Ideology and the urban crisis

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Book reviews

discussed in greater detail, would have been more effective, and the same holds true for the footnotes. The large number of typographical errors is rather disturbing, and detracts from one’s overall impression of the book. Perhaps there will never be a general theoretical foundation for political geography, but the discussion about the different frameworks must go on. For German political geography, it is an important book, because it will do much to wake up German geographers and show them that political geography exists. I hope that some of them will soon contribute to such important fields as international conflicts, war and peace research, and the destruction of regional cultures -research topics which are all still undiscovered in German academic geography. Henning Heske Department of Geography University of Diisseldorf, FRG

The USSR, Eastern Europe and the Development of the Law of the Sea, Compiled, Translated and

Edited by W. E. Butler, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1983 et seq. Two looseleaf binders, $100 each binder. Oceana has for a number of years been publishing extremely valuable books on the Law of the Sea and other topics that fit readily into the realm of political geography. They have also developed a ‘ Looseleaf Service’, a probably unique device for updating books without having to issue new editions. Additions to the looseleaf binders are produced as needed. Among the titles in this format are several covering the development of the Law of the Sea in various regions: North America and Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America and, the latest, the USSR and Eastern Europe. This is a continuation of the two-volume work on Eastern Europe produced by Victor Sebek between 1977 and 1979, which is still available and still valuable. Besides containing more recent (as well as some older) material, the new series differs from its predecessor in several other ways. The editor, William Butler, has written extensively on the subject, especially on Soviet maritime policy and the Soviet navy and merchant shipping. All materials have been translated into English (much of it by Butler); and the material is now organized to conform with both Oceana’s New Directions in the Law of the Sea (edited by K. R. Simmonds) and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The materials included in these regional looseleaf services are mostly texts of relevant national

legislation and of bilateral and multilateral treaties. There are also background notes and commentaries on the documents, but they are minimal; the documents essentially speak for themselves. The topics in this particular volume are: internal waters and bays, the territorial seas and the contiguous zone, straits, archipelagoes, the exclusive economic zone, the continental shelf, the high seas, islands, the protection and preservation of the marine environment, marine scientific research, rights of access of land-locked states to and from the sea, the international seabed area, disputes settlement, the international maritime organization, the United Nations, and the interim regulation of deep seabed mining. Here is a sampling of the documents included: Fundamental Principles of Water Legislation of the USSR and Union Republics; Law on the State Boundary of the USSR; List of Living Organisms Which are Natural Resources of the Continental Shelf of the USSR, Finnish-Soviet Treaties on the Delimitation of the Continental Shelf; Proclamation of Lands and Islands Located in the Northern Arctic Ocean as Territory of the USSR; Decree on Measures Relating to the Prevention of Pollution of the Caspian Sea. All of the foregoing description pertains to Volume I. Volume II (which may be purchased separately) is a splendid bibliography of Soviet materials on the Law of the Sea and marine affairs, including many unpublished items such as doctoral dissertations. The Russian titles are printed in Cyrillic script and translated into English. No one interested in either the region or the topic, or in international political geography, can afford to ignore this fine reference work. Martin Ira Glassner Department of Geography Southern Connecticut State University

Ideology

and the Urban Crisis, P. Steinberger,

Albany, $10.95.

NY:

SUNY

Press,

1985,

175 pp.,

Beginning students of social theory, political philosophy and ‘urbanism’ will find Peter Steinberger’s book helpful. It is short, quite easily read, and in several instances neatly summarizes major strands of thought in social theory. The book provides a useful review of the behavioralist revolution in urban political science, and recent reactions to it. Sound discussions of Kuhn, Feyerabend and modem advocates of hermeneutics, for example, are provided (although the attempt to ‘socially

Book reviews locate’ them amounts, unfortunately, to little more than a demonstration that urban unrest in the US during the 1960s made celebrities of some American academics). The book also includes a ‘model’ of the essential elements of a political philosophy. Steinberger identifies ‘the problem of demarcating the private and the public realm’ and the issue of ‘political obligation’ as ‘basic to political philosophy’ (p. 18). These are derived from an ethical theory, which Steinberger calls a theory of ‘practical reason’, which, in turn, follows from a fundamental conception of ‘the nature of man’ (sic). Steinberger then spends most of the book evaluating three ‘ideologies’ (which he notes are ‘ideal types’) in light of this model: Managerialism, Communalism, and Possessive-Individualism (Steinberger’s titles). Steinberger is at his best in his discussion of managerialism. He refers primarily to the good government/municipal reform and rational planning movements of the early 20th century in the US, as personified by Louis Wirth (though, curiously, Steinberger never mentions him). He correctly traces the values underlying ‘the managerial mood’ to Hume, Kant, Newton, and the Enlightenment in general. This view of human beings as essentially ‘ knowledge-generating’ is accompanied, he observes, by a skepticism about metaphysics. Such skepticism finds expression, in managerialism, through a devotion to positivist epistemology and methods, and utilitarian-based ethical judgments. Steinberger correctly criticizes managerialism as ‘ignorjing] the question of moral action itself’ (p. 5 5), and notes that ‘nothing in managerialism per se . would rule out authoritarianism or even totalitarian political arrangements’ (p. 60). The discussion of communalism refers primarily to movements in the 1960s in US cities for neighborhood-level control of political and economic institutions. Steinberger’s tracing of these movements’ ideological foundations to Rousseau, Marx, and the concept of alienation is certainly on the money. It is therefore rather perplexing that he chooses to assert that communalism ‘transcend[s] the usual ideological divisions’ (p. 78) on the weak grounds that Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community, used the rhetoric of ‘local-control’ in defense of a conservative social agenda. Steinberger correctly emphasizes the importance of process as opposed to policy here, but he fails to grasp the funda mentalist Marxian‘communalist’ tenet that alienation is first and foremost a materd condition, and that therefore democratic process means nothing in the absence of some kind of economic, or material, democracy. It is no surprise, therefore, that Steinberger focuses

