This volume is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible.

Chapter 1 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley This study is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding politics at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is quite opposed to the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible. The principle of self-sufficiency or autarchy derives from ancient Athens. Yet Athens was not a closed city-state but engaged in a Mediterranean-wide trade in order to secure the resources it needed to satisfy its everyday needs.

Part 1 Cities and Citizenship This part is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible. Part 2 The Philosophical Idea of the City This part grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation. Proceeding from chapters on Plato and Aristotle, this part details the evolution of cities alongside changing conceptions of citizenship, up to and including the Hellenic world. Part 3 Universitas The City from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance This part examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance. The flaw in the attempt to establish the universal state is easy to identify: universalist theories and programmes have tried to impose beliefs, practices and identities from above and from the outside, from the centre outwards and downwards, which can only be achieved on an enduring basis by consent. These attempts pay insufficient attention to the need to identify the conditions and relations facilitating the individual grasp of the universal via social and discursive interaction. Part 4 The Rationalisation of the City This part traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification proceeding from the scientific and industrial revolutions. The argument establishes a concept of “rational freedom” through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Through these philosophers, freedom is defined as an interdependent notion connecting each individual with all other individuals. This defines an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. The modernist break with the “rational” philosophical legacy is located in a Weberian process of rationalisation, implying the commodification, instrumentalisation and bureaucratisation of the urban lifeworld. The city is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a rational telos but instead emerges as an instrument of force, of autonomy-denying alien power. This part locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation. Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region. Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities. Part 5 The Economic Concept of the City The critical focus of this part is upon abstracting and diremptive tendencies within the city, particularly with respect to new symbolic and informational economic geographies. Critical attention is paid to the iniquitous realities behind the provision of post-industrial infrastructures (convention centres, office developments, finance-insurance-real estate stations, consumer landscapes, gentrified downtowns) in contemporary urban development and regeneration. The argument concludes that the result of social division and exclusion is an “ecology of fear” generating the militarisation of urban space and the privatisation of residential and commercial space. This part examines the urban consequences of social and spatial injustice, paying particular attention to the work of Mike Davis (1990 1998). Part 6 The City as Social Movement This part addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This is achieved by locating the “rational” philosophical ideal within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the “politics of difference” (Young 1990) within a universal frame. The conception of urban justice builds upon the work of John Rawls (1973) but rejects Rawlsian universalism as abstract and disembodied in being identified with formal legal-institutional structures. Instead, an ethic based upon the responsive social intercourse of individuals within community is developed. This ethic draws upon essentialist (Nussbaum 1986 1992), feminist (eg Gilligan 1982), communitarian (Sandel 1982) and ontological liberal (Raz 1986) modes of thought to locate individual rights within a conception of human flourishing within expansive structures of community interaction and communication. This part proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community." Part 7 The Ecological Concept of the City Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This part shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human/anti-ecological) forms.

"This volume traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification proceeding from the scientific and industrial revolutions. The argument establishes a concept of “rational freedom” through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Through these philosophers, freedom is defined as an interdependent notion connecting each individual with all other individuals. This defines an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. The modernist break with the “rational” philosophical legacy is located in a Weberian process of rationalisation, implying the commodification, instrumentalisation and bureaucratisation of the urban lifeworld. The city is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a rational telos but instead emerges as an instrument of force, of autonomy-denying alien power. This volume locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation. Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region. Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities."

"This volume addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This is achieved by locating the “rational” philosophical ideal within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the “politics of difference” (Young 1990) within a universal frame. The conception of urban justice builds upon the work of John Rawls (1973) but rejects Rawlsian universalism as abstract and disembodied in being identified with formal legal-institutional structures. Instead, an ethic based upon the responsive social intercourse of individuals within community is developed. This ethic draws upon essentialist (Nussbaum 1986 1992), feminist (eg Gilligan 1982), communitarian (Sandel 1982) and ontological liberal (Raz 1986) modes of thought to locate individual rights within a conception of human flourishing within expansive structures of community interaction and communication. This volume proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community."

