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The City in the Future of Democracy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert A. Dahl
Robert A. Dahl*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

I need hardly remind this audience that one of the characteristics of our field is the large number of old and quite elemental questions—elemental but by no means elementary—for which we have no compelling answers. I don't mean that we have no answers to these questions. On the contrary, we often have a rich variety of conflicting answers. But no answer compels acceptance in the same way as a proof of a theorem in mathematics, or a very nice fit between a hypothesis and a satisfactory set of data.

Whether the obstacles that prevent us from achieving tight closure on solutions lie in ourselves—our approaches, methods, and theories—or are inherent in the problems is, paradoxically, one of these persistent and elemental questions for which we have a number of conflicting answers. For whatever it may be worth, my private hunch is that the main obstacles to closure are in the problems themselves—in their extraordinary complexity, the number and variety of variables, dimensions qualities, and relationships, and in the impediments to observation and data-gathering.

However that may be, a question of this sort often lies dormant for decades or even centuries, not because it has been solved but because it seems irrelevant. For even when no satisfactory theoretical answer exists to a very fundamental question, historical circumstances may allow it to be ignored for long periods of time. Even specialists may refuse to take a question seriously that history seems to have shoved into the attic. What seem like fundamental controversies in one age are very likely to be boring historical curiosities in the next. And conversely it is my impression that a great many of the elemental political questions regarded as settled in one age have a way of surfacing later on.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 953 - 970
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

Presidential address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 7, 1967.

References

1 Kitto, H. D. F., The Greeks (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951, 1957) p. 79.Google Scholar

2 Various classical scholars have made valiant attempts to guess the population of Athens and its composition—citizens, adult males, metics, slaves—from the most fragmentary bits of evidence. I have not been able to locate any estimate that does not seem to leave great room for error. Kitto suggests “30,000 as a reasonable estimate of the normal number of citizens” in the Fifth Century: op. cit, p. 131.

3 Vidich, Arthur J. and Bensman, Joseph, Small Town in Mass Society (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1960)Google Scholar; Miner, Horace, St. Denis, A French Canadian Parish (Chicago: University of Chicago Phoenix Books, 1939, 1963)Google Scholar; Wylie, Laurence, Village in the Vaucluse (New York: Harper Colophon, 1957, 1964)Google Scholar; Birch, A.H., Small-Town Politics, A Study of Political Life in Glossop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward C., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Bete'ille, André, Caste, Class and Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).Google Scholar

4 Miner, op. cit., 58–61.

5 Wooton, Graham, Workers, Unions and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 36.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 36. The quotation is from Engels' essay “On Authority” in Feuer, Lewis S. (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 481–484.Google Scholar

7 Wooton, op. cit., 113–124.

8 Cf. Meister, Albert, Socialisme et Autogestion, L'Expérience Yougoslave (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964)Google Scholar; and Kolaja, Jiri, Workers Councils: The Jugoslav Experience (New York and Washington: Praeger Frederick A., 1966).Google Scholar

9 See the comments of Kolaja, op. cit., pp. 7 and 66ff.; and Meister, op. cit., pp. 240–245, 263–278, 373.

10 Cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, “The Chairman's Problem,” this Review, 55 (June, 1961), 368–372.

11 In 1960 the percentage of migrants from another country since 1955 for all U.S. cities 25,000 and over was 18.4%. The percentages ran slightly higher (19.7%) in small cities of 25–50,000 than in cities over 150,000 (15.6%). See Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Borgatta, Edgar F., American Cities, Their Social Characteristics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar, Appendix, Table 1. variable #19, p. 108.

12 American Institute of Public Opinion release, April 24, 1966.

13 The most extensive survey and analysis of the evidence seems to be the work of Otis Dudley Duncan. The findings of his Ph.D. dissertation, An Examination of the Problem of Optimum City-Size (University of Chicago, 1949) have been summarized in Duncan, Otis Dudley, “Optimum Size of Cities” in Hatt, Paul and Reiss, Albert (eds.), Reader in Urban Sociology (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1951), 632–645Google Scholar; and Dahir, James, “What is the Best Size for a City?,” American City (08, 1951), 104–105.Google ScholarLillibridge, Robert A., “Urban Size: An Assessment,” Land Economics, 38 (Nov., 1952), 341–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar, summarizes Duncan and others. In addition, see Ogburn, William Fielding and Duncan, Otis Dudley, “City Size as a Sociological Variable,” in Burgess, Ernest W. and Bogue, Donald J., eds., Urban Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago, Phoenix Books) 58–76Google Scholar; Duncan, Otis Dudley, “Optimum Size of Cities” in Spengler, Joseph J. and Duncan, Otis Dudley (eds.), Demographic Analysis (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1956), 372–385.Google Scholar

14 I am indebted to Mr. Garry D. Brewer for undertaking an extensive survey of the writings and findings dealing with economies of scale in American cities. The relevant literature is extensive, but the most relevant studies appear to be Hawley's, Amos H. seminal article, “Metropolitan Population and Municipal Government Expenditures in Central Cities,” Journal of Social Issues, 7, nos. 1 and 2 (1951), 100–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Werner Z., “Expenditures Implications of Metropolitan Growth and Consolidation,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 41 (08, 1959) 232–241CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brazer, Harvey E., City Expenditures in the United States, National Bureau of Economic Research Occasional Paper no. 66 (New York, 1959).Google Scholar See also the analysis of the evidence of these studies in Thompson, Wilbur R., A Preface to Urban Economics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), Ch. 7Google Scholar, “The Urban Public Economy,” 255–292.

15 Data in the paragraph above are from Hadden and Borgatta, op. cit., Appendix, Table 1, p. 110, variables 57, 58, and 65.

16 Thompson, op. cit., p. 34.

17 Duncan, “Optimum Size of Cities,” op. cit. p. 381.

18 “… museums, professional athletic teams, complete medical facilities, and other accoutrements of modern urban life could be supported collectively. As the federated places grew and prospered the interstices would, of course, begin to fill in, moving the area closer to the large metropolitan area form. But alert action in land planning and zoning could preserve open spaces in a pattern superior to those found in most large urban areas.” Thompson, op. cit., p. 36.

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