The City as a Historical Community
In recent decades American sociologists have paid increased attention to the history of the city, partly as a result of the translation into English of Max Weber's writings on the city.
54 Weber mastered the secondary literature on the history of the Western city that had accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he synthesized it and integrated it with his own general theory of society. Yet Weber's influence has not been wholly benign. He failed to correct some major errors concerning urban history that had been made by his predecessors, and his general theory of society suffers from serious defects that are especially harmful when applied to urban communities.Above all, Weber's theory of the city, although cast in historical terms, fails even to mention, much less to explain, the most striking and distinctive characteristic of the Western city, namely, its historical consciousness-that is, its consciousness of its own historical development, its belief in its own movement from past to future, its sense of its own ongoing, developing character. Weber's theory makes an important contribution in that it addresses the structural unity of the Western city as a community at a given moment, namely the moment of its historical origin in the "late Middle Ages"; but a serious weakness of the theory is its failure to address the dynamics of the development of the Western city -Âits failure to notice that the Western city, in contrast to Roman, Islamic, and Oriental cities, believed in the organic growth of its political and economic and social institutions over generations and centuries.
Weber wrote that although the rudiments of the Western type of city may be found occasionally in other cultures, principally in the Near East, "an urban 'community' in the full meaning of the word appears only in the Occident." "To constitute a full urban community," he stated, "a settlement had to represent a relative predominance of tradecommercial relations, with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: (1) a fortification, (2) a market, (3) a court of its own and at least a partially autonomous law, (4) a related form of association, and (5) at least partial autonomy and autocephaly, thus also an administration by authorities in the election of whom the burghers par- 399- ticipated." Such a peculiar system of forces, according to Weber, could only appear under special conditions and at a particular time, namely, in medieval Europe.
55The constituent elements attributed by Weber to the "full urban community" of the Occident reflect its structural integration, but they do not account for its dynamic character, its development in time. They do not explain why or how the twelfth-century city developed into the city of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, many of whose characteristics are identical to, or at least continuous with, those of the twelfth-century city, but others of which are substantially different in degree if not in kind. A typical twentieth-century city has the following characteristics: (1) it is a corporation, endowed with legal personality, with capacity to sue and be sued, hold property, make contracts, purchase goods and services, employ labor, borrow money; (2) it is a political entity, usually governed by a mayor or city manager together with an elected council, which may employ officials, levy taxes, exercise the right of eminent domain, and perform other governmental acts and functions; (3) it is an economic unit, which usually purveys or controls the purveyance of water, gas, electricity, and transportation, and regulates the construction and use of housing and the location of economic enterprises; (4) it is an agency for the promotion of social welfare, including education, health protection, poor relief, and public recreation. 56 Like their twentieth-century progeny, the cities of twelfth-century Europe were also corporate, political, economic, and social entities; however, the range of their activities in each of these roles was much more limited than that of a present-day city. Much of what a city does today was done then, within the city, by guilds and by the church, as well as by the extended family. Also the city today is much more integrated in, and much more representative of, the modern national state, an entity which was only beginning to come into existence in the twelfth century. Yet despite these differences, the present-day city developed, by a process of organic growth, out of the cities and towns that were created, or recreated, in the period of the Papal Revolution; and that process of growth was part of its character as an urban community.
The process of growth of the Western city cannot be explained without reference to its historical selfÂawareness, its sense of its own historical continuity and development, its consciousness of its own ongoing character as a community, its own movement from the past into the future. Historically, this was connected, first, with the religious dimension of the Papal Revolution, and especially with the mission of the church gradually to reform and redeem the secular order. It was connected, second, with the political dimension of the Papal Revolution and especially with the belief in the coexistence of plural autonomous secular polities; it was this belief that made it both possible and urgent for
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citizens to form urban communes independent of royal, feudal, and even ecclesiastical authority -Âsomething that would have been unthinkable before the papacy desacralized kingship. It was connected, third, with the legal dimension of the Papal Revolution, and especially with the belief that the reformation and redemption of the secular order had to take place by the continual progressive development of legal institutions and periodic revision of laws in order to overcome the forces of disorder and injustice.
Strangely enough, Weber in a later chapter contradicted his own earlier statement of what constitutes the uniqueness of the medieval Western city. Without noticing the discrepancy, he attributed all five characteristics of a "full urban community" -- which at first he had said "appears only in the Occident" -- to the Asiatic and oriental city also. The latter, too, he stated, was a fortress and a market. It, too, contained farms held in socage (that is, in nonfeudal tenure), with land alienable without restriction, or hereditary in an unencumbered way, or obligated only with a fixed land rent. It, too, had its own "autonomous constitution," which presumably meant its own form of association and at least partial autonomy and autocephaly.
