1 The Fascinating City: Place of Thought, Place of Human Life

From the ancient Greek polis to the medieval communes, from the industrial cities of the last century to the global megacities of the XXI century, the city is now the privileged place of the inter-human cohabitation to the point that, nowadays, the traditional contrast between the urban environment and the countryside seems completely over: “the world” has indeed “become city” (Hénaff 2016, p. 9). Even the continual retreat towards the non-city (that is not countryside anymore) confirms, conversely, the centripetal force of the city itself that pushes away, but still keeps strong links (due to jobs, services and other facilities) as a big magnet (Ricoeur 1967). Maybe this is the reason why the studies about the city do not age; they showed and still show the unique and typical character of human cohabitation.

Philosophical reflection defines the city as a place that generates thoughts. Philosophy thinks of the city because it is in the city that humans think. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, says that, neither the countryside nor the trees allowed him to learn but humans did, claiming a double central role, that of the human being in relation to other living creatures and, above all, the man of the city, someone who lives in a broader inter-subjective relationship.

The central position of the city is mainly determined by the fact that it is the place of excellence for human living. Weber “is fascinated by the historical uniqueness of the city” and “one of his purposes […] is to examine the ways in which the historical formations he labels cities have either contributed to, or hindered, the development of modern society and polity” (Schwarts 1985, p. 542). According to Weber, the city is the place where the economic development that has led to capitalism is generated; the battle field where people have conquered free work and personal freedom against slavery; the privileged context for social interaction and inter-subjective relations. The city is of life and for life, as it is the place of economy, labour, personal freedom and social relations. If it is true that, in the first 20 years of the last century Weber already recognised the relative anonymity of the urban relationships as a limit, due to the fact that it, lacks “the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants” (Weber 1978, p. 1212), on the other hand the city is the context where social action as a behavior oriented to the attitude of other individuals explodes because of the physical proximity.Footnote 1

According to Weber, in other terms, the city is the place where civilization develops and it is the place of human beings.

The contributions of the city in the whole field of culture are extensive. The city created the party and the demagogue […]in the sense of party leaders and seekers for ministerial posts. The city and it alone has brought forth the phenomena of the history of art […]. So also the city produced science in the modern sense […]. Furthermore, the city is the basis of specific religious institutions. Not only was Judaism, in contrast with the religion of Israel, a thoroughly urban construction – a peasant could not conform with the ritual of the law – but early Christianity is also a city phenomenon […]. Finally, the city alone produced theological thought, and on the other hand again, it alone harboured thought untrammelled by priestcraft (Weber 2003a: 360-361).

Politics, art, science, religion and even secularism were born in the city. In one word, the city has generated civilization. On the other hand, according to Weber, the city is the place of excellence for human beings. If, as Karl Löwith clearly thinks, Weber’s attention to the topic of western capitalism corresponds to a deep attention to mankind as, “western capitalism includes today’s man in his total humanity base that determines both social and economic issues” (Löwith 1994, p. 3) then the human being, towards whom we have to focus our attention, is the city man. In fact, the man of modern western capitalism is the man of the city, as shown by the historical connection between the development of the new industrial capitalist system and the birth of large urban agglomerations (Hobsbawm 1962). The attention to the city, as with the attention to capitalism, directly reflects Weber’s passion for humans: “Weber warns us that the protagonist of urban development is the human being with their ideas, their responsibility of being rational; they are the protagonist who cannot abdicate” (Bettin 1979, p. 15).

Not to abdicate to philosophical reflection on the city is the same as not to abdicate towards the human being.

2 The City and the Contemporary Era

Weber’s studies and literary production constantly explore the topic of the city and its central position reflects his preference to consider human social relations. The western medieval age, a period in history that Weber’s essay The CityFootnote 2 is dedicated to, completely reinvents and rethinks the concept of the city. However, the city is not an invention of this period, but rather an “ancient giant” (Nippel in: Weber 2003b, p. XXXIV). Weber’s writing on ancient agrarian history (Weber 2013) already clearly highlights his interest, not in landowners, but in the strict Calvinist entrapreneurs: Weber is much more interested in the city than in the countryside, as the city is the symbol and product of rationality. The ancient civilization appears, in its essence, as an urban civilization.

In spite of the pervasive presence of this theme and “although it is acknowledged as an important piece by Max Weber, The City—Non-legitimate Domination, has received almost no attention in the recent theoretical literature about this classical author in the social science[s]” (Domingues 2000, p. 107). This is confirmed by the limited philosophical literature about this topic. There are different possible reasons: the incomplete and reconstructed character of the main texts and the problem related to their timing (Petrillo 2001, pp. 192–195); the preferred sociological analysis. The miscomprehension of this part of Weber’s thought could be linked to the fact that the role of the city has not been considered essential to the main theory of the relationship between the Protestant religion and the spirit of capitalism.

However, this lack of perception of Weber’s thought about the city might betray a judgment about its meaninglessness and irrelevance for present time. Weber focuses his attention mainly on the western medieval commune, but if “the modern city has got little to do with the pre-industrial medieval one” (König 1997, p. 110) the difference between our world-city and the medieval commune drives Weber’s thought to oblivion.

But if we read his work carefully we see that Weber himself strongly highlights the connection between the medieval city and the modern city of industrial capitalism. The medieval town is much closer to our capitalistic development than the polis. “The ancient cities were always much more centres of consumption than production, whereas the opposite is true of mediaeval cities. Similarly, the development of ancient cities, although producing numerous elements of ‘an urban economy’ […] never led to anything so closely resembling the ‘ideal-type’ as appeared in a great many mediaeval cities” (Weber 2013, pp. 60–61). For Weber the type of capitalist development of the modern age, that is industrial capitalism, is linked to the legal forms developed in these medieval cities (Weber 2013).

This connection is similar to that between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: it is not univocal and necessary but a facilitating element for the emergence of capitalism since its main pre-conditions were actually born in the medieval commune. Here, we see the beginning and growth of an acquisitive economy which is not directly connected to human needs, of the idea of free work and of the rational calculation of capital. According to Weber, the city has crucial importance as it is the land of an urban middle class, that introduced during the middle age a series of economic innovations. It contributed to a larger market, created free labor, experimented with new accounting techniques and legal tools for trade, and finally had complete control of the overall production.

Modern capitalism and the modern state were not born in the ancient cities, whilst the development of the medieval towns was crucial for their birth. If we do not consider the link between yesterday and today we cannot understand our own origins.Footnote 3 In other words, Weber is interested in the medieval town because he wants to find in the medieval towns the backbone of our modern society (Petrillo 2001). The ancient world, the middle ages and the modern times also talk to and about the city of today.

