Restoring the European City: A Review of Ferenc Hörcher’s “The Political Philosophy of the European City”
Hörcher, Ferenc. 2021. The Political Philosophy of the European City. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Most political science programs nowadays teach students to use the same rubric to evaluate each new piece of scholarship read: what academic puzzle does it address, how does it do this, and what contribution does it make to future scholarship. An assumption underlies this process that demonstrates how far political enquiry has moved from Plato’s dialogues. The political scientist reading Ferenc Hörcher’s The Political Philosophy of the European City is likely to be confused as to what puzzle is being addressed because Hörcher does not spell it out. Early on, he notes that the book assumes “that the political practice of the European city has accumulated a large dose of practical knowledge about politics, and the task is not to formalize it, in other words to set down the rules one can draw from this knowledge, but rather make it available to the general reader and through her acquaintance with this tradition to let her become an active contributor of its reformation itself” (Hörcher 2021, 2). This is the moment when the puzzlement of the political scientist can be one of Aristotelian wonder, an invitation to participate in a thoughtful experiment in philosophy and history. Hörcher then brings the reader in and leads a discussion which gives a sense of what this knowledge, drawn over time through pragmatic encounters, suggests about what went wrong and how to respond.
In this way, Hörcher fosters a reading consistent with Sándor Márai’s character’s comment in Portraits of a Marriage, “I read a great deal. But you know how it is with reading too…you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.”[1] And indeed, Hörcher has brought his pistols and a wide range of seconds.
A simple reading of the text reveals an examination of European literature, art, and philosophy as a means of exposing how people lived in key European cities (as well as New York) mostly between the 15th and early 20th centuries but with forays into ancient Athens and Christian Western and Central Europe, as well as the late 20th and early 21st century. In examining the way living in cities was understood by different voices—or in different media (novelists, poets, painters, travelogues, philosophers, historians)—it collects information on the ways in which residents governed their own affairs. The book fulfills its promise of presenting a “conceptual order of the changing phenomenon of the European city” and using political philosophy as a way of understanding (Hörcher 2021, 1). Its use of history is, following Collingwood, historicist, aiming to draw out how lives were lived, cities experienced and governed, at a particular time, primarily relying on contemporaneous literary texts or reminiscences of a city of one’s youth, including Hörcher’s own Buda/Budapest.
The reader witnesses Budapest, Sienna, Verona, Siena, Paris, and New York through the eyes of Baudelaire, Benjamin, Géza Ottlik, Márai, Márton Szepsi Csombor, Mann, Weber, Rousseau, Hegel, Calvin, Althusius, Rodin, Antal Szerb, and Mario Ascher among others (including Hörcher himself). The city is thus revealed in its physicality (urbs) by various members of its community (civitas). The voices are those of flaneurs, philosophers, artists, but also historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Nevertheless, there is a bit of a counter-academic cultural approach in the assumption that the place for social science is more limited in trying to understand the city’s life, particularly when compared with literature and art.
So then what is Hörcher’s contribution? It is likely that it is not to construct a political philosophy of the European city or to present a ‘conceptual order,’ but that it is to train readers to become engaged in a political philosophy which prioritizes a prudential reading of the history of European cities.[2] Such a reading suggests that the rise of centralized states has had negative consequences for the life of cities, as has modernization’s push towards megalopoloi. A prudent burgher, the likely reader of this text, a student of practical wisdom’s engagement with real challenges, will not simply engage through contemplation but action as well. This is clearly, at least according to the present reading, a very Aristotelian project.[3]
The charismatic Mauricio Viroli sees the rise of reason of state and the national form of identity as taking away the republican politics of the city/city-state and denaturing the love of patria.[4] It is hard to think of what ‘went wrong’ in Europe without the wily Florentine appearing in some form. Bobbit argues that Machiavelli, perhaps earlier and better than others, saw the need to shift the form of the polity from the polis-like Italian republics and principalities towards the state.[5] Machiavelli’s conception of an ethics colored by virtù and glory of the patria, a break from classical and Christian sources, contributed to a new phase in the philosophic and practical exercise of phronesis/prudentia. It was not without critics—indeed Machiavelli’s Prince, unpublished during his lifetime, was soon banned by the Pope, Machiavellian became an adjective to be reserved for people who, probably, do what you do or would do but will not admit, and a legend was born—but it clearly had a resonance. In an earlier work, Hörcher examined how Montaigne and Lipsius adopted some of Machiavelli’s virtù while also restoring some of the more classical and Christian (i.e. traditionally virtuous) elements of prudence.[6] Prudence is fundamental for Hörcher (see 2020) as it is lived wisdom expressed in concrete moments and ways to respond to a political reality. There is a prudence that emerges and reacts to the emerging reality of a reason of (absolute) state, growing cities, and industrialized societies. But as politics adjusts spatial from the polis to the distant palace of an absolute monarch of a sovereign state, politics itself shifts, as does prudence. The famous shift of politics and, therefore, the citizen, from the Athenian polis to the Roman republic finds advocates of both sides. The former was a thicker form of participation, the latter more law-bound and, eventually, inclusive.
