But uneasy with an emphasis on practical activity in the everyday world, Hegel himself would, as he aged and his thought hardened, put increasing emphasis on a rational, all-comprehending, all-inclusive state to resolve the problems of lords and bondsman – the perverse conclusion the older Hegel arrived at in 1821 in The Philosophy of Right.
We want to be young Hegelians, in the sense that we want people to step outside the lordship-bondsman relationship without, as did old Hegel, then seeking refuge in a higher, rational, resolving order. But we face the same problem, in our own narrow sphere, as the young philosopher. Can a city create a chemical bond between people outside of the unequal struggle for recognition? Seemingly, a civil society that admits ructions between people and values their separateness doesn’t do much to bond them. Furthermore, we need to discriminate among rules – some provide positive guidance, others need to be disordered.
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Hegel did well to focus on labour. In modern society, the servant’s work poses complex, indeed surprising problems of authority. The bonds between employer and employee have come unglued in a new era of capitalism, beginning in the late 1970s, which sought to make organisations more ‘flexible’. In part, this flexibility means upsizing and downsizing a company’s workforce numbers in response to global market and financial conditions. It also means a constant process of internal reorganisation as the company does new things or abandons established practices. Finally, flexibility means changing the worker’s job to focus on a shifting set of tasks rather than performing a fixed function within the firm.
Flexibility has set many workers adrift. The reason for this involves time. The iron cage described by Max Weber and later C. Wright Mills structured workers’ experience of time as deep. Bureaucracy organised labour in years or decades. Workers typically worked for fewer than four employers in the course of their careers. Labour unions protected seniority for long-serving labourers and pensions rewarded such service. Organising labour in long units of time meant that a corporation would generally follow a clear internal structure: people would climb up or down fixed job ladders, knowing exactly where they stepped. Despite cyclical blips of unemployment, labour time was predictable and, in that sense, orderly.
Today’s workers experience much shorter labour time because of a reconfiguration based on power. Firms are now oriented to short-term share price rather than long-term profit. This shift speeds up and shortens labour time, as the firm requires different skills and restructures groups of workers in pursuit of short-term recognition by global investors. Flux within organisations kicks away people’s career ladders. Workers shift from task to task without an overarching narrative of where they are going. Young employees can expect to work for at least a dozen employers – or in the ‘gig’ economy, to work from month to month selling themselves to whomever will contract for their services.
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Today’s labouring servant is thus set adrift. This is where Hegel enters the picture. How can servants demand recognition of their needs, their presence, from the master? And what does this tell us about the kind of cities in which we live?
Flexible capitalism unfolds now in a rigid city. The city has become an iron cage – one that imprisons disoriented, labouring animals. There are several reasons for this paradox. The first is the withering of mixed spaces and their replacement with more homogenised districts. This process of sorting and segregating went on throughout the last century but has sped up since the early ’80s.
In the nineteenth century, the wealthy centres of London, New York and Paris were necessarily mixed because they contained a huge live-in servant population. These districts were also filled with small shops – butchers, cobblers, ironmongers – whose specialised commerce maintained affluent households. Servants and shopkeepers in turn had their own local supports, in pubs and cheap restaurants, close to where they worked. London’s Mayfair or the Upper East Side thus registered in censuses before World War I as diverse places in a particular way: they mixed the elite and the satellite working class.
Missing from the centre, however, were the middle and lower-middle classes, and the industrial labourers who were spread out in the city. From the 1870s, the middle and ‘respectable’ working classes established colonies in new suburbs, while the industrial proletariat was often condemned to live in degraded conditions near factories. Still, outer city territories were amorphous; they were mostly new housing developments that arose in erratic fashion. Whether respectable or miserable, all of these places had mixed local economies, just as in the centre. Near-in suburbs before the Great War were more like small towns than the dormitory-suburbs that sprang up after World War II.
The twentieth-century city was marked by relentless homogenisation. In the centre, the departure of live-in domestic servants meant that mews houses in London and top-floor flats in Paris became new kinds of luxury spaces. Haussmann had dreamed of remaking Paris in the mid-nineteenth century to create elegant, affluent spaces where the ugly underside of the city did not appear; a century later his wish began to be fulfilled. Outside the elegant zone, large developers came to dominate the financing and construction of housing at urban edges and in the suburbs; for these firms, homogeneous projects were much more commercially attractive than mixed-use and mixed-user ones.
Above all, the twentieth century saw the reign of zoning laws far more detailed and draconian than the rather loose standards of the nineteenth century. The history of zoning law is boring, but it has largely shaped the modern city. Written law takes aim at ambiguity. Increasingly in the decades after World War II, planners hunted down informal, abandoned or amorphous spaces.
In New York, in particular, planners’ prescriptive writing was seldom based on inductive experience of the city; their prescriptions were deductively formulated, with the division of labour as a model for the division of space: separate places for shopping, schooling, housing. New York is urbanistically distinctive because of the street-walls formed by contiguous tall buildings. These street-walls enable complexity of use and users at street level; they were replaced during the postwar years whenever possible by set-back, isolated buildings with few or no activities at street level.
This process of caging – separating – different uses, places and people has accelerated under flexible capitalism. The more the city has been sorted into different silos, the more the issues of lordship and bondage become visible and physical. The ‘lord’ becomes a rule or plan designating the precise use of each space, including who belongs there. The ‘bondsman’ is still a human being, one who submits to the rules of a space, using it as it is meant to be used; the bondsman knows, moreover, where she belongs and where she doesn’t. In New York today, the ‘lord’ of Hudson Yards is its highly articulated and regulated public space; the ‘bondsman’ are the men and women who use it exactly as planned. Moreover, few poor Latinos and African Americans will be found here; they know they don’t belong here.
Hegel’s early logic of civil society – as noted, different than his later, more statist views – is that the bondsmen set themselves free in the end by a show of indifference to the rules – say, by colonising bits of the outdoor public space in Hudson Yards for political purposes. Rather than debate planning regulations, they will speak a language to justify themselves which revolves around the need for face-to-face contact, or, more abstractly, invokes Lefevbre’s right to the city. An asymmetry results; lord and bondsman are speaking at cross purposes; thanks to this disordering, the bondsman has set her or himself free – free of the lord’s setting the terms of control.
By this same logic, Constant saw the creation of a civil society. In a good civil society, discourse is not resolved into a single set of issues for the lord and against the bondsman seeking recognition. Due to that very lack of resolution, people find spaces of freedom: they are no longer positioned, defined.
A city can make tangible this kind of civil society. The density and diverse population of a city spawns multiple scenes for civil society, so long as these
