporary writers such as Castells, Pahl, Harvey and Giddens are discussed and evaluated, and the book concludes by identifying a new 'sociology of consumption' which may now be emerging in the urban studies literature.

1
Social theory, capitalism and the urban question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx’s method of analysis has been debated long and hard by subsequent generations. It is clear that Marx himself believed that his was a ‘scientific’ method in the sense that it led to the discovery of the forces which shaped the development of the social world, just as, for example, Darwin’s work had led to the discovery of the forces shaping the evolution of the natural world. The problem, however, is that Marx did not devote much of his writing explicitly to elaborating this method, and it has therefore been left to later philosophers and theorists to specify precisely how such scientific discoveries could be accomplished.

Although Marx himself never used the term, his approach has often been designated by the label ‘dialectical materialism’. The phrase is useful as it points to the two basic principles upon which Marx’s method of analysis was based.

The principle of the dialectic is essentially that any ‘whole’ is comprised of a unity of contradictory parts, such that it is impossible to understand any one aspect of reality without first relating it to its context. We cannot, for example, understand the plight of wage labour under capitalism without also understanding the process leading to the augmentation of the wealth and power of capital, for capital and wage labour are tied together in an inescapable yet inherently antagonistic relation of mutual interdependence. A method of analysis which is dialectical, therefore, is a method which holds that no single aspect of reality can be analysed independently of the totality of social relations and determinations of which it forms a necessary part. Put another way, any explanation of the part can only be accomplished through an analysis of the whole. As Swingewood suggests, ‘The dialectical approach in Hegel and Marx is preeminently a method for analysing the interconnections of phenomena, of grasping facts not as isolated, rigid and external data but as part of an all-embracing process’ (1975, p. 33).

It is this claim to be able to analyse the totality of things which has helped to make Marxism so attractive to so many contemporary social scientists. In contrast to so-called ‘bourgeois’ social science with its irksome and petty disciplinary boundaries, Marxism holds out the promise of an all-embracing explanation which can relate the processes studied by the political scientist to those analysed by the economist or the sociologist. Its first claim to superiority, therefore, lies in its purported ability to transcend the inevitably partial and stunted knowledge of the specialist disciplines by means of an analysis of the totality of social relations in which changes in one sphere of life are explained with reference to changes in another.

There is, moreover, a second claim advanced on behalf of a Marxist method, and this had to do with Marx’s ‘materialism’. The term ‘materialism’ in this context is generally used in contradistinction to ‘idealism’, and it basically refers to the principle that the material world exists prior to our conceptions or ideas about it. Marx recognizes that the prevailing ideas which we share about what the world is like and how it works must bear some relation to the actual reality, for it is inconceivable that generations of people should collectively delude themselves entirely about the nature of a reality which daily confronts them in various forms and manifestations. Nevertheless, Marx also argues that reality may rarely be directly reflected in consciousness. The way the world appears to us, in other words, may conceal or distort its essential character. Indeed, if this were not the case, there would be no need for science since all knowledge of reality would be immediately available to us through our everyday unmediated experience of living in the world. What science does, according to Marx, is to penetrate the forms of appearance in which reality cloaks itself in order to discover the essential causal relations which lie behind and give rise to such appearances. As Derek Sayer puts it, ‘Unlike phenomenal forms, Marx holds, essential relations need not be transparent to direct experience. Phenomenal forms may be such as to mask or obscure the relations of which they are the forms of manifestation’ (1979, p. 9).

We are now in a position to understand Marxism’s claims relative to ‘bourgeois’ social science. First, a Marxist method will understand the total context of interrelations and mutual determinations which shape the social world, whereas bourgeois approaches will remain partial and thus fail to achieve any clear overall understanding of the causes of the changes they are studying. And second, a Marxist method will penetrate the phenomenal forms of appearance in which the world presents itself to our consciousness while bourgeois approaches will remain stuck at the level of these appearances and fail to analyse the underlying essential relations which generate them. It was precisely in these terms that Marx attacked the bourgeois economists of his day, for in his view, any theory which fails to relate the operation of the economy to processes taking place in society as a whole (e.g. as in economists’ fascination with Robinson Crusoe models of economic life), and which adopts as its tools of analysis the categories of everyday experience (e.g. land, labour and capital as three ‘factors of production’ which exchange freely as equivalents) while failing to analyse the processes which underpin these experiences (i.e. the creation of value by labour and its expropriation by capitalists and landowners) will simply end up reproducing in more elaborate terminology the existing and muddy conceptions characteristic of any given period. Such theories, in other words, are no more than ideologies. It is the task of science to go beyond the world of common-sense experience: ‘The forms of experience are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must first be discovered by science’ (Marx 1976, p. 682).