For Arendt (Arendt 1973) and Giddens (1985) “the formation of modern democracy, […] required the existence of already formed nation- states […] or ones in-the-making […] to act as power containers for the experiments in democracy” (Rundell 2009, p. 90). Weber instead highlights how the origin of democracy is essentially connected to a previous historical phase, to the medieval municipal cities. For Weber, the medieval town, whose intentions are often disregarded, is the source of freedom, autonomy and mutual responsibility of the citizens, who are equals. When Weber’s The City is read from this perspective “it suggests an analysis of the formation of modern democracy” (Rundell 2009, p. 85). A city does not exist without democracy and democracy lives in the city. Medieval communes and megacities—again—do not appear so distant, at least not in their aspiration for democracy.

According to Weber the main change and the distinctive feature of the medieval town, the ideal type of the democratic city, is represented by its “autonomy” and “autocephaly” (Weber 1978, p. 1226). The city is a place of independent power that starts as “revolutionary usurpation” (Weber 1978, p. 1250) towards the pre-existent feudal and high-class domination. So, the city was born as a form of non-legitimate domination.

The usurpatory character of urban aggregation immediately opens up a paradox. On one hand, as the code of the revolution it seems to speak the language of irrationality. However, on the other hand, Weber attempts to define the city as rational although, he is aware that it is inconclusive. The city embodies rationality in the social sphere: it is the social rationality that leads towards living in concentrated housing; it is economic rationality that generates the acquisitive economy and free labor, and will finally lead to capitalism; it is the rationality of the politics, organization and defense. However, these fragments of definition, even if they reveal important aspects, do not include the city in its global context. The problem of defining the city, even if it is the starting point, is not crucial for Weber.

Actually, the origin of the city as usurpation already anticipates the reason for the impossibility to define it because it is essentially a rupture, an excess. So, not even rationality can fully understand it,Footnote 4 and its pretentious rationality—social, economic and political—is uncertain if analyzed in its tangible historical forms. Not even the city is as rational as it pretends to be.

However, the failure in defining the city and the failure of its rationality in the history of urban experiments, as with the recognition of the undeniable differences between the medieval commune and the city of today, do not mark the end of the city and the theories about it. They recall instead its authentic meaning, its broken nature, and its constant need to reinvent and outdo itself.

The real issue is neither the problem of defining the city, nor the theoretical question about the compatibility between the Weberian sociological categories of domination and the city, defined as non-legitimate domination by the main critical literature. Instead, we need to place ourselves on the side of denial, of what the city as non-legitimate domination challenges and revolutionizes, and grasp the productive and broken nature of the city. The medieval town denies birth rights, labor slavery, the heteronomy of the high class, and Episcopal domination. Thus, it introduces a democracy.

But, the break that the city operates is immediately creative: free fraternity is opposed to the clan, autonomy to heteronomy, freedom to slavery, free labor to corvée labor, an acquisitive economy to an economy based on basic human needs. The non-legitimate domination appears to Weber as an explosive but proactive, inventive and creative power. Without—again—its creativity being ended and ever inconclusive.

Many have noticed how Weber does not talk about the future of the city, and according to some interpreters this silence, considered as an omission, is in favor of a theory that after modern states the city cannot have a future. The reality is that there is no future for the city because the city belongs to the future, the city is always evolving. Thus, the city as a rupture always goes beyond itself.

3 The City as Revolutionary Usurpation

Marcel Hénaff, in his recent The City in the Making, presents Weber’s work on the medieval city, on the relationship with the market and on the bureaucratising process, as an essential piece in order to understand the contemporary city “at the very moment when the world seems to become city” (Hénaff 2016, p. 9). If today, the world has become a city, a reflection on the essential characters and origins of the city itself is fundamental to a better understanding of our world. “The concern of giving an answer to the big question on the origins and nature of the western civilisation […] provide the key to understand the origins of the urban form where we live today” (Bettin 1979, p. 14). Ricoeur, instead, in Urbanisation et secularisation, revisits Weber and his theories about the city when challenging the nostalgia of pre-city past, the oppositions and criticisms of the organisation itself. The world that has become a city generates fear and the urban cohabitation appears in crisis. Considering the desire of escaping and coming back to a non-urban past, Ricoeur refers to Weber, in order to underline how the human being is meant for the city and for the social relations (Ricoeur 1967).

So, it is not only the connection between the medieval city, the modern and the contemporary one that reveals how this superficial inattention of the analysis of this topic is a deep omission. Contemporary reviews on Weber show, much more radically, how his reflection about the city is not limited to an analysis of the medieval city, but he also talks to and about the city as a place of human cohabitation, regardless of its historical forms and its geographical and temporal placement. As usual, Weber tries to define the concept of the city and to grasp the essence, even if he is aware that you can only try “to attempt” to define a city, and “in many different ways” (Weber 1978, pp. 1212–1213). This means that he is aware of the uncertainty of the thought. So, his reflection questions every city, because he asks what the city is and the relation with the social, political and economical human being. However, the city is ultimately indefinable because it represents in its essence a form of rupture towards its own lack of democracy, inevitable and always present due to its human character. With a pun we could say that the city is indefinable by definition because the city has to constantly re-build and always go beyond itself.

In The City, as in General Economic History, the attempts to conceptually clarify the essence of the city act is incipit for Weber, but it soon becomes the background. Thus, it is the background of the analysis of the medieval city and of its birth as usurpation and revolution.

When defining the medieval city, the features amongst those ones listed (social, economic, political, military etc.), that determine the unique and original character of the city are the “autonomy” and “autocephaly” (Weber 1978, p. 1226). According to Weber, these features come directly from the usurpatory nature and revolutionary character of the birth of the commune. The main peculiarity of the western communal city is that it was born from a sworn fraternity of autonomy (the coniuratio), from a free association of individuals who independently chose to create a community.

It is true that outside the western world there were cities in the sense of a fortified point and the seat of political and hierarchical administration. But outside the occident there have not been cities in the sense of a unitary community (Weber 2003a: 362).Footnote 5

Elsewhere, the city was not “necessarily […] consolidated into a separate and independent association” (Weber 1978, p. 1231), there was neither a kind of civic representative—”no general corporation of the burghers” (Weber 1978, p. 1234)—nor a legislation and court, nor autonomous administrative institutions. But, overall, it was lacking the possibility to freely and individually join these institutions without the restrictions of belonging to a specific family or any other closed community.

The autonomy of the medieval commune is gained thanks to the revolutionary character of establishing urban communities:

quite often, and especially in the most important cases, the real origin is to be found in what is from the formal legal point of view a revolutionary usurpation of rights (Weber 1978: 1250).

From the formal judicial point of view it represented a “revolutionary usurpation” towards the high class feudal domination that owned the land, the market rights, the army, the administration of justice, and the freedom of servants and other men working under a corvée.

The urban citizenry therefore usurped the right to dissolve the bonds of seigneurial domination; this was the great – in fact, the revolutionary –innovation which differentiated the medieval Occidental cities from all others (Weber 1978: 1239).

The revolutionary character of the communal city corresponds to the fact that it was born as a violation of the feudal, pre-existent and legitimate domination. In fact,

the earliest references to cities as political units designate rather their revolutionary character. The occidental city arose through the establishment of a fraternity, the συνoικισμóς in antiquity, the coniuratio in the middle ages. […] The pronouncements […] against cities prohibit none of the specific presumptions of citizenship, but rather the coniuratio, the brotherhood in arms for mutual aid and protection, involving the usurpation of political power (Weber 2003a: 364).

The revolutionary character of the origins of the city refers back to the fact that the city constantly tries to go beyond itself. So, the medieval rational city of the market, administration, and security was born from a usurpation opposite to rationality. It is a usurpation that indicates incalculability, unpredictability, in-definability, and, inconclusiveness that introduces an element of irrationality in the origins of the city itself.

A paradox opens up; the city was born as an irrational act of usurpation, but on the other hand it is the exact opposite of it—that means its rationality—that constitutes, according to Weber, its peculiar character is the key word of every attempt to define the urban aggregation. The city embodies social rationality, a rationality that was born—and this is the paradox—from the irrationality of the usurpation, the reason and its opposite inextricably intertwined.

4 The City as a Symbol and Contradiction of the Rationality

According to Weber the city is the highest symbol of free social rationality typical of the West. If the process of rationalization is the distinctive and crucial element that marks the western development, the city is the privileged place where this happens. In analyzing rationalism Weber highlights its intrinsically plural character stating that “by this term very different things may be understood” and “what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture” (Weber 1992, pp. XXXVIII–XXXIX). Saying that the city is a form of rationality, “a framework of rational socialization” (Petrillo 2001, p. 208) does not unravel the mystery around its essence, but it makes it more incomprehensible. First of all, because the rationality of the city, as the rationality itself, has different forms (social, economic, political, organizational, military etc.). Secondly, because the city as rationality has inevitable cracks, contradictions and aporias of reason, which are mixed with irrational elements.

Within the attempt to define the city in Weber’s The City, the rationality of the urban aggregation immediately appears as multiple, both because the process of rationalization develops in several possible directions (for example there are differences between the Italian medieval cities, those ones north of the Alps, those ones in the UK etc.),Footnote 6 and because the urban society rationalizes different spheres of human existence.

The city is, above all, a form of human cohabitation that realizes the rationality of the social sphere. Weber offers, from this point of view, a quantitative-geographical definition of the city and a relational one. The city is above all “a relatively closed settlement, and not simply a collection of a number of separate dwellings”. It is also

a settlement of closely spaced dwellings which form a colony so extensive that the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic of the neighborhood, is lacking (Weber 1978, p. 1212).

For Weber the city—especially in reference to the medieval city born from the coniuratio, the free and independent association of individuals—is the place of neutral relations and you belong to it because you choose so and not because of the mediation of the family, clan, caste, religious group or ancestry. If it is true that the neutrality almost becomes—and falls into being—anonymous, it is also true that the free choice of belonging to a city releases the individual from the old relational barriers inherited from birth.

Soon after, Weber inserts a reference to the economic dimension:

a further characteristic is required for us to speak of a ‘city’: the existence of a regular, and not only occasional, exchange of goods in the settlement itself, an exchange which constitutes an essential component of the livelihood and the satisfaction of needs of the settlers – in other words: a market. But again: not every ‘market’ converts the locality in which it is conducted into a ‘city’ (Weber 1978: 1213).

So, the city man appears primarily as “homo oeconomicus” (Weber 1978, p. 1354). In comparison, the Greek polis appears deeply different. In Athens, the military force was the foundation of profit and in the economic field freedom did not get a foothold, not even for the citizens with full rights.Footnote 7 Instead the medieval commune originates and guides its own citizens “towards pacific economic acquisition based on rational and continuous economic activity” (Weber 1978, p. 1362). Thus, “not the fulfilment of any economic function does characterizes the city in the economic sense, but only the fulfilment of that economic function which assumes the characteristics of the rational organization of the economy and which already constitutes the transition to modern capitalism” (Andrini 1990, p. 90).

In the same way, the fracture with the oikos, typical of the feudal high-class world, is radical. The purpose of this urban economic activity is no longer the mere satisfaction of the basic human needs, nor doing something just for the lord. The goal of the citizen, as an economic human being, is the profit and the goal of production itself. The market is finally independent and not subordinated to the purchasing capacity of the lord’s administration. The city as a market embodies the first form of rational acquisitive economy and develops its own economic policy.Footnote 8

Despite the richness of the market as described above, not even this element is enough. The market was not enough for Weber to make every sort of cohabitation a city by default, in the same way the stock exchange is not enough. The city is also—essentially—something else; it is impossible to describe it without referring to concepts such as politics, power and authority, that immediately recall its political and social aspect. Another part of Weber’s effort to find a definition is indeed the reference to a political-administrative rationalization that takes place in the urban context. “The city […] exists within […] larger social formations, yet in a distinctive way: it is politically autonomous. While intricately connected with the larger economy and society, it forges its own political independence” (Schwarts 1985, p. 543). The rationality of the city results in independent policies, the presence of authorities and institutions defined and regulated by the citizens, in what concerns the exercise of power and the turnover of the public office staff and only in this “sense may a special urban territory be associated with it” (Weber 1978, p. 1220).

The problem of rationalization also involves the administration of justice. In the city, courts and independent law are born, against an arbitrary and individual use of the law. From this point of view, the city is also the organizational rationalization of cohabitation. “The Gemeinde [Community] is defined, as such, as it is capable of Anstalt [Institution], and of structuring the original institution” (Petrillo 2001, p. 213) Also: “To exist, the city calls for an administrative machine from which it is inseparable. Weber’s thesis is beyond question: the administrative organization indeed means the advent of rationality” (Hénaff 2016, p. 67).

Finally, the city also appears as the place of defensive and military rationality: “the city in the past, in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, outside as well as within Europe, was also a special kind of a fortress and a garrison” (Weber 1978, p. 1231).

The peculiar characteristics of the city (a defined urban settlement, with regular market activities oriented to profit, with its own regulated and independent institutions and jurisdiction, even from a defensive point of view) make it the city of reason.

When we try to follow this basis, to put the city on a pedestal as a symbol of concrete expression of rationality, the structure sways. Deep cracks are generated in the rationality of the city, not only from the theoretical point of view, but also in reality. The city is not always as rational as it seems, or as we would like to define it.

The contradictions of every historical city recall the irrational character that was already part of its origin as usurpation. Justice is never really fair, the bureaucratic organisation is never functioning properly, the political power is never totally democratic and in reality the market is not as rational as it pretends to be. If the city was really a perfect rationality, we could say that there are no cities in the world. Weber clearly shows this awareness: every definition is an attempt,Footnote 9 a defensive rationality “even in the past it was not universal” (Weber 1978, p. 1221) and the market or political-administrative autonomy “do not by themselves exhaust the concept of the city” (Weber 1978, p. 1219). The city, as the place where the process of rationalization takes place, inevitably brings out the aporias and contradictions of rationality. In its origin as usurpation, but also in its development, the city as a symbol of western rationality is entangled with irrationality.

5 The End of the City?

Urban development as a process of rationalisation is not the last word on the city. On the contrary, it opens up the awareness of the aporias and contradictions, even irrational ones, that are always typical of the city. The economy, the social character, the politics and the security embodied in the reality of the city are uncertain and their rationality is less monolithic than it seemed, in the medieval communes and even more today. If the city was essentially concrete we could say that the era of the city rationality is over: social conflicts, crazy urban development, and political abstention, a widespread perception of insecurity, strengthened by enforced security, all indicate that talk about a city that is far from the reassuring order of reason. Most of the elements presented by Weber do not belong to the contemporary city, or they have deeply changed to the point of losing their nature.

In the contradiction of the definition of the city as rationality, as in its constant transformation, the thought of the end of the city finds its place and roots itself. It is only—and precisely—the origins of the city as usurpation, that saves the city and the Weberian reflection from oblivion. The city is indeed indefinable precisely because it is a rupture itself. The city is contradictory and always changing because it is always exciding itself; it goes against a legitimate domination, (the feudal one) that is considered illegitimate, and it demonstrates against a democracy that is still too partial.

5.1 Between Rationality and Irrationality

It is immediately clear how impossible it is for reason to define and fully understand Weber’s city. The relational characterization already shows a city where the rationality of the social sphere also corresponds to the neutrality—or better to the anonymity and the anomie—of the relations. In the city “the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic of the neighbourhood, is lacking” (Weber 1978, p. 1212). Paradoxically, the social character immediately becomes part of the definition of the city reason, but it is denied, or at least in danger.

Although Weber insisted on the definition of city as economic rationality, as it is the origin of the modern western capitalism, he is aware that it presents notable risks. Above all, there is the risk that the economic dimension is overestimated to the point that the market becomes the element that supports the definition of the city. The reality is that even Weber thinks that, “the economic activity does not complete the concept of city” (Andrini 1990, p. 91) and also “when all is said and done the economy of a city is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the city” (Martindale in: Weber 1962, p. 58). But, we need to avoid this because, as a reaction, we risk the opposite which means forgetting the fundamental role of the market for the city and cohabitation. The peculiar and positive character of the market is indeed to initiate the public sphere. The market originates

the most ancient form of the public sphere in a sociological sense. The part of the public sphere that citizens are entitled to, is not only the festive exception, but also a daily form of social behaviour. Thus, the development of other forms of the public sphere, for example a political one, becomes possible and plausible (Bahrdt 1961: 50).

The market is an archetype of a social rational relation that allows the combination of personal freedom of the individual, with the idea of belonging to an urban community. What is public becomes a daily affair and not only something festive. But, if the potential is so big, so are the risks. If the market is one of the places of freedom, social interaction and public relations, its deterioration marks its own dimensions. If the market originates as a public sphere, its rules cannot be private. The irrationality is pressing, also for the perfectly rational institution that the bureaucracy represents ever sinceFootnote 10:

bureaucracy stifled private enterprise in Antiquity. There is nothing unusual in this, nothing peculiar to Antiquity. Every bureaucracy tends to intervene in economic matters with the same result. This applies to the bureaucracy of modern Germany too (Weber 2013: 499).

The tendency of bureaucracy to suffocate the private economic initiative is not typical of the ancient world. Every bureaucracy, even our own one, when expanding tends to create this effect.

Also, the defensive rationality of the city-fortress, where the independently auto-organized citizens hold the military task, is not clearly rational. The communal cities are fortresses inside because the war is outside, and the cities are in conflict against each other. The rationality of the fortress is maintained for the irrationality of a permanent conflict.

Thus, Weber’s definition of the medieval city does not fully define it. There are still dark areas of rationality and elements of irrationality. The city—and this is the paradox—is the symbol of rationality. But this rationality does not manage to fully combine its elements; it is never without contradictions or irrationality.

5.2 City and Transformation

On the other hand, urban modernity and post modernity make Weber’s definition uncertain. Most of the defining elements cannot be found either in the modern city or in the contemporary city. The city as autonomy and autocephaly seems hardly adaptable to the birth of patrimonial states described by Weber. Today’s cities do not look safe and secure: from the atomic bomb to armed terrorism, cities “may have become the big death trap of modern man” (Martindale in: Weber 1962, p. 66). And even the market, which nevertheless is always predominant, is not a local market anymore; the city has become a global super-market. The city is still a concentration of houses, with skyscrapers, but in terms of space it appears enlarged; from space, the earth appears like a sky full of urban constellations: “the inhabited earth looks like an urban galaxy, as if the starry universe surrounding the globe had been projected as a series of cities” (Hénaff 2016, p. 6).

The irrationality, as well as the deep and undeniable differences between the medieval commune and the contemporary city, seems to impose a death sentence on the city described by Weber. According to Pietro Rossi, in fact, the Weberian western city:

establishes historically an unicum […] If we look closer, according to Weber the peculiarity of the western city coincides with its exceptional nature.

The medieval city presents itself as:

an historical intermission that was possible thanks to an exceptional historical situation […]. The kind of western city does not embrace the western development, but it establishes itself as an exception within itself (Rossi 1978: 8-9).

So, from this point of view, the medieval city as an exceptional city loses interest. The growth of modern states and nations has developed at the city’s expense: “the modern city is losing its external and formal structure. Internally it is in a state of decay while the new community represented by the nation everywhere grows at his expense. The age of the city seems to be at an end” (Martindale in: Weber 1962, p. 67). So, the end of the city.

The definition of the city as rationality and the realisation of it aporias are one step away from the city death sentence. The realisation of the contradiction of the urban rationality, as in that the deep changes do not combine either with the end of the city or with the end of studies about it. If Weber’s definition of the medieval city—as inconclusive and contradictory as the rationality—is not completely credible, this does not end the era of the city but—on the contrary—renews and keeps alive the questions about the “ancient giant” (Nippel in: Weber 2003b, p. XXXIV). The incomplete character of Weber’s conceptualisation does not constitute a limit, but an opportunity to avoid the city being locked in the cage of thought, and an opportunity to keep the question open. An opportunity to renew the question about the city, that despite everything still appears today as an “erratic rock” (Breuer 1995, pp. 135–136).

The city is neither definable nor mortal because it is a revolution, usurpation, fracture, and excess. It is exactly this revolutionary character, that Weber keeps mentioning in The City and General Economic History, that impedes a definition of the city if not in its rupture. The heart and the origin of the city is in the transgressive act of denying the pre-existing power and of establishing a new non-legitimate domination. The city, as a non-legitimate domination is, in other terms, a clot of contradictions: rationality and irrationality; constant renewing and going beyond itself. And, this is—maybe—its secret.