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exclusively on the ‘spiritual’, or ‘humanist’, side of communalism. In his discussion of possessive-individualism, Steinberger describes a reactionary libertarianism, and contends that this, too, ‘transcends conventional left-right distinctions’ (p. 101). The Hobbesian and Lockeian foundations of this libertarian tradition are duly noted and explained. One gets the uneasy feeling, however, that Steinberger has set up a straw man when he concludes that certain modem possessive-individualists (e.g. Edward Banfield and Daniel Moynihan) are inconsistent because they have moved away from the ‘atomistic’ and ‘ahistorical’ elements of the Hobbesian conception of human nature. There is also a tendency in this section to characterize possessive-individualism in vague, popularistic terms. I was never quite sure, for instance, what was meant by possessive-individualism’s ‘basic proposition’ that ‘thinking about the urban crisis means relying on hard-headed, no-nonsense realism’ (p. 105). Steinberger is weakest in the last section of the book, where he offers the beginnings of a new ‘philosophy of urban politics’. Having conceded in the Preface that he does not make the case for the existence of an urban crisis (one supposes that the phrase was chosen over Steinberger’s proposed alternative, ‘urban politics’, primarily for dramatic effect), he proceeds simply to assert that urban contexts provide ‘obstacles and opportunities that are qualitatively different from those found elsewhere’ (p. 134). In light of recent debates in political geography, political science, and sociology over precisely this issue, the book sorely needs a better defense of this point. Steinberger is attracted to Hadley Arkes’s work because it takes the position that ‘urban issues are uniquely urban’ (p. 140). To this reader, however, the assertions, attributed to Arkes, that ‘the issue of protest behavior and public disorder does not typically arise in rural areas’, and that ‘the problem of “combat zones’ ’ where vice is tolerated is a characteristically urban problem’ (p. 141; note the value judgment inherent in the choice of the word ‘problem’ in the latter assertion) appear patently false. Obviously Steinberger has not thought much about peasant uprisings throughout the world, or even radical ‘prairie populism’ in relatively recent US history. Nor, evidently, is he familiar with ethnographies of sexual and other sub cultures in rural areas. Steinberger tries to take a pragmatic, antiideological position on the theory of urban politics. Thus he concludes that ‘all three perspectives contribute something important to an understanding of the urban crisis and its resolution’ (pp. 130-131). He takes a self-

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Book reviews

consciously eclectic position which regards the city as a ‘polity’, in the Aristotelian sense. But he also wishes to incorporate some of the insights of several ‘neo-Marxists’ regarding the impact of ‘postindustrial capitalism’ (Steinberger’s term) on urban structure and urban life (most importantly he cites Manuel Castells’ The Urban Qtlestiun). To Steinberger, it is much more important that Castells and conservatives such as Arkes are theoretically consistent, within their respective philosophies, than that they agree with one another. Thus he calls for a discussion, or ‘philosophizing’, which he believes will itself be ‘a step toward the realization of the city as polity’ (p. 150). While his tracing of the three ideologies’ epistemological and philosophical underpinnings is excellent, I found Steinberger’s overall project to be misconceived. This is primarily because of its reliance on the unquestioned assertion that the ‘urban’ is a ‘unique setting for social interaction’ (p. 134). Furthermore, Steinberger’s model of the essential elements of a political philosophy struck me as somewhat dubious. The choice of phrases such as ‘public realm’ and ‘private realm’, for example, suggested an inability to comprehend fully perspectives which challenge the assumption of autonomous human beings entering into social contracts of one kind or another. Ironically, this is in spite of Steinberger’s excellent ability to articulate these perspectives. Indeed, the book rather consistently reproduces errors that Steinberger himself articulates quite well when discussing other people’s work. For instance, no sooner has he finished bemoaring the false dichotomy between fact and value in social science than Steinberger reproduces it himself, complaining that behavioralists are insufficiently normative and ‘normative’

theorists insufficiently empirical (p. 3). In terms of his ideal ‘city as polity’, Steinberger admits that two of the four ‘essential characteristics’ of a polity, equality and morality, are not local-level problems (p. 147). Thus I was left wondering just what the appeal of the ‘city as polity’ is. Finally, Steinberger’s language is terribly ethnocentric. Even in his discussion of The Urban Question Steinberger talks about his subject being American cities, American politics, and AmeriLan capitalism. Yet there is no indication at all that many of the writers he considers are in fact discussing only American society. In the case of Castells this is quite clearly not the case. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that a theory of urban politics should be specific to the US. Combined with his use of liberal terms to characterize radical conceptualizations (e.g. the phrase ‘postindustrial capitalism’ in the context of Castells’ work), one is left skeptical of Steinberger’s project on linguistic grounds alone. Overall, Steinberger’s book is valuable as an exercise in discovering the philosophical roots of some modern intellectual currents and social movements. But it falls short of its goals of providing a ‘novel synthesis’ which will be useful for developing new theory. I personally found the ‘urban-as-unique’ orientation and the attendant ethnocentrism more than a little annoying. These led Steinberger directly to the romantic and largely unfruitful notion of the ‘city as polity’. Still, his concise philosophical and epistemological dissections make the book well worth incorporating into any introductory or intermediate program of study in political geography, sociology, or ‘urban’ studies. Lawrence Knopp Department of Geography The University of Iowa