Hörcher shows that in early modernity, even in empires, citizens largely governed local matters. They did not have sovereignty and their right to office or self-government may have been given by a monarch but they could engage in quotidian exercises in problem-solving. This did not happen without errors and grave ethical problems, both when cities were face-to-face spaces and when they were large and impersonal. Burghers supported conflict-resolving institutions and engaged in normative and habitual practices to bring stability and order, but they also supported, at different times and in different ways, slavery, exploitive practices of labor, colonialism, and totalitarianism (Hörcher 2021, 253).[7] Government in cities was not democratic but “representative democracy learned a great deal from the form of self-governance that European cities developed” and the wisdom that was generated by engaged political practice developed a mindset which “preserves what is valuable in the past and rejects the guilt of the past” (Hörcher 2021, 251, 255).
What is valuable? Viroli asserts that the change in agency and the subject of politics from the citizen of the polis to the subject of the modern state is a loss. Hörcher’s “parallel story” involves making knowledge available to the reader so that the reader can recognize what has been, see value in prudential action, and, ultimately, act. It is not a matter of nostalgia but citizen-building, in as much as it describes the different ways of cultivating citizens. So why are the reason of state, the size of the city, and centralization of politics in the state (and thus away from the city and thereby fundamentally changing citizenship) so important? It is likely that Hörcher sees not only the rise of state power but that of the European Union as being particularly dangerous for the ability of burghers to maintain a tradition in which, under the veil of considerable autonomy/ autocephaly, they were able to govern their cities according to her customs, traditions, and laws, adjusting them in similar fashion. Europe must treat cities as “partners,” not as subjects, otherwise “Europe cannot preserve its civilized political face” (Hörcher 2021, 30).
The comment about Europe appears suddenly and disappears. But the prudent reader will note that—as Hörcher discusses concordia as “a cooperation approaching harmony” (2021, 86), something treasured by cities—it is difficult to imagine a post-modern nation-state, let alone a trans-national body like the European Union having, let alone attaining, such a goal. Indeed, modern liberalism’s assumption of a plurality of first principles sets up a second-best scenario wherein people accept peace (and therefore self-regulation and tolerance) over seeking harmony. Hörcher’s contrast of Venice and Florence is telling. The latter had more liberty but the former was more orderly. The Venetian constitution was balanced and concerned with order and was able to sustain that order through common rules, norms, and shared ethics which led to concordia. Such a thing at the national or supranational level seems either impossible or only possible for an efficient, totalitarian regime, one in which there is no effective citizenship. It is likely Hörcher worries that the centralization of authority and power within the European Union in recent decades has contributed to a leadership class pursuing a means of top-down harmonization which is driven not by prudence but its ancient foe, hubris. Chapter 4, which addresses the size of the city covers a very impressive range of thinkers and discussions about the drive to large cities before coming to subsidiarity, as a mode of political administration, and a reminder that the early architects of the European Union had based it upon this doctrine (Hörcher 2020, 210). The reader has been led to reflection on the direction of the European Union, against subsidiarity, towards greater centralization, towards reduced space for local politics, how these have contributed to the politics of the city and how prudential citizens can react.
Hörcher does not lay down rules or a prescription,[8] but he does train his readers. How should the prudential burgher respond? A clue may be found in the personal and pragmatic nature of the text. It deals with a mode of living amidst the cares of this world. At the time of the British vote to leave the European Union, David Goodhart[9] described people on either side of the debate as being ‘somewheres’ (those wishing to leave) and ‘anywheres’ (those hoping to remain). The European Union leadership in recent generations can be characterized as being more favorable to the latter, building an intellectually broad, multi-linguistic workforce with a broad sense of European-wide identity, rights, and obligations, citizens in a polity that is in the process of being built and, therefore, exercising a citizenship that is similarly under construction. An exaggerated version of the ‘anywhere’ is an atomistic individual who treats all places in Europe, or the world, with equal amity or disdain, a cosmopolitan who is equally comfortable in all places. One imagines that Hörcher, with a mastery of several European languages, well-versed in the particularity of history, mores, and cultures of cities and countries in Europe, would certainly be comfortable in any city in Europe. But for all his learning of the languages, cultures, and literature of other nations and cities, and his awareness of a broader European and Western culture, he remains in Buda, the city of his forefathers, with his wife, and his son nearby, and a daughter planning to return when possible. Clearly, the accumulated practical wisdom of the city and the particular pursuit of a reflective life of a self-governing burgher has an allure beyond its depiction in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
NOTES:
[1] Sándor Márai. 2012. Portraits of a Marriage, p.169. New York: Vintage Books. Translated by George Szirtes.
[2] See Ferenc Hörcher. 2020. A Political Philosophy of Conservatism. Bloomsbury.
[3] It is worth noting that the great ‘Stagirite’ was the first and among the most important to conceptualize citizenship despite never being a citizen of the polis he inhabited and where he taught for most of his life.
[4] Mauricio Viroli. 1995. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. New York: Clarendon Press.
[5] Philip Bobbit. 2003. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. New York: Anchor Books.
[6] Hörcher, Ferenc, 2019. “The Lion and the Fox: Montaigne, Lipsius and Post-Machiavellian Conservative Prudence,” Teoria Polityki, 3. p. 161-173.
[7] Of course, European cities during early modernity were also subject to colonization (see Robert Bartlett, 1994, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[8] Pinkoski takes the text to task for this (Nathan Pinkoski, “Resurrecting the European Polis,” Law and Liberty blog 24 January 2022. https://lawliberty.org/book-review/resurrecting-the-european-polis/ accessed on 24 January 2022.
[9] David Goodhart. 2020. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Related Posts