Chapter 4 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley For political, social, cultural and sociological reasons, the future of the city is one of the most important questions facing the contemporary world. Since most of the world live in an urban environment and since even more people are likely to be living in an urban environment in the future, it follows that for ethico-anthropological reasons this environment needs to be humanised. The urban environment needs to correspond with rather than contradict the human ontology. This book addresses this question by reconstructing the philosophical conception of the city (Part I), proceeding to show how capitalist urbanisation has subordinated this conception to economic forces (Part II), going on to argue for the social conception of the city that integrates all aspects in a true public life (Part III). The purpose of this book, then, is to unravel the question of what the city is, what it ought to be and what it could be. This Introduction is concerned to lay the foundation of the argument by emphasising the extent to which the city is constituted by the urban associative culture and society. The argument rests upon a notion of the city as process. This is a relational conception that emphasises the reciprocity, exchange, interaction and solidarity between the individuals composing the city. The argument affirms the city as the essential physical terrain for the development of a viable commonality. The city is not the place of the individual, but the place of the individuals who together constitute a community; it is the relation between individuals that continuously draws together the threads of ideas and expanding information. The city supplies the physical, social and relational context for this information, facilitating access to the product of that information and ensuring the implementation of any public policy based on that information. There is no civilisation without these three factors and the city is crucial to their effectiveness. The city is not merely a physical entity or a site of economic activity but is the embodiment and expression of the human spirit. There is a connection between the processes of urbanisation and of humanisation. Where some, like Davis (1965), predict the end of urbanisation, this book defends the city as integral to human growth. The question, then, is not whether the process of urbanisation will end but how, as an ongoing process, urbanisation can be consciously controlled so as to respect the qualities of scale, balance and form constituting a viable urban order.

From The City of Reason vol 4 The Rationalisation of the City by Dr Peter Critchley The symbiotic relationship between the centralised nation state and the global capital system amounts to a system of alien control to which all human purpose is subordinated. The state and the capital system are, by their very nature, designed to appropriate, centralise and monopolise power, whether from labour, the community or nature. The state and capital expropriate and enclose human and ecological life systems together, commodify and privatise them in order to maximise the exploitation of scarce resources, expand production and consumption, and advance utilitarian self-interest. This expansionary, nihilistic system has generated the economic and ecological crises of the modern world. The alien control of the state and capital has been the principal agency for implementing the ideals of the Enlightenment. It is therefore crucial to comprehend the dynamic role that the state and capital have played in humanity’s attempt to achieve a material existence in autonomy from nature through the technological conquest of the environment. The new capitalist order redefined urbanism in ways which conflicted with older urban solidarities and which continue to block the emergence of new solidarities in the contemporary world. The modern city is the site of the capital economy. Capital is the principal agency of rationalisation, something that transforms the character of reason. Reason comes to concern less the realisation of human nature and more the realisation of the surplus value invested in commodities. The predominance of exchange value is an inversion of subject and object that results in the loss of substantiality. This substantiality pertaining to persons is replaced by instrumental, fluid relationships that reduce persons to means to external ends. The capital economy generates the predominance of instrumental over substantive rationality, with irrational results for the socio-urban environment. The systemic processes of private accumulation have caused social dislocation, inequality, economic crisis and ecological destruction within the city. And as systemic, these processes are non-discursive, not open to citizen interaction and discourse; they are non-negotiable. The resolution of the problems of urbanism lie in the future reappropriation of the social power alienated to the built environment and social processes of the capital city. The work of Max Weber is important in terms of the stress that he places upon the extent to which modern rationalisation has irrevocably changed the terms of moral argument. Max Weber may be considered the representative of the urban cosmopolitan conception of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberal world view. He argued for the superior rationality of the institutions of liberal industrial capitalism and the values of modern urban culture. Weber’s intellectual roots and moral concerns, however, are in the ‘rational’ tradition of philosophy dating from Plato and Aristotle. His concern with the ethical development of ‘Menschentum’ places him within German philosophical anthropology, demonstrating a normative concern with the most appropriate mode of life for human self-development. Weber thus shows how the social and cultural requirements of modern capitalism contradict the ontology of human beings, begging the question of the appropriate regimen for human self-realisation.

This book identifies the contemporary environmental crisis as a call to create a new biocentric civilisation. Proceeding from the identification of the constants of civlised life, the argument seeks to build constructive ecological models by relating Green politics to philosophy and ethics. This approach seeks to develop a practical, institution building orientation out of fundamental Green principles. In the process, the gap between the 'is' of the real world and the 'ought to be' of philosophy is closed via notions of cognitive praxis and ecological praxis. Ensuring the unity of subject and object is a way of recovering the original meaning of politics as creative human self-realisation. Eudaimonia in Aristotle and conatus in Spinoza are identified as crucial to human flourishing, identified as definitive of the good life. Reason is shown to be central to this conception of happiness and the constitution of the common good. The book criticises market society and its atomistic relations as a reversion to the lowest form of reasoning in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In relating ecological praxis to civilisation, the book calls for the extension of communicative and cooperative structures in order to foster and embed the rational restraint crucial to long term freedom for all in social relations and institutions.. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Habermas to this view are all emphasised.

