It was the genius of the American aristocrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to turn the Democratic Party into a national Tammany Hall, decently covering the bare-knuckle politics of the inner city with an upper-class veneer, and bringing hope and a job to those sucked into the maelstrom of the Great Depression—in return once again for their votes.

It is traditional for the enlightened classes to deplore the corruption and waste of the big city political machine.  For the city immigrant, the power relations of the political machine are not scandalous, but familiar, a power available to fight on his side in the strange and frightening city and the overwhelming power of landlords and employers.  Yet understanding only power the immigrant fails to recognize how the law of the city, though favoring the city-bred middle class, still offers opportunity and protection to the weak.  The bourgeoisie has an opposite problem.  Skilled and experienced at living according to the rules of the city, they forget that the rules were forged in a power struggle between the middle class and the king, and that, for all that they replace naked power with law, they still represent the power of the bourgeoisie to write laws that suit its needs and that reflect its idea of right and wrong.  Thus both immigrant and middle-class talk past each other, the immigrants not understanding how law benefits them, and the middle-class forgetting that they wrote the laws to suit themselves.

It was the remarkable achievement of the left and of writers like Jacob Riis in his cloying How the Other Half Lives to dramatize the struggle of the city immigrant and the mild hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and turn it into a scandal, insisting that the misery of the immigrant was a consequence of bourgeois law.  For the left, the law is a decoy, a pretence of justice that merely covers the mailed fist of bourgeois power with a velvet glove of law.  In The Communist Manifesto Engels only mentions law once, in passing, as an accompaniment of free competition that supports the sway of the bourgeois class.  Since then, the left has never tired of discovering that the application of law unfairly targets the under-class immigrants to the city.  A sophisticated modern analyst like Foucault in Discipline and Punish has shown that bourgeois law is really no different than the law of the ancien régime, except that at least the kings of France were honest about power whereas the bourgeoisie hides its power behind blank prison walls and faceless bureaucrats.  Thus the left denies that law is anything but the codification of oppressive power relations, the imposition of legal shackles upon a helpless people enslaved by a power elite.

The grain of truth in the left’s attack on law consists in this: that the bourgeois city of law is not a paradise.  Conflict is real, and the cockpits of power are not abolished by the courts of law.  But that is the limit of the left’s argument.  The bourgeoisie turned out not to be a pack of snarling beasts, but concerned citizens who were touched by the struggles of the immigrants in the cities and sensitive to the accusations of activists.  It responded by trying to mitigate the immigrants’ struggles and miseries.  Over the past two centuries the bourgeoisie has enacted numerous programs that demonstrate its good faith and its concern to accommodate people who have come to the city but are not yet of the city.  The bourgeoisie condoned the corruptions and the tribalisms of the political machines, social organizations for people who need to be socialized in the face-to-face society; it institutionalized labor unions, social organizations for people who believe in us-and-them and who experience the business world as a cockpit of exploitation; it reformed the criminal law to soften its impact on the rambunctious and rebellious underclass males; and it enacted universal suffrage.

The city is a hard taskmaster.  It does not tolerate incompetence and the slipshod.  It expects and demands from those that come to the city honesty and the performance of promises.  The artifacts of city commerce are drenched in words like “deed” “trust” “bond” “interest” as Frederick Turner discovered in Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics.  What it expects from its citizens is the capacity for self-government.

The world of self-government calls forth a culture of law, a mitigation of power relationships into a matrix of rules, and the transformation of the old culture of extended family and blood kinship into the new world of the individual, the nuclear family, and the perpetual corporation.  This new culture might be a precipitate of the superior consciousness of the city dwellers, or it might be an artifact of the complexity of city life and commerce, demanding a web of rules to regulate and guide the behavior of the business of the city in a detail and a fineness that the crude application of tribal or family power could not provide.  What is certain is that the law of the city is not a conspiracy of  bourgeois merchants to secure their power and wealth against the claims of the lower orders, but a step-by-step movement to make the city work for people who live and work in it.  Law is not just a codification of power relationships, but also a genuine transcending of the simple calculus of power with something universal and beneficial to all.  He who learns the art of living under law has learned to thrive in the city.  The law of the city is the rule of the road to the middle class.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill