This essay first appeared in the Nation, May 11, 1998.
Take It to the Streets: Conflict and Community in Public Space
THE DIALECTICS OF DOUBLE LIVES
Karl Marx, writing in the 1840s, developed a perspective that can help us see why modern men and women have a special need for public space, and also why the historical forces that create this need make it especially hard to fulfill. His 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” tries to grasp the new liberal and democratic civilization that the French and American Revolutions have produced. In all states that have had successful bourgeois democratic revolutions, Marx argues, “man leads a double life.” The typical modern man or woman is “split into a public person and a private person,” or into an “egoistic individual” and a “communal being,” or—here Marx quotes the language of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen—“into a man and a citizen.” Marx characterizes this double life as a life of “political emancipation.”
It takes no special wisdom to see that this form of freedom has severe defects. Marx portrays it as only part of the way toward full “human emancipation.” Nevertheless, it is “a necessary part.” It is only by going through this historical split that we can integrate ourselves into fully developed “species beings.” Full human emancipation will happen “only when the individual man [Mensch—human being] has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and, in his everyday life and his relations with other people, has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers.”
It is this modern, split, fragmented individual, living a double life, that is Marx’s subject—these individual people who must do the work of putting their lives together, together with their fellows. Without the experience of radical separation, modern men and women will lack the space they need to grow into people capable of full integration. This is why Marx (as opposed to some other socialists, then and now) supports civil rights, both for Jews (as he argues in the “Jewish Question”) and for everybody else. It is true, civil rights for an individual or a group involve “the right of separation.” But it is only by going through the most intense separation and individuation that modern men and women can develop the resources to create new forms of solidarity and community.
The paradigms that Marx developed in the 1840s can still be fruitful for understanding life in the democracies of today. We still lead double lives, split into men or women and citizens, torn between private and public; we still dream of resolving our inner contradictions and living in a more integrated way. We know, as Marx did, that this can’t happen without a radical transformation of our economy, state, and society; we also know that this can’t work if it’s imposed from above, but only if people come together freely to do it on their own.
In this political context, the idea of public space takes on a special urgency. A society of split men and women badly needs a terrain on which people can come together to heal their inner wounds—or at least to treat them—and advance from political to human emancipation. Of course, there is no spatial form that in itself could make this happen. But we can imagine environments that could help it happen: environments open to everybody where, first of all, a society’s inner contradictions could emerge freely and openly and, second, where people could begin to deal with these contradictions and try to work them out. Any society that takes the rights of man and citizen seriously has a responsibility to provide spaces where these rights can be expressed, tested, dramatized, played off against each other. Implicit in our basic democratic rights, then, is the right to public space.
Americans are faced with special difficulties in trying to secure this right. Our Republic inherited no splendid monuments and plazas, such as were built by the feudal and absolutist powers that dominated Europe’s past. (I will have more to say later about those spaces.) Our built environments have been created almost entirely by private capital for private purposes and profits. Nevertheless, Americans are at least intermittently aware of what they are missing. Again and again, since the earliest days of the Republic, there have been popular demands and mobilizations for public space. Sometimes the people are lucky enough to get Central Parks and Washington Squares. But Americans haven’t been so lucky for a long while.
Michael Walzer’s distinction between “single-minded” and “open-minded” space is especially fruitful for understanding the politics of public space in the USA. Walzer’s “single minded” metaphor can help explain what makes our post–World War Two public spaces so sterile and empty, why they have been gold mines for owners and developers but ghost towns for the public. And his “open-minded” metaphor can help us imagine what kind of spaces we really need, so that we can fight for them effectively in the generation to come.
If I have an argument with Walzer, it is that he has not adequately thought through the consequences of his own values. Specifically, his vision of open-minded space isn’t open enough. I want to open it up some more, to expand our vision of what public space should be. I want to bring in all sorts of people, impulses, ideas, and modes of behavior that Walzer leaves out, to unfold dimensions of openness that he doesn’t seem to see. My critique of Walzer and my own vision of open space will emerge in two parts: first, openness to modern individualism; second, openness to the urban poor. I will be promoting an ideal of open space that Montesquieu was the first to identify, and to celebrate, on the streets of Paris after the death of Louis XIV; an environment where
Dissimulation, that art so practiced and so necessary among us, is unknown … Everything is said, everything is seen, everything can be heard. The heart shows itself as openly as the face.1
A PLACE IN THE SUN: MODERN INDIVIDUALISM
There is a distinctive strain in Walzer’s argument that seems to grow out of a paradoxical but persistent tradition in modern thought. This tradition professes an Olympian disdain for modern life as a whole and dreams nostalgically of a golden age of Greek or Roman antiquity. When the nostalgia takes a political form, it often focuses on idealized, magnificent public spaces where ancient men are said to have lived on a lofty plane of civic virtue. (This tradition doesn’t say much about where, or how, ancient women lived.) Moderns, by contrast, are seen as petty souls mired hopelessly in trivial pursuits.
When Walzer works in this tradition, his argument shifts from an indictment of capitalism for depriving the people of public space, and turns into an indictment of people for not wanting public space or caring about it. Thus, he says, modern men and women have been deformed by “the triumph of liberal individualism—which is not merely a creed but a state of mind, a … characterological formation.” People with this character can imagine and pursue happiness only in narrowly private forms. They seek material comfort, intimacy, love, “personal and mutual exploration.”
Walzer seems to write off all these needs as exclusive private affairs. He sees his contemporaries as having fallen from the heights of “older republicanism,” which left us a noble heritage of “monuments and fellow-citizens.” The men of those monumental times could be at home in public space because they were supposedly free from the press of personal needs that obsess us. They understood that public life “requires impersonality and role playing; civility, not sincerity; reticence and wit, not confession.” But we moderns are unable to leave our selves behind, and so public space is no place for us.
Walzer’s tone is uncertain and possibly ironic here. He may not believe all this. But there