AEI Press republished Edward C. Banfield’s classic book, Government Project, in late December 2023. Copies of the book may be purchased at https://amzn.to/48S4nV2. The new edition retains Banfield’s original text, Rexford Tugwell’s original introduction, and a new preface by Kevin R. Kosar. Government Project tells the story of an attempt by the US government to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation. The farm was financially succeeded for a time, but in the farm’s seventh year of operation, the inhabitants shuttered it. Many of them walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it. Government Project deftly explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, Banfield illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.

Reviews and Coverage

Amity Shlaes, “Casa Utopia: The Tale of an American Collective Farm,” National Review, January 10, 2024.

American Enterprise Institute event, “Good Intentions Are Not Enough: Revisiting Edward C. Banfield’s Government Project,” January 20, 2024.

Kevin R. Kosar interviewed about Government Project on Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast, February 8, 2024.

Mark Pulliam, “Government Project: The Eternal Folly of Central Planning,” American Institute for Economic Research, April 1, 2024.

Dominic Pino, “Kevin Kosar Revives Edward Banfield,” National Review, April 9, 2024. A video of this dicussion apppears here.

Les Lenkowsky, “‘Government Project’ Review: Big Dreams, Bitter Harvest,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2024.

Kevin R. Kosar, “Old Lessons for the New Right,” The Dispatch, April 10, 2024.

Vance Ginn, Why Don’t Government Projects Work with Dr. Kevin Kosar, Let People Prosper podcast, April 15, 2024.

Howard Husock, “The New Deal’s Failed Kibbutz in the Desert,” AEI Ideas, April 19, 2024.

Mark Pulliam, “Remembering Edward C. Banfield,” Chronicles, May 1, 2024.

AEI Press has brought back this classic book, which has been out of print since the 1950s. The new edition retains Banfield’s original text, Rexford Tugwell’s original introduction, and a new preface by Kevin R. Kosar.

Government Project tells the story of an attempt by the US government to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation.

Casa Grande Valley Farms was an elaborate venture that provided the Americans who volunteered to settle there with housing, work, and the opportunity to earn income. For five years, the farm succeeded. The revenues from the sale of its crops gave the Casa Grande settlers material comfort and wealth far beyond what they had ever possessed.

But in the farm’s seventh year of operation, the inhabitants shuttered it and walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it.

Banfield’s Government Project deftly explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, Banfield illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.

Buy a copy.

Reviews

“It is not a nice story.”
-Rexford G. Tugwell, administrator, United States Resettlement Administration, from the 1951 introduction

“Devotees of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Dreiser will understand this book. With the relentlessness of a Greek tragedy, the story of this Resettlement Administration project… moves forward from relief and destitution… through hope, then security, to the very brink of success, only to disintegrate.”
-Howard J. McMurray, American Political Science Review

“Sociologists will find much meat in this book for the purposes of illustrating the processes of social interaction—conflict, co-operation, and attempts and failures at accommodation.”
-Lowry Nelson, American Journal of Sociology

In November 2023, Daniel DiSalvo, authored an essay titled, “The Unsolvable City” in City Journal. He notes that “[r]evisiting the still-controversial work of urbanist Edward Banfield can help put race relations, education, housing, crime, and other policy debates into a broader perspective.”

Importantly, Banfield’s book reminds us that American cities have always been raucous places, and their problems may be managed but cannot be solved. “The foundation of Banfield’s urbanism is an interconnected argument: most of what we view as urban ‘“’problems’ are not really problems at all, and the genuinely serious issues are not amenable to ‘policy solutions’ that are technically feasible and morally legitimate in a democratic society.”

Read more at https://www.city-journal.org/article/reassessing-edward-banfield.

Note: DiSalvo, a professor at City College of New York-CUNY, also wrote “Edward C. Banfield Revisited,” for the autumn 2023 issue of National Affairs.

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An earlier retro review (May 2020) was written by Craig Trainor at Quillette: “Return to ‘The Unheavenly City’.” He writes,

“The Unheavenly City leaves the reader in little doubt that only one of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s two “truths” is actually correct. Culture—the habits of mind, conduct, beliefs, and values—“determines the success of a society,” and that politics is far too limited an enterprise to change the deeply ingrained cultural orientation of those who comprise it. That is a lesson it is never too late to learn.”

Read the full rreview at https://quillette.com/2020/05/17/return-to-the-unheavenly-city/.

Thomas Sowell has a short essay in the Fall 2020 issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Unheavenly City at 50.” Sowell, who turned 90 years old this past June, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

He writes:

“Somewhere Winston Churchill said that all wisdom is not new wisdom. That is certainly true of Edward C. Banfield’s landmark book, The Unheavenly City, published 50 years ago. Many, if not most, of the people discussing urban problems today have not yet caught up to what Banfield said half a century ago.”

Riffing off Banfield’s observations on dropouts, Dr. Sowell also add this personal note:

“While many people today may simply dismiss what Banfield said, it is impossible for me to dismiss it. As a personal note, I happen to have dropped out of high school at age 16, and took a full-time job as a messenger delivering telegrams for the Western Union telegraph company. But the law required me to also spend some time in what was called a ‘continuation school.’