All of this, of course, raises the obvious question of how Marx’s method of dialectical materialism can analyse the totality and come to discover its essential features when all other methods are doomed to remain partial in their scope and superficial in their insight. How do we get from our existing knowledge, which is inevitably partial and superficial, to a scientific knowledge which claims to be holistic and essential? And (just as important), having made this transition from common sense to science, how are we to know that the totality is as the theory tells us, and that the essential determinations which it has discovered are actually present and operating, when all that we can ever ‘see’ are the ‘parts’ and the ‘appearances’?

It is clear from Marx’s own writings that he believed that scientific understanding derived both from theoretical critique and development of existing ideas and from empirical investigation of existing conditions. There is, in other words, a dialectical interplay between theory and observation, the development of generalizations and a concern with specifics, the elaboration of abstractions and the analysis of concrete cases. Seen in this way, Marx’s science is a product both of his mulling over musty texts in the British Museum and of his observation of conditions in the European capitalist countries of his time. McBride summarizes this method as, ‘A movement from broad generalizations to endless specifics to generalities qualified by facts’ (1977, p. 56).

Now this is all very well, but it does not take us very far. The problem still remains: how is the scientific knowledge produced and how is it to be evaluated? If the scientific knowledge is a product first and foremost of Marx’s theorizing, then why should we accept his ideas as in any way more insightful or valid than anyone else’s? Are we to accept, for example, that Marx had some privileged insight into reality, an ‘inside track’ denied to other mortals who, in their reflections on the world, fail to get beyond partiality and phenomenal forms of appearance? If, on the other hand, the knowledge is primarily a function of observation and experience, then how was Marx able to construct valid and all-embracing generalizations out of his own selective and partial biographical experience? How, for example, could he derive his theoretical constructs and abstractions directly and necessarily from his observations when, as he himself argues, such observations necessarily obscure or even invert the essential reality which lies behind them?

Despite the manifold attempts over the last hundred years to demonstrate the epistemologically superior starting point of Marxist analysis, it is clear that any approach which attempts to analyse the whole when all that can be experienced are the parts, and which attempts to discover essential causes when all that can be experienced are phenomenal forms, can never be more than conjectural. What Marx offers, in other words, is not a special insight into the truth, but a distinctive approach based upon what Sayer has termed a ‘method of retroduction’.

Sayer resolutely denies the claims which have often been advanced by Marxists that a Marxist method starts from theoretical abstraction. As he points out any mode of investigation that began with a battery of abstractions would have to be premised on the assumption of some prior magical or privileged insight into the essence of reality, yet it is precisely this essence which the method is supposed to discover. It follows, therefore, that the starting point for investigation must be empirical:

Marx’s historical categories…are generated neither from ‘simple abstractions’ in general, nor from transhistorical categories in particular. They are emphatically a posteriori constructs, arrived at precisely by abstraction from the ‘real and concrete’. Marx had no mysteriously privileged starting point (D. Sayer 1979, p, 102).

This then raises the question of how Marx derives his abstractions from observation of ‘concrete’ conditions. How does he penetrate the phenomenal forms of appearance to reveal the essential relations which lie behind them? Sayer’s answer is that he only ever develops conjectural knowledge of the essential relations. In other words, the logic of Marx’s approach is to suppose the existence of certain relations which, if they did exist, would account for the observed phenomenal forms. ‘The “logic” of Marx’s analytic’, says Sayer, ‘is essentially a logic of hypothesis formation, for what he basically does is to posit mechanisms and conditions which would, if they existed, respectively explain how and why the phenomena we observe come to assume the forms they do’ (p. 114). This method is neither deductive (since there are no a priori covering laws or transhistorical generalizations from which essential relations can be deduced), nor inductive (since the discovery of regularities in the phenomena under investigation cannot itself imply the existence of certain essential causes). Rather, it is a ‘retroductive’ method.

The logic of retroductive explanation involves the attempt to explain observable phenomena by developing hypotheses about underlying causes. It cannot support any c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• 1. Social Theory, Capitalism and the Urban Question
• 2. The Urban As an Ecological Community
• 3. The Urban As a Cultural Form
• 4. The Urban As a Socio-Spatial System
• 5. The Urban As Ideology
• 6. The Urban As a Spatial Unit of Collective Consumption
• 7. A Non-Spatial Urban Sociology?
• 8. From Urban Social Theory to a Sociology of Consumption
• Appendix: A Note On the Empirical Testing of Theories
• Further Reading
• References