| the interest of providingto the extent possiblea synthesis that is at once accurate, accessible, and concise. |
| For example, I have assumed without argument that there is indeed an urban crisis. Many would disagree with this, but to have made the argument against them would have required a very different kind of book. Moreover, the analyses that do appear here are largely unaffected by the issue of whether or not there is a crisis; indeed, the book might have been more accurately, if less dramatically, entitled Ideology and Urban Politics. |
| Similarly, though far more seriously, at numerous points complex problems in political philosophy have been ignored, circumvented, or even dangerously oversimplified. But to have given a full account of, say, Hobbes's theory of obligation or the debate in ethics over utilitarianism or the foundations of natural rights theory would have required a book many times longer than the present one and would have taken the discussion very far indeed from the realities of the urban crisis. Still, I am hopeful that the analyses provided are, as far as they go, faithful to the basic themes of the texts in question. |
| My main arguments arise out of a certain dissatisfaction with conventional references to ideologies of urban politics. It is common to classify such ideologies as being either neo-conservative, reformist, or radical. Such a division, obviously useful for some purposes, is simply not very helpful in dealing with the urban-oriented materials. For example, Robert Nisbet is typically and correctly thought to be a neoconservative. Yet the import of his work for the urban crisiswith its emphasis on alienation and communityis deeply incompatible with that of another neoconservative, Edward Banfield, for whom problems such as alienation can play no major role in any sensible discussion of urban policy. The writings of a third neoconservative, Hadley Arkes, emphasize the peculiarly ethical dimensions of city politics and are, again, largely unrelated to the concerns of Nisbet and Banfield. Thus, the category "neoconservative" turns out not to mean very much when applied to the urban crisis. If anything, the so-called reformist and radical approaches are even more diffuse and incoherent. |
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