6 The City as a Non-legitimate Domination

The link between the city and the domination is inseparable: “the city has always dealt with politics” and it has been “the place where the most significant types of domination took place, in a concentrated form” (Scaglia 2007, p. 17). Political, economic and financial powers live, structure and plan the city and its urban development, even today, and every form of domination and authority implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an interest in obedience. There may be various motives for obedience—economic motives, material interests, affectual ties, etc.—but more importantly, for Weber, there is another element, the belief in legitimacy of domination. Domination is legitimate when the subordinates accept, obey, and consider domination to be desirable, or at least bearable and not worth challenging. It is not the actions of the dominant that create legitimacy, but rather the willingness of those who subordinate to believe in the legitimacy of the claims of the dominant.

Nevertheless, Weber thinks that the city, a place of excellence for the expression of powers, does not embody the traditional power, the charismatic one and not even the legal-rational one standardized by its sociology as the three forms of legitimate power.Footnote 11 The city embodies the model of a non-legitimate domination that, as such, avoids all these categories (Domingues 2000, p. 110). As underlined by Pietro Rossi, it is impossible to: “attribute the city, not only to the rational-legal power and to its bureaucratic administration, but also to the same type of domination (as not-legitimate domination)” because “even if it will access the path of legitimacy, it was always born as a non-legitimate domination of excellence” (Rossi 1978, pp. 8–14).

In fact, the problem of non-legitimate domination reflects, at a philological level, the indecisiveness of Weber’s curators to insert, or not, a reference to non-legitimate domination in the title of the essay, The City.Footnote 12 It seems that this indecisiveness reflected the theoretical question. Does the city start, according to Weber, a new ideal-type of power, that one of non-legitimate domination?

The problem is strong and real; non-legitimate domination indeed seems to be incompatible with Weber’s idea of power and legitimacy presented in the first part of Economy and Society. Here, Weber highlights how, “every system of leadership wants its rule not merely on domination, then; it also wants its power to be granted because its authority is legitimate” (Ricoeur 1986, p. 13). So, how is it possible that non-legitimate domination, if the claim of legitimacy, defines the same power? For a long time the philosophical and sociological reflection has focused on this question, with, on one hand, the merit of grasping the heart of the city as illegitimate usurpation, but on the other hand, with the risk and demerit of only focusing on the theoretical dilemma. The concern of finding an adequate theoretical collocation risks taking the attention away from the analysis of what the non-legitimate domination is and so, from the city that creates it.

6.1 Theoretical Perspective

There are several solutions to the theoretical dilemma: bypassing the problem by denying the existence of non-legitimate domination; justifying it as a new form of legitimacy; or identifying its existence as a simplification of a fourth ideal-type of power, the democratic power (Petrillo 2001; Breuer 2000).

Many authors believe that non-legitimate domination can neither exist nor sustain Weber’s sociological structure. From this point of view, the illegitimacy is believed to be incompatible with domination because “the basis of the legitimacy of domination disappears, in the same way as the possibility of orders to be obeyed disappears” (Mommsen in: Stammer 1965, p. 136). The illegitimate domination would be a contradictory concept and therefore non-existent (Speer 1978, p. 160, Schreiner in: Kocka 1986, p. 126). Even Wilfred Nippel places himself on this side, as he thinks that

there are doubts […] if the city has to be subsumed as non-legitimate domination” (Nippel in: Weber 2003b: XCVII).

From a context point of view, Weber’s text, which brings together several questions about the unique character of the political association of the Western bourgeois, in a universal western comparison, is incomplete. It cannot be read, in the sense that by analyzing the medieval commune, such an analysis would be valid for the theory of non-legitimate domination (Nippel in: Hanke et al. 2001, p. 189).

Doing so would be as if Weber, though, did not clearly talk of “revolutionary usurpation” and against the “legitimate powers” (Weber 1978, p. 1259). Doing so would be as if it were possible—and easy—to separate reflections on the city, which is a privileged place of domination, from those ones of the domination itself.

A second point of view supports the idea that non-legitimate domination is not an illegitimate power making a distinction between non-legitimacy and illegitimacy (Scaglia 2007). The domination of the city is not illegitimate because its non-legitimacy is only temporary. In other words, it is a transitional situation. It is temporarily illegitimate towards the old establishment (legitimate) of the feudal domination because its aim is exactly that of becoming a new form of legitimacy. This new legitimacy does not come from God, but it is based on a free associative agreement, that the members agree on, and it does not bind and subordinate third parties. So, non-legitimacy is included and resolved (or reduced) in a new and different form of legitimacy:

“the urban bourgeois illegitimacy as usurpation refers exclusively to the fact that a new form of legitimacy is founded with it” (Scaglia 2007: 36). From this point of view there is nothing left to distinguish the legitimacy from illegitimacy and there is the risk of considering any kind of revolution or change transitional, and therefore potentially legitimate.

Finally, the question has been resolved, recognising instead the possibility of including in the city a new ideal-type of power in Weber sociology. Regarding the ideal-type of the democratic power, Wolfgang Schluchter shares this opinion:

during his conference about the problems of the State sociology in October 1917, Weber introduced a new type of power, the principle of the democratic legitimacy as fourth principle of legitimacy. He did this explicitly in connection with consideration about the progress of the western city (Schluchter 1988).

Nevertheless, developments of the city today seem to situate cities as major enemies of democracy, even though “democracy has been hardly damaged by its contact with city conditions” (Wilcox 1904, p. 21). For example, we can think of the anonymity of the relations, the working alienation, the concentration of power, and the omission of responsibilities. Doubts on the real democracy of the city appear in Weber, also when considering the medieval communal city. Freedom is conditioned and belongs to a limited number of people, the role of nobles and notable people that hold the power changes the face, but still remains and democracy finds it difficult to root itself.

6.2 Understanding the City

The dissatisfaction that remains despite the proposed attempts to solve the theoretical question of the compatibility between the type of domination and non-legitimate domination is accompanied by a doubt. It might be that the theoretical question is hiding from the much more substantial problem, that means, from questioning what non-legitimate domination is. If it is true that the dilemma of the total compatibility of Weber’s sociology of the domination persists, it is also true that, in order to understand the city, it is much more functional placing ourselves beyond it. Or better still, placing ourselves inside the revolutionary character of the city and not only outside it, with only the concern of finding a solution to the conceptual issue within the theoretical constellation of the power. And this is because of both methodology and substantial reasons.