57In all these respects, the differences between the medieval occidental city and its Asiatic counterparts were differences -- Weber stated -- only in degree. What "absolutely" distinguished the Western city, he finally concluded, was the personal legal condition, that is, the freedom, of the citizen. 58 Serfs emigrating to the cities had a common interest, he stated, in avoiding the imposition of military or other services by their erstwhile lords. "The urbanites therefore usurped the right to violate lordly law. This was the major revolutionary innovation of medieval occidental cities in contrast to all others." 59 Weber went on to say that the "cutting of status connections with the rural nobility" had been connected with the formation of municipal corporations -- legally autonomous communes. "Similar preliminary stages of the constitution of a polis or commune may have appeared repeatedly in Asia and Africa," he added. (Note the cautionary words "preliminary" and "may".) "However, nothing is known [in Asia or Africa] of a legal status of citizenship." 60Thus Weber eventually recognized that there was something about Western law that was of critical importance in the rise of the Western city. Also, it appears, there was something critically important about Western religion as well-which Weber also dealt with only obliquely. He pointed out that in the Asiatic cultures, including China and India, it was impossible to bring all the inhabitants of a city together into a homogeneous status group. "Foremost among the reasons for the peculiar freedom of urbanites in the Mediterranean city, in contrast to the Asiatic," he wrote, "is the absence of magical and animistic caste and sib constraints. The social formations preventing fusion of urban
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dwellers into a homogeneous group vary. In China it was the exogamous and endophratric sib; in India...
it has been the endogamous caste." 6 1 Here Weber turned to Fustel de Coulanges's work to show that the ancient Greek and Roman cities did create a religious foundation of citizenship by substituting the city cult meal for the cult meal of the family. Yet Weber offered no explanation of the relationship of the religious factor to the legal and political factor; more particularly, he did not confront the fact that ancient Greek and Roman cities rested on slavery and lacked that "peculiar freedom of urbanites" which was characteristic not of "the Mediterranean city" as such but of the western European city of the late eleventh century and thereafter. Thus Weber stopped short of s aying that the emergence of urban liberties in the West was part of a revolutionary religious change, in which, on the one hand, the ecclesiastical polity declared its independence from all se cular polities, and, on the other, the very concept of secular polities was for the first time created and secular polities were said to be reformable and redeemable.Why did Weber underestimate the role played by law and religion in the origin and development of the Western city? And why did he miss entirely the role of Western historical consciousness, that is, the Western belief in the organic growth of religious and legal institutions over generations and centuries?
Karl Marx had attributed changes in social consciousness, including religious and legal consciousness, to changes in technologies for meeting economic needs (the mode of production), and in the class struggle to control those technologies (relations of production). Weber, for his part, believed that in addition to the material economic forces that determine social consciousness there are also material political forces -- in other words, that the drive for political power is an independent objective force and not (as Marx had thought) merely a reflection of the drive for economic power. For Weber, therefore, the rise of the Western city in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries was due not merely to the development of a new mode of production (artisan and craft industry), which drew the serfs from the manor in opposition to their feudal lords, but also to the development of new political relationships.
Weber could see that the nobility, too, had political reasons to favor the creation and development of cities. But Weber, like Marx, believed that consciousness, and especially legal and religious consciousness, were essentially instruments of domination. More specifically, Weber, like Marx, believed that the idea of creating cities, the growth of communal consciousness within cities, and the development of urban legal and religious institutions which on the one hand manifested urban consciousness and on the other hand maintained the economic and political power of the ruling classes -- that all these constituted a nonmaterial-402-
(spiritual, ideological) "superstructure" built on a material (economic and political) "base."
Western legal institutions cannot, however, be explained satisfactorily either as mere superstructure or as mere ideology; indeed, any interpretation of Western history that is built on a distinction between a material base and an ideological superstructure cannot account satisfactorily for the Western legal tradition. This does not mean, however, that values, ideas, beliefs, concepts, and other forms of social consciousness come first, so to speak, and that they "cause" changes in economic and political life -- or, for that matter, in legal institutions. Legal institutions in the West are to be explained neither in idealistic terms, solely as manifestations of preexisting concepts, nor in materialistic terms, solely as instruments for exercising economic or political power. They can only be satisfactorily explained in terms that encompass and go beyond both idealism and materialism.
Conventional social theory errs in supposing that historical change is caused by changes in basic social, economic, and political conditions alone. There is, in fact, no such thing as social, economic, and political conditions (or forces) alone; they are always part of a context of perception and feeling. Nor are there values, ideas, beliefs -- alone; as a social matter, they are always interconnected with "material interests." Power is also an idea; justice is also a force. Neither causes the other, in the physical-science sense of that word.
To understand why a great historical change occurred, one must go beyond the interrelationships between ideas and material conditions to the times and cirumstances themselves, not only to recount them but also to show their historical significance, their meaning for the past and the future. Such legal institutions as the corporate character of the city, the alienability of urban property, and the liberties of the citizen are to be understood partly as manifestations of ideas and values and partly as instruments of economic and political power, but they are also to be understood as significant historical events and as parts of significant sequences of historical events. They were not merely "manifestations" and "instruments"; they happened; and knowing when and how they happened, and as part of what larger happenings they happened, helps one to understand why they happened. Indeed, the legal institutions of the Western city cannot be explained satisfactorily in any other way. In addition to the objective materialist "why" and the subjective idealist "why" there is a historical "why" -- a "why" that adds to the outer and inner dimensions of the inquiry both a past and a future dimension.
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