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BAUMGARTEN / URBAN FAILURES
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because he had left behind everything tha t had to do with his
merely ‘private’ concerns — those governed by the standards o f
utility as well 'is those un d e r the sway o f necessity. Here alone he
found himself released from the need both to rule and to be
ruled . Here alone did the opportun ity to reveal his individuality,
to distinguish himself from all others, fully presen t itself.”7 Bel
low’s nuanced and subtle articulation o f the values o f
the polis
p a r
allel the exposition o f its meanings central to the work o f H annah
A rend t, a colleague o f his in the Committee on Social T hough t at
the University o f Chicago, Like A rendt, Bellow speaks for the
values o f urbanism , the condition by which we live with all kinds,
not ju s t ou r own, in a public space conducive to the expression o f
the varied aspects o f ou r personalities. Not to live in the city is to
lose ou r sense o f reality and become “entirely private . . . deprived
o f seeing and hearing others, o f being seen and being heard by
them .” As A rend t points out, this brings us to “the end o f the com
mon world . . . ” U nde r these circumstances, the city becomes a
wilderness.8T he force and subtlety o f the analysis o f both A rend t
and Bellow thus honors tha t o f their predecessors — the Chicago
school o f social science — o f Jane Addams, Louis Wirth, and Rob
e r t Park .9They make us aware o f the ways in which the epic city o f
n ine teen th and twentieth century culture continued to fulfill the
grea t ideals o f the Greek
polis.
Nevertheless, it is important to dis
tinguish between them.
T he Greek City was in size and population no more than a good
sized village, enclosed by a city wall. It was culturally and socially
homogeneous, depended upon slaves for many o f its economic
functions, denied citizenship to women, whose activities were lim
ited to the domestic sphere, and tended to link the political and
sexual spheres th rough homosexuality. By contrast the grea t city
o f the industrializing cultures o f the n ine teen th and twentieth
cen tury was an expand ing space, with grea t social, cultural, and
hum an diversity, rapidly replacing the labor o f slaves with
machines (and resources approp ria ted from colonies abroad),
7 Peter Fuss, “Hannah Arendt’s Conception o f Political Community,”
Hannah
Arendt: The Recovery of thePublic World,
edited by Melvyn A. Hill, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1979, pp. 166-168.
8 Quoted by Fuss, op. cit., p. 166.
9 For a useful selection of their work, see
Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities,
edited by Richard Sennett, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1969.