Below are links to and brief descriptions of the four volumes of my study of the nature, evolution, and possible future of the city, gathered under the title of The City of Reason.
The City of Reason. Vol 1. The Philosophical Ideal of the City. 2004 189,571 words
The City of Reason is a four-volume study of the origins, evolution, and potential futures (both desirable and dystopian) of the city. ‘The City’ here is defined expansively, paying at least as much attention to the (human) contents as to the (physical) containers. Accordingly, volume 1, The Philosophical Ideal of the City, returns the city to its roots in ancient Greek ideals of the scaled and balanced city-state.
Part 1 Cities and Citizenship is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state.
Part 2 The Philosophical Idea of the City grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation.
Part 3 Universitas examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance.
The City of Reason. Vol 2. The Rationalisation of the City. 2004 123,623 words
The Rationalisation of the City, traces the evolution of thinking about the state, city, and politics in the work of a range of political theorists and philosophers. The book ranges from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the Enlightenment and its aftermath, with substantial chapters on Machiavelli, Luther, Hobbes and Locke, William Godwin, Rousseau, early modern German thought to Max Weber and Michel Foucault.
The City of Reason. Vol 3. The Political Economy of the City. 2004 108,479 words
The Political Economy of the City, examines the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification, and commodification inaugurated by the industrial and scientific revolutions, so that the emancipatory potentials of the original ideal would come to take repressive form in a totalising rationalisation.
The City of Reason. Vol 4. The Social Ecology of the City. 2004 138,689 words
The Social Ecology of the City opens by addressing the problematic character of attaining the common good in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice, embedding the ‘rational’ philosophical ideal developed throughout the book within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the ‘politics of difference’ within a universal frame, thus checking tendencies to separation and division.
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