Audio recordings of Edward C. Banfield are exceedingly rare. years ago, I posted a couple of them on this website. Over time, I have added a few more.
A few weeks ago, I was delightfully surprised to find an audio recording of Banfield from April 11, 1970. He was on a panel discussion of urban issues held by the Philadelphia Society. The conference, I hasten to add, included some big names: Milton Friedman, Walter Berns, and M. Stanton Evans.
The recording is quite clear, and Banfield speaks for over 20 minutes.
Edward C. Banfield talk on urban issues and solutions
Banfield states that it is helpful to think about urban problems through the lens of class. There are normal class variants of a problem and there are lower class version. Take unemployment as an issue: the normal class problem involves individuals who are disabled, people who are between jobs, etc. The lower class variant frequently involves individuals who do not want to work regular jobs preferring instead “the action of the street.”
He then takes up solutions to these problems, observing that different phenomena require different interventions, and that some problems are not readily addressable by policy. For example, he states that the libertarian proposal to reducing unemployment by abolishing rid the minimum wage to create jobs—well, that will not do much for someone who doesn’t care to take a job. This class framework he developed first in the publication of his book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1968) and came to fruition in The Unheavenly City (1970).
Banfield’s comments range widely, and display is clear-eyed realism about the urban “problems.” I thank the Philadelphia Society for preserving and sharing the Banfield talk and the many other presentations.
Here, Banfield reminds fellow attendees of the conference on Democracy and the Constitution that the American Founders conceived of two forms of happiness, individual and national happiness, and that the earliest Americans imagined humans as selfish yet also expected those who served in office as statesmen to rise above their selfishness in pursuit of the common good. Banfield notes this dualism raises interesting questions, such as whether we can judge the motives of voters who cast ballots self-interestedly.
This event also featured Robert A. Goldwin (American Enterprise Institute), Professor Benjamin R. Barber (Rutgers University), Professor Terrence Marshall (University of Paris), Judge Abner J. Mikva (U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit), Edwin Yoder (Washington Post), and a young Charles Krauthammer (Syndicated Columnist).
The Harvard Law Forum hosted a discussion titled “$50 billion for what? The federal welfare program” on December 9, 1966. Banfield spoke third, after Dr. Ellen Winston and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who recently had returned to Harvard from government service.
The moderator describes Banfield as “another popular entertainer form the harvard community,” which elicits audience laughs, and notes that Banfield has “more auditors than people taking his courses.”
Banfield’s acidic opening remark notes that federal government housing policies have harmed inner city Blacks but benefited Harvard. Here Banfield was referring to the destructive effects of federal urban redevelopment efforts, which including bulldozing poor neighborhoods and relocating residents to massive low income complexes. He wrote of these policies in his second and fourth books, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest (1955) and Government and Housing in Metropolitan Areas (1958).
So what was the Harvard connection? Well, these aggressive federal policies sparked the establishment of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT, with which Banfield and Moynihan both were affiliated.
Banfield directs most his remarks at this event to discussing two types of welfare problems: helping the “money poor” (the old, disabled, etc.) and the “culturally poor” (who lack money but also live according to “low” standards.) This distinction was one Banfield explicated at length in his book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), and developed further in The Unheavenly City (1970). Play the above video to hear the rest of his thoughts.
Not quite 50 years ago, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a series of lectures in honor of the American Bicentennial that were given by top thinkers, including Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond, Gordon Wood, Seymor Martin Lipset, and, appropriately, Edward C. Banfield.
Banfield delivered a speech on The City and the Revolutionary Tradition at Franklin Hall, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The video of the speech is above, and AEI published Banfield’s remarks here.
He begins in his typically blunt manner:
“It would be very pleasant on such an occasion as this to say that the American city has been and is a unique and unqualified success-and to be able to show that its successes all derive from adherence to principles established and given institutional form in the American Revolution, whose bicentennial we are here to commemorate. Unfortunately, it is all too evident that even if this were the Fourth of July I would not have license for that-sort of oratory.”
America’s cities, he explains,
“were built by that often ludicrous and sometimes contemptible fellow-the Worshipper of the Almighty Dollar, the Go-Getter, the Businessman-Booster-Speculator-an upstart, a nobody, but shrewd, his eye on the main chance, always ready to risk his own and (preferably) someone else’s money.”
They were a distinctly bottom up enterprise, and their governance system and politics were not quite what the Founders sought. Governing authority in cities is severely fragmented, and getting things done necessitated the rise of power-broker politicians, who operated through bribery and appeals to individuals’ and factions’ self-interest.
The fragmentation of authority has not only permitted but also encouraged its informal centralization by means-notably the machine and the boss-that were corrupt. If, as [Lincoln] Steffens said, businessmen gave bribes because they had to-because it was impossible to operate a street railroad without doing so-it is also true that politicians took them because they had to-because, to centralize enough power to get things done, they had in one way or another to ‘purchase’ pieces of authority from voters and others. Without this easy access to power on the local scene, the Go-Getter would not have had the opportunity to ‘go get.’ As it was, he could extend the grids of nonexistent cities into the hinterland confident that he could induce some public body to build the canal, railroad, highway, arsenal, or whatever that would send land values up. Even the new immigrant’s ethnic ties had a political value that could be converted into the small amount of capital he needed to get started.
Dispersed governing power in cities also produced a consequence for federal governance: governing nationally demands federal leaders cultivate local support. Achieving that made political parties indispensable. But these parties could not be ideological or uniform: “[R]ather they are shifting coalitions of those who, by winning elections or otherwise, have assembled enough pieces of local authority to count.”
Hence, on this bicentennial, Banfield impishly told his audience:
“One of the great ironies of history is to be found in these developments, for it was a centralized system like the Canadian, not a fragmented one like the American, that the principal figures among the Founding Fathers thought they were creating.”
The Founders wanted a governance system that was informed by the public but capable of resisting it and societies various factions. Leaders were to be trustees for voters. Instead, America by 1830 had something else—a system whose leaders were wheeler-dealers whose primary duty was to “accommodate competing and more or less parochial interests, not to deliberate about (much less enforce) an idea of the common good.”
So, Banfield concludes, hurrah for the 200th anniversary of our Founding, but let us remember the cities and nation we got veered from the revolutionary tradition. And let us not overlook that a system so firmly directed by majoritarian impulses tends to prefer expediency to justice.
In late 1977, Stephen Smith, a journalist, interviewed Edward C. Banfield and many persons who knew him, for an article intended for Esquire magazine. Smith kindly gave the tapes of his interviews to the Banfield family. Below are selections from these tapes.
Recording #1 (32+ minutes)
With the family dog, Sashi, at his side, Edward C. Banfield speaks of his farm, his childhood, neighbors, early employment, how he ended up attending the University of Chicago and studying planning and cities, Rexford G. Tugwell, Martin Meyerson, James Q. Wilson, and his first books.
Recording #27 (22+ minutes)
Edward C. Banfield speaks of his Harvard colleagues, problems America may face (hedonism, loss of virtue, nihilism), liberalism as theory and policy, human nature, “Policy Science as Metaphysical Madness,” free markets, his desire to research new topics, and Bonnie Bluestein (a student who disrupted his classes at both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania).
Edward C. Banfield, An Online Resource 