Petersen on Power, Prestige and Position
I know I should be writing more. Perhaps I should just save my twittering style as drafts and trickle them out over a couple of days…
But, for lack of anything else at the moment (otehr than the fact that I finally found auto insurance, which is a story no one wants to hear), let me say that I’ve been reading Paul Petersen’s 1981 classic City Limits. Well, I’ve read two chapters, and they’re fantastic. However, so far, his abuse of sociology is both fascinating and inspired. His basic argument is that cities have unified interests because, despite some differences, city residents in their role as residents of a territorially defined political community have a common interest in the city enhancing its power, prestige, and economic position. He draws these three common sociological interests from Weber’s “Class, Status, Party”, which Petersen mistakenly refers to a “Class, Status, and Power”. I’ve detoured to read this section of Economy and Society and the one immediately prior to it. I’m in the middle of it, but in his description of “political community”, Weber is already making a distinction between the interests of the ruling class and the ruled, and he definitely does not seem to be suggesting that all members of a political community share the same interests. For example, in his explanation of the drive toward, often violent, expansion under capitalist imperialism, he writes that labor often benefits from imperialist tribute,
[L]abor in creditor nations is of strongly pacifist mind and on the whole shows no interest whatsoever in the continuation and compulsory collection of such tributes from foreign debtor communities that are in arrears….This is a natural outcome of the immediate class situation, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the internal social and political situation of communities in the capitalist era. Those entitiled to tribute belong to the opponent class, who dominate the community. [Part Two, chapter IX, p. 920]
So there’s no reason (in Weber’s framework) we can assume a priori that resident is a shared role in which all benefit from the pursuit of power, prestige and position vis-a-vis other political communities. Even Petersen’s own concrete example of a drug dealer benefitting from the attraction of capital and jobs resulting from a push to get drugs off the streets requires little imagination to identify scenarios under which the dealer would not benefit. If those new jobs go to non-residents or better educated workers (as they so often do) and he or she has been deprived of an income stream, where is the benefit?
Instead, I would suspect that Petersen’s definition of the public interest as power, position, and prestige of residents “taken as a whole” is fundamentally an ideological fudge that assumes that economic growth benefits all members of a community. But we’ll see.
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