From a methodology point of view, according to Weber, as the reality is always composed of mixed types (and never of ideal-types), in the same way the ideal-types cannot pretend to extinguish the possible ideal-types. Something is lost in the comprehension of a reality that is far richer. It is not just a simple statement of modesty towards the demands for a complete conceptual list. It is instead a firm Weberian belief that the historical reality is “constantly new” and it is exactly for this reason that “Weber’s fundamental sociological concepts” cannot be “valid forever and for everything” (Scaglia 2007, pp. 52, 57). As Ricoeur has noticed, the Weberian ideal-types are “neither a priori nor merely inductive but in between” (Ricoeur 1986, p. 187), but at the same time both pre-conceptual and inductive, never disconnected to the historical reality. Thus, there is a sort of priority of the real over the ideal and theoretical, and due to this priority Weber authorizes himself—and every professional of the science in general—to always go beyond the concepts that already exist and develop innovative ones, even if precarious, whenever a reflection on a new historical situation asks for it.

In addition, from a substantial point of view, the solutions to the dilemma proposed by different interpreters do not stand. First of all, denying the existence of a non-legitimate domination as an ideal type, or as a conceptual structure, does not deny its real existence in any way. As a matter of fact, this would mean establishing or ratifying—against Weber—the superiority of the logical-conceptual dimension over the history (Scaglia 2007, p. 33). Even the attempt of saving non-legitimate domination temporarily, limiting the non-legitimacy, brings up some perplexities. Non-legitimate domination would be, indeed, understood and received only thanks to the reference to legitimacy, and so, not understood, as its essentially the opposite.

In order to leave this issue behind, it would be enough to recognize that the city described by Weber is not the place where the domination becomes, in a short time, legitimate. It is rather and exactly the constant questioning of legitimacy itself, of the existing powers. The city is ruptured, it is a break with what came before. Thus, not understanding the split opened by the non-legitimate domination means—and this is the major risk—not only preferring a different theoretical-conceptual option about the sociology of the domination, but above all, not understanding the city at all.

7 The Meaning of the Rupture. The City as Democracy

According to Weber, the city is therefore, the form of the revolution and of the usurpation, as revolutionary as was Paul’s opening towards those ones who were not circumcised in Antioch through the ritual of the Eucharist (Bettin 1979, p. 51). The medieval city and the ritual of Antioch belong indeed to the same history, as the communal meal open to everyone—against every ritual or birth barrier—is, according to Weber, as the condition of possibility in order to realize the free urban fraternity. While the ritual of the Eucharist breaks the discrimination launching the idea of brotherhood, the city breaks up the legitimacy, the routines, the exclusions, and the arbitrary act of power that existed before, “the new domination of the city is confirmed by the usurpatory character that clearly distinguishes it from the pre-existent assets of power”. The city is dis-continued, against every theory of continuity (Petrillo 2001, p. 218). At this point, a new and much deeper question opens up immediately. Placing ourselves inside the city as a rupture means, as a matter of fact, questioning which rupture the city operates, which legitimacy it challenges, and what it revolutionizes and usurpates. In other words, this means again questioning the non-legitimate domination, despite the fact that we aim at getting a real understanding of the city as a rupture, more than at its conceptual coherence.

From a historical point of view, there are no doubts, the medieval communal city is historically revolutionary towards the feudal domination, the situation in the East, and the ancient city. But, the difference is even deeper since, as for the first time in history, the communal city launches an experiment of authentic democracy where freedom is of everyone and for everyone. “The dissolution of the bonds of seigniorial domination became, for Weber, the revolutionary innovation of the occidental city, the outcome of which was the disappearance of the status distinction between the free and the unfree” (Rundell 2009, p. 87).

In order to grasp the innovation compared to the period of feudalism, first of all “we have to picture urban conditions prior to the coniuratio”: “officially the legitimate lord of the city was either an imperial vassal or—as in most cases—the local bishop” but in reality

numerous claims to authority stand side by side, overlapping and often conflicting with each other. Episcopal powers of seigneurial and political nature; appropriated vicontiel and other political office powers resting partly on chartered privileges and partly on usurpation; powers of great urban feudatories or freed ministeriales of the king or the bishops (capitanei); those of rural or urban subfeudatories (valvassores) of the capitanei; allodial clan properties of most varied origin; countless owners of castles fortified on their own authority or that of some other power, a privileged estate wielding authority over a broad stratum of clientes, either bound or free; occupational unions of the urban economic classes; judicial powers based on manorial law, on feudal law, on territorial law and on ecclesiastic law – all these found in the city (Weber 1978: 1251-1252).

Inside this historical situation of powers that are the result of “appropriation”, “usurpation” and are based on “privilege”

in the early period of ample economic opportunities, the inhabitants of the cities had a common interest in their full utilization. Population growth through immigration was seen as a way to increase the opportunities for sales and acquisition for every individual. For the same reason the burghers had a common interest in the elimination of the possibility that a serf, once he had become prosperous in the city, would be requisitioned for house and stable service by his lord, if for no other reason than to extort a ransom from him (Weber 1978: 1238-1239).

Furthermore, in the city the distinction between the eastern and western world is expressed. The medieval communal city is, according to Weber, unimaginable in a socio-political context in the East. While in the West “the forms of religious brotherhood and self-equipment for war made possible the origin and existence of the city”, in the East the army of the prince already existed and “the second obstacle which prevented the development of the city in the orient was formed by ideas and institutions connected with magic”. “The beginnings of an analogous development are found in the East […]. Hence only in the west did the development come to complete maturity” (Weber 2003a, pp. 366–367).

Finally, the communal medieval city is revolutionary compared to the ancient polis and to the other previous forms of urban cohabitation. The main difference, compared to the ancient city, is represented by the “contrast between the political-military orientation of the first one and the economic orientation of the second one” (Rossi 1978, p. 9). In the polis the citizen is mainly “homo politicus” and the victory of the population is “based on purely military factors”, whereas, in the medieval commune the citizen is above all “homo oeconomicus” and the power is founded on “economic interests” and reasons (Weber 1978, pp. 1353–1354).

But the comparison with the ancient city opens up another chapter, one of the relationship—and of the differences—between the city and democracy. Both the medieval commune and the ancient cities introduced forms of democratic power, however, “their ways part with the establishment of democracy” (Weber 2003a, p. 370). Democracy is paradoxically, both a point of junction and the main point of disjunction between the polis and the commune, because, according to Weber, the form launched by the latter represents another democracy completely.

At the outset, to be sure, there are similarities to be noted in this connection also: Δημoς, plebs, popolo and Bürgerschaft are indifferent words which refer in the same way to the breaking in of democracy; they designate the mass of citizens who do not pursue the knightly life (Weber 2003a: 370).

Also, the illegitimacy of the power as a challenge to the existent powers has many more ancient roots than the Medieval Age:

the Spartan ephors as representatives of the democracy against the kings, and the Roman tribunes of the people, while in the Italian cities of the middle ages the capitano del popolo, or mercadanza, are such officials. It is characteristic of them that they are the first concededly “illegitimate” officials. […] The source of the power of the tribune is illegitimate; he is sacrocanctus precisely because he is not a legitimate official (Weber 2003a: 371).