“It was a time-wasting farce. I informed the teacher that the law could force me to be there, but it could not force me to participate, and I had no intention of participating. I was indeed angry ‘at the stupidity and hypocrisy of a system’ that used me like this. Fortunately, Western Union had its own continuation school for its messengers, and I transferred there, where I learned to type, a skill that would be of some value to me in later years—instead of being used to justify some teacher’s job in a public school.’

You may read the essay at https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-unheavenly-city-at-fifty/.

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)

Zocalo Public Square has published an essay of mine on Banfield’s classic text, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958).

More than 60 years ago, an American family arrived in a seemingly idyllic town in Southern Italy. Stone buildings resembled “a white beehive against the top of a mountain.” Donkeys and pigs idled in the ancient, winding streets. A town crier tooting a brass horn announced “fish for sale in the piazza at 100 lire per kilo.” There were two churches, two bars, and a movie theater. Shops offered locally made shoes and olive oil, and locally-sourced meat. Nearly everyone farmed and tended animals and knew one another, at least by name or reputation.

Yet Chiaromonte’s 3400 residents were anything but content. They were crushingly poor and simmered with resentment. Why? In great part, as the Americans learned during their stay, because they were too family-focused.

Political scientist Edward C. Banfield went to Italy in 1954 to better understand poverty. Researchers then tended to assume people were poor due to lack of education or because they were victimized by the government or capitalism. Banfield himself had been a reporter and had traveled across the United States during the Great Depression, so he knew the reality was more complex. In order to understand why people are as they are and do what they do, Banfield believed one needed to learn how they viewed the world and their place within it.

This may sound self-evident, but it cut against the academic grain of the day. The University of Chicago, where Banfield earned his doctorate and had a teaching appointment, was known for its shoe-leather sociological research. Its Prof. William Foote Whyte, for example, wrote Street Corner Society in 1943 after four years studying a slum in Boston’s North End.

In 1956, Banfield and his wife Laura (who spoke Italian) spent nine months in Chiaromonte and interviewed dozens of residents. They pored over census data and official records, enlisted some residents to keep diaries, and conducted psychological surveys on others. Two years later, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society described what they had found and concluded that Chiaromonte’s poverty and grim melancholia (la miseria) were rooted in its people’s “amoral familism.”

Read more at http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/12/15/idyllic-italian-village-crippled-family-centrism/ideas/nexus/

As a young, recently minted Ph.D., Lynchburg College’s Joseph Freeman wrote a peach of a review of Banfield’s The Unheavenly City for Political Science Reviewer (now defunct). The Intercollegiate Studies Institute kindly has posted the PSR archives online and you can read Freeman’s review at https://isistatic.org/journal-archive/pr/01_01/freeman.pdf.

A hat tip to Robert Schadler for telling me about this review. Schadler had Banfield for a one-on-one reading course at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. He also was managing editor of Political Science Reviewer for a decade. These days, Schadler is a Senior Fellow in Public Diplomacy at the American Foreign Policy Council, and the President of Educational Enrichments, an information service based in Washington, DC.

 

Banfield’s Here the People Rule (1985/1991) is a collection of his best essays on government and politics in the United States.

Perhaps his most famous student, James Q. Wilson, reviewed the book in the Public Interest,which is freely accessible here. (By the way, the archives of which are available at http://www.nationalaffairs.com/archive/public_interest/default.asp.)

Full citation: “Edward Banfield, American Skeptic,” Public Interest, issue 107, Spring 1992, at
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20090102_JamesQ.WilsonEdwardBanfieldAmericanSkeptic.pdf

Public Administration Review published my retro-review of Banfield’s first book, Government Project:

A Nearly Forgotten Classic in Public Administration: Edward C. Banfield’s Government Project, Public Administration Review, September/October, 2009.

As the neo-progressive wave in politics rises higher and higher, Banfield’s Government Project provides a cautionary tale of the challenges that well-intended policymakers and public administrators face in tackling social problems.

It is an easy reading book that nearly anyone can read and enjoy. (Dry, academic treatise it most certainly is not.)

So what’s the book about? Well, it describes and analyzes one of the federal government’s attempts to help poor farmers during the Great Depression.

But that’s not all it is about. As Banfield put it:

The most characteristic feature of modern society, perhaps, is the great and increasing role of formal organizations of all kinds. Primitive societies were (and are) held together chiefly by the nonlogical bounds of custom and tradition; in modern society the relations of individuals are to a large extent consciously and deliberately organized by the use of intelligence, and the rules of logic. . . . This attempt to organize society along rational lines is a stupendous experiment. Nothing in history promises that it will succeed. But like Faust we are bound by our bargain, and so the study of formal organization and planning—of the techniques by which control may be exerted deliberately and intelligently—is a matter of profound importance. If it is placed in the widest possible framework, then, Government Project may be regarded as a study of one of mankind’s countless recent efforts to take command of his destiny.

How’s that for a subject of import?

Citation: Kevin R. Kosar, A Nearly Forgotten Classic in Public Administration: Edward C. Banfield’s Government Project, Public Administration Review, September/October, 2009.

Christopher DeMuth, “Banfield Returns,” The Alternative, November 1974.