By Kevin R. Kosar

Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary about these problems—a tendency Banfield’s book sought to address.

The Unheavenly City is one of those rare academic books that became a bestseller, marked by Banfield’s characteristic straight talk and satirical passages, such as when he muses on whether the burdens of impoverished, unwedded mothers might be lifted by authorizing them to sell their babies. The book also outraged the Left—particularly the political class and intelligentsia, which had invested a great deal of time trying to solve America’s urban crises.

They damned the book as “reactionary,” “ignorant,” “dangerous,” and “tasteless.” The New York Review of Books ran an unflattering caricature of Banfield alongside a scathing review by a young Richard Sennett. For years after the book’s release, radicals disrupted Banfield’s classes and public lectures, calling him a racist and a fascist—neither of which was true.

Many of the critics missed the point of the volume, which was at its core Socratic. America was worked up about cities, with some fearing a national race war and a collapse of civilization. The “war on poverty” was in full swing, and more policies aimed at saving cities were in the works. Banfield saw good reason to ask tough questions and consider all possible solutions, no matter how unfashionable…. (Read more)