How can we avert ecological catastrophe and avoid social collapse? What is the practical relevance of ethics and philosophy? How can we build community? In the forthcoming book, Being and Place, I address the question of why, despite a wealth of knowledge and know-how, we are failing to respond to social and ecological crisis and bring about the ecological society. The book presents alternative ways of life that can help us create an ecological society. The solutions to our crises, I argue, are within our grasp and can be achieved through practising a notion of eco-praxis. The key question is this: Is humanity capable of creating institutions and sustaining practices that are geared to the long-range collective good, or are we irrevocably short-term thinkers? I do emphasise agency, meaning, will and values in a participatory and creative universe. My main purpose in this book is to provide a diagnosis of the social, moral and ecological failures of modernity, going on to emphasise solutions, transitions, practices and transformations bringing out the social-ecological society - the Ecopolis. I work in the tradition of virtue ethics and am developing the notion of ecological virtue. You can call the virtues qualities for successful/sustainable living, and such qualities are to be defined in terms of the ecological conditions for human and planetary flourishing. If that sounds arcane or abstruse think of it in these terms, our current form of socialisation is concerned with shaping people to be producers geared to the endless accumulation of material quantities and consumers forever running on the hedonistic treadmill. The truth is that the vices of endless production – production for the sake of production, accumulation of means for the sake of means is without end and is a nihilism - and overconsumption are undermining the social and ecological bases of civilised life. All of which begs the question of how to create the ‘happy habitus’ (eudaimonia = flourishing) which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues, construct the right character, develop the right habits and create capabilities. Within prevailing social relations, there is no necessary connection between the individual/private good and the social/ecological/public good. That means that the common good is something abstract and that all appeals to such a good are lacking in social relevance; they presume a social identity that does not exist. The kind of identity presupposed by the modern market society within which we live is that of the self-interested individual whose own good may well be achieved in ways detrimental to the overall social and ecological good. Any overall good that may result from such self-interested behaviour is indirect. To demand that such an individual serve the common good and live the virtuous life is to expect an altruism which, within prevailing social relations, is irrational, a sacrifice of a tangible and immediate individual self-interest for a vague and intangible general interest. The result, though, is that individual freedom and reason generates a collective unfreedom and unreason (call it the crisis in the climate system and looming eco-catastrophe). As social beings, our lives are governed by collective forces. The problem is that we lack appropriate mechanisms of collective control capable of governing those forces. We require a social identity that establishes a direct connection between individual and social good so that responding to appeals to the common good would indeed be rational and require no irrational sacrifice of self-interest. An identity of this kind is not available within the instrumental market relations upon which society is patterned. Here, individual identity is constituted by abstraction, and the good is defined in terms of private acquisition and enjoyment. Such identity is the polar opposite of the identity given by participation in the politics and culture of the public life we need in order to be ourselves. In my current work, I argue not only for a recovery of virtue ethics, but for its extension as a conception of ecological virtue. This alone is insufficient, creating just another socially impotent and irrelevant ethic to join the club of warring gods in the modern world. We are not short of competing moralities, value judgements with no claim on society other than personal preference. The attempt to rework an ethic of virtue can only succeed if the context has been created to enable the social identity required by that ethic, a social identity which connects individual self-interest and the social interest. Only such a social identity serves to check the problem of the free rider. Without that identity, there is no connection between individual action and overall good, something which inhibits the individual from engaging in action for the greater good.

Chapter 2 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley The bad odour into which politics has fallen in the contemporary world indicates the extent to which it is no longer conceived as integral to the realisation of the human personality and is instead identified with remote institutions of power and representatives. For most people, politics refers to techniques for the management and manipulation of the masses. Whereas in the original sense politics concerned the ethical end of the realisation and exercise of the power belonging to all by all as an attribute of their essential humanity, politics now designates techniques for the instrumental end of exercising power over human beings. Politics has become a means of mass management and manipulation. In its original conception, politics was integral to human self-realisation and associated with the health and well-being of humanity through the actualisation and exercise of essential power. In the contemporary world, politics is no longer ethical but instrumental, denoting the acquisition and retention of institutional and instrumental power – the power of some over others – and inherently corruptive of both its practitioner and people over whom it is exercised. That politics is considered to possess an inherent tendency to corruption indicates the extent to which it has been perverted to mean the precise opposite of its original meaning. Far from being corrupt and corrupting, politics in the classical conception denoted the means and ends of human health and well-being through the creative unfolding of immanent human power. The question arises as to where, when and precisely how politics came to be removed from the body politic, defined as an autonomous sphere and finally came to be appropriated and monopolised by the institution of the state. With the classical Greeks, politics and public life are still grounded in human association at the level of the polis. It is well known that democracy was born in the Greek agora, that the term is Greek, meaning the rule of the people. There is no word for the state in Attic Greek. What is significant is the lack of curiosity with regard to the origins of the term on the part of those who so readily proclaim the ideal. For such a universally trumpeted value, democracy is a remarkably little known and hugely misunderstood political ideal. The apogee of Athenian democracy came some time towards the end of the fifth century B.C. Athens at this stage had still to see any institution that even resembled a state conceived in the modern terms of a professionalised institutional apparatus exercised for purposes social control. Indeed, Athenian democracy is the complete antithesis of a bureaucratised system of governance organised strictly for social control, explaining why no modern political leader dares to investigate closely the actual meaning of the democratic ideal.