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3 Seeing Like a City How to Urbanize Political Science Warren Magnusson The social sciences still bear the marks of their origins in the late nineteenth century, when the world was divided up in a new way for purposes of academic study (Gunnell 1993, 2004). It was in this period that American institutions of higher learning (and the academic professions associated with them) began to take their present shape. In a crucial move, the new social sciences were separated from the natural sciences and humanities: literature, history, philosophy, theology, and law. Each social science was to have its particular mandate: sociology, society; economics, the economy; anthropology , the origins of man; geography, the environment in which men lived; and political science, “the state.” The presumption was that this division of labor would facilitate the scientific study of the world, and there is no doubt that it has done so to a considerable degree. Nevertheless, it also has interfered with other forms of study, which have less legitimacy and institutional support because of their interdisciplinary character. Urbanists, among others, have had to struggle to generate appropriate backing for their work in an academic world that still privileges what are now thought of as the “traditional” social sciences. I suggest that urbanists have been much too timid in challenging restrictive disciplinary boundaries, and, moreover, that this timidity is bound up with an ongoing tendency to see like a state rather than a city. I borrow the phrase, “seeing like a state,” from James C. Scott (1998), but I give it a larger meaning than he does. In my view, the disciplinary divisions to which I have just referred are a consequence of seeing like a state. They reflect a particular but contestable way of understanding the world that began to take shape in the nineteenth century and crystallized in the twentieth. Crucial 41 42 Warren Magnusson to that understanding was the ideal of the liberal-democratic nation-state, epitomized by the United States. To my mind, the United States is not “exceptional,” as many analysts have suggested, but paradigmatic: Since the beginning, the United States has provided the foremost model of a modern “extensive republic” with a market economy, a society secured in its autonomy from undue state intervention, and a limited but strong state buttressed by fierce nationalism or “constitutional patriotism” (see also Imbroscio Chapter 6, this volume). Until World War II, the Europeans were able to persuade themselves that their forms of order were the rule, and what the Americans did was the exception. That pretense was gradually eroded between 1945 and 1989. Since then, the Communist alternative also has collapsed. Thus, the opinion that the liberal-democratic nation-state (or extensive republic, as Madison would have described it) is the norm toward which the world is tending—and should tend—is now so widely accepted among the world’s leading intellectuals that it is scarcely ever challenged. The main challenge is from those who insist that our world—the modern world, the free world, the civilized world—is under threat from fanatics and barbarians who have to be dealt with by taking strong measures. This is a difference of opinion about the nature and extent of the present danger, not about the norm of civilization. That norm is built into present understandings of what it means to be realistic and hence scientific. At the end of the nineteenth century, states actually were not the norm: empires were. Nor was liberal-democracy the norm. Nevertheless, the disciplinary structure of the academy—especially the American academy —anticipated the form of world order that would be produced by the political struggles of the twentieth century. In fact, there was always a close connection between this way of seeing the world for academic purposes and the policymakers who brought such a world into being. Since 1945, the aim in the West has been to produce a world of sovereign states, organized on liberal-democratic principles and buttressed by nationalism, but integrated with one another through international institutions, a global economy, and a shared culture of human rights. In this context, it has seemed logical to study the economy, society, culture, and environment separately from the state, because the former clearly affect the latter and the state’s organization is obviously crucial to world order. Political scientists have put themselves forward as the experts on how states are formed, how they become effective, and what they actually do. The presumption is that politics proper is...

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