But, the difference of the democracy launched by the medieval commune is explosive:

In his personal relations, however, the citizen of the medieval city is free. The principle ‘town air makes free’ asserted that after a year and a day the lord no longer had a right to recall his runaway serf. […] Hence the equalization of classes and removal of unfreedom became a dominant tendency in the development of the medieval city (Weber 2003a: 376).

It is a completely different democracy compared to that of the polis, where the distinction between free men and slaves remains, if not grows.

So, the rupture of the medieval city is not only historical—compared to the contemporary and previous context—but above all substantial. In the medieval commune the distinction between free and not free men (against slavery) disappears; an equality that keeps plurality as a value (against the idea of homogenising) is produced; free labour (against non-free labour and economic dependence); free will to belong to a city (against the idea of belonging because of family, caste and clan), are born. Finally, an acquisitive economy, based on money, is born to replace forms of economy based on basic human needs, and of services in exchange for goods and labour. In this sense, the innovation of the medieval communal city is essentially a democratic innovation. The revolution operated by the city is a democratic revolution.

A last annotation: the city as rupture breaks with the past, it stands against precise domination and previous situations. Nevertheless, it immediately creates a tangible alternative to what it denies, and shapes a different present. If, according to Weber, the medieval city with its own distinctive character and all its changes builds the economic and social foundations for the following development of capitalism, then the medieval city is, somehow, the precursor of the future. Thus, the revolutionary character of the city reminds us of its innovative and creative form, more than a form of annihilation of the past.

8 Collective Creativity

Once its main characteristics are analyzed, the city of usurpation, of the revolution and of the non-legitimate power, is therefore innovative and creative. Born from the sworn fraternity of free individuals who become citizens through an agreement

the city took an utterly different path. It stemmed from a collective movement that entailed a far-reaching social and political democratization. A collective creativity was then exerted, which, in this specific juncture, constituted the mechanism of social change – without recourse either to a charismatic personality or to the bureaucratic rationality of an increasing adequation of means to ends (Domingues 2000: 110).

Thus, “the non-legitimate city in its historical formation” substantially reveals as a form of non-legitimate domination “in a sense that is clearly creative” (Scaglia 2007, p. 20). Paradoxically, the non-legitimate domination, that Weber’s curators are really concerned with, due to the possible conceptual incoherence, is the heart of the city and what makes it a social creative formation and creator of innovation. The birth of rights and the popolo as an antagonist formation within the aristocratic city, are two moments that give us the opportunity to understand the meaning of the urban creativity described by Weber.

The birth of the city coincides with the birth of independent law, which is an alternative to the arbitrary management of the law or to a law that is subjugated to unknown powers. On the one hand, the city, as such, determines the characters of the law itself, which means that the rationality is disentangled from the value and a new class of independent lawyers are born (Andrini 1990, p. 82). This autonomy of the law can only be originated from the request of a specialization that comes from needs connected to the new urban economic activities, and from “the birth of an independent power of the members, not subjugated to the lord or religious head;” in just one word, from the city. In order to understand the origins of the law we have to “bring the attention to the analysis of the forms of domination, specifically to that of non-legitimate domination, the western city, that only historically produces that autonomy”. On the other hand, the city is exactly qualified by the character of the law that it has contributed to create (Andrini 1990, pp. 86–87). This means that the legitimate law is originates from an illegitimate usurpation of power. Thus, the city as a non-legitimate domination expresses a creative potential oriented to the creation of greater legitimacy and justice.

A second moment useful to understand the creative character of the city is represented by the Venice case. According to Weber, it simplifies the historical circumstance of the birth of the popolo within the aristocratic city. The city, ancient or medieval, is initially characterized by an oligarchic closure, which means that despite the democratic push the “full citizenship and the access to public roles is only restricted to a small group” (Rossi 1978, p. 9). But soon, the democratic tendencies start to win and we see the birth of “a widespread tendency towards some forms of democracy, the political monopoly of the high class is first contrasted then broken by an alternative association, which is the plebs or popolo that organise themselves in a distinctive community within the city”. The crucial point is recognizing how the process that sees the population opposing to the oligarchic limitations is

a process somehow similar to the one that is at the origin of the city: is a process of creation of a group that confront the power of the aristocratic class, claiming their own autonomy, in the same way as they claimed it against external forces (Rossi 1978: 10).

At the beginning, the Western city, especially the medieval one, does not represent a form of legitimate power. Even later, when it manages to confirm its autonomy and get to a formal recognition, a new kind of illegitimate domination emerges. It is the power of the plebs or popolo organised in cooperative forms (Rossi 1978: 15).

The commune, born as a liberation and space of freedom and equality for all the citizens-members betrays itself the moment it becomes oligarchic and so the oppressed population has to re-found the city. The process of liberation of the population inside the aristocratic city is therefore an historic simplification of the possible rebirth of the city inside the city itself. A re-birth, a revolution that is the witness of the excess of the city which testifies that the city is always and at the same time possible and impossible, always beyond itself. These are the words used by Weber to describe the population that opposes the aristocratic city:

the Italian popolo was not only an economic category, but also a political one. […] In the truest sense of the word it was a ‘state within the state’ – the first deliberately non-legitimate and revolutionary political association. (Weber 1978: 1302)

The same words used by Weber to describe the origins of the city, of the fraternity, and of the coniuratio are reserved for the population: illegitimacy and revolution are back confirming the structural character and the possibility—or need—of their constant recovery when the city betrays its own promise of democracy.

Thus, the illegitimacy of the domination, is for Weber, a characteristic that originates from the city, not as a transitory characteristic: “the element of illegitimacy, that marks the origin of the western city, will [….] remain and will develop in the following events. In other words, it represents a structural element” (Rossi 1978, p. 15).

More than this, it is exactly the illegitimacy that is the main source of innovation and creativity. Urban power is creative when it is illegitimate. If that is true, “the conjuration gives a structure in a pre-existent situation of anarchy” because “several different claims of power coming from the religious authorities, the lord and the royal power were crossing in the cities” (Bettin 1979, p. 48), it is also true that the illegitimacy of the city is never a new form of order. On the contrary, the city as a form of illegitimate domination is constantly confronting the established order and opens up to a further, and always possible, space of greater democracy.

9 Utopia and Pessimism

Paul Ricoeur, in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia in 1986, presented two chapters that delved deep into the analysis of Weber’s sociology of power and its distinction based on the different claim for legitimacy.Footnote 13 According to Ricoeur, Weber clearly showed that neither a “system of legitimacy”, nor a “totally rational system of authority” exist. This is because there is

a tension between the claim to legitimacy made by the authority and the belief in this legitimacy offered by the citizenry. The tension occurs because while the citizenry’s belief and the authority’s claim should correspond at the same level, the equivalence of belief with claim is never totally actual but rather always more or less a cultural fabrication (Ricoeur 1986: 13).

So, the gap shows the impossibility for any powers to be both totally rational and totally legitimate: if even the “legality”, that is for Weber the most rational form of power, “rests on belief” (Ricoeur 1986: 203), if the gap is not closed, the city as a form of non-legitimate domination does not scare anymore, not even conceptually, but reflects the precarious character—and the human one—of every form of power as such.

But, Ricoeur goes beyond that, to the point of saying that the gap between the power, its claim of legitimacy and the belief creates “the empty place of a theory of the ideology in Max Weber” (Ricoeur 1986, pp. 200–201) with the function of filling “the credibility gap” present “in all system of authority” and power (Ricoeur 1986, p. 183). The city as a non-legitimate domination leaves space for the ideology and Ricoeur would like to recover a very positive meaning of such an ideology. Indeed, in the ideology:

the distorting function covers only a small surface of the social imagination, in just the same way that hallucinations or illusions constitute only a part of our imaginative activity in general (Ricoeur 1986: 8).

The ideology that

tries to secure integration between legitimacy claim and belief […] it does so by justifying the existing system of authority as it is. Weber’s analysis of the legitimation of authority reveals a third mediating role for ideology (Ricoeur 1986: 14).

Ideology, in Weber, mediates in a creative way the gap between authority and legitimacy. If we say that the non-legitimate domination always leaves space for ideology, this means that the non-legitimate domination leaves space for social imagination, for the thought of a new city that is more of a city. Thus, the symbolic capacity and the social imagination linked to the non-legitimate power expresses—again and from another point of view—its creative character.

More radically, the connection between the city as a non-legitimate domination, ideology as imagination and creativity, opens up—maybe—a space for utopia. According to Weber, the city constantly rises again in the city itself exactly in the utopic-revolutionary form of a non-legitimate domination that challenges its own impossibilities, injustice, and limits that are still there. So, a “functional structure of utopia” that has a “constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life” finds its space (Ricoeur 1986, p. 16). The creativity of the power tells us that there is a role for utopia in the concept of the city itself, and thanks to this role we can also understand better the revolutionary character of urban aggregation: “there is no social integration without social subversion” (Ricoeur 1986, pp. 16–17).

The creativity of the city and its connection to utopia poses a question of the relationship between the city and the future. There is indeed a contradiction from Weber: if the creativity and the utopian imagination that lives within the city talks about the future, Weberian pessimism seems to talk to the past, to close the doors to the future stretched between “the inevitability of the iron cage” and “his refusal to perceive alternative developments in the present” (Domingues 2000, p. 120):

rationalization, the disenchantment of the world, economic individualism, along with a social atomization which would have as a corollary the superimposition of an all-mighty bureaucracy onto the social fabric, entailing a fragmentation of human community. Eventually nothing would be left of common meaning. And science, he noted with resignation, could do nothing about that, except to advance a criticism which, due to its own nature, did not enjoy political efficacy (Domingues 2000: 116).

Against every possible utopia, the door of the future seemed to be closed to resignation and open to pessimism. The problem of the future bursts open impetuously.

10 The Future of the City, Risks of Democracy

The question about the future immediately joins the question about the destiny of the city as described by Weber. Doubts and perplexities about the possibility of its survival are raised, not only by later literature, external to Weber’s thought, but dominate it inside his thought. In The City, the list of typical characters of the city “at the apogee of urban autonomy” are constantly accompanied by the idea that these characters are in crisis, or limited by the birth of the modern bureaucratic and patrimonial state:

the modern patrimonial bureaucratic state eventually deprived most of them [cities] of their political autonomy as well as of their military powers, except for police purposes (Weber 1978: 1324).

About the “autonomous law creat[ed] by the city, and within it […] the developing patrimonial bureaucratic state everywhere increasingly curtailed” it even more, and the same stands for the “autocephaly”, the “taxation power” and “the right to hold the markets” (Weber 1978, pp. 1325–1328). Also in the General Economic History, the passage between the chapter about urban bourgeoisie and the modern rational state is marked by clear pessimistic consideration on the destiny of the city.

Quite different was the fate of the city in the modern era. Here again its autonomy was progressively taken away. […] Everywhere the military, judicial, and industrial authority was taken away from the cities. In form the old rights were as a rule unchanged, but in fact the modern city was deprived of its freedom […]. They came under the power of competing national states in a condition of perpetual struggle for power in peace or war. This competitive struggle created the largest opportunities for modern western capitalism (Weber 2003a: 384)

The modern state characterized by legal rational power marks the end of the era of the city as autonomous and autocephalous, as a clot of constantly renewed illegitimate power. We might confirm the non-existent problem of the future, because the city does not seem to have a future. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the medieval communal city remains a “condition sine qua non” of the modern state, its inevitable “historical introduction” (Rossi 1978, p. 15).

The absence from Weber of clear lines about the future of the city has been interpreted by many authors as a lack in his thought process, or—much more radically—the pessimistic considerations of the relationship between the state and the city have been read as a judgment about the proposed model of a democratic city. But from an opposite point of view, the silence on the destiny and future of the city—if listened to—says something completely different and essential; it reminds us, against every creative rush, that the internal risks of the city are always there and that the city is structurally in excess of itself.

First of all, Weber does not theorize about the destiny of the city or talk about the future of this brave form of inter-human cohabitation because he is aware of the risks of democracy, of its constant omissions and impossibilities. “In Weber’s view, the medieval city initiated the first modern democratic revolutions […] whose outcomes are neither stable nor can be predetermined”. (Rundell 2009, pp. 87–88). Already, when he describes the medieval city, that represents an ideal and fertile moment for the development of the democratic city, Weber underlines its deficiencies. For example, the conquest of freedom that characterizes the democratic city is often an advantage only for a few, or conversely, it excludes the former oppressors:

Wherever the popolo was completely successful, the nobility was […] left with only negative privileges. While the offices of the commune were open to the popolani, the offices of the popolo were not open to the nobility. The popolani enjoyed special privileges of trial procedure if they had been insulted by a noble. […] In many cases the nobility was explicitly excluded temporarily or permanently from any participation in the administration of the commune (Weber 1978: 1304).

Or, on the contrary, the city starts a superficial democracy where the privileged power of the nobles does not disappear, but changes its form. Some of the inferior social layers of society

nowhere obtained permanent political power. The proletarian stratum of travelling journeymen, finally, was everywhere without any share in the city government, was everywhere without any share in the city government. The participation of the ‘lower’ crafts for the first time brought an at least relatively democratic element into the city councils, but their factual influence nevertheless remained small (Weber 1978: 1306).

Often “democratic participation was not extended beyond those who actually used it as a form of power” (Rundell 2009, p. 90). In addition, despite the political equality of the citizens, a “social weight” of the aristocratic class remains in the election of the council of the commune and they get to the “practice of replenishing the council through co-optation”. “Too many particularistic elements remain” (Schwarts 1985, p. 544). And, Weber adds:

It will be remembered how easily a similar development can occur even under modern conditions” (Weber 1978: 1281).

The city does not a have future because the future of the city is always mixed with its impossibilities, its denials. The city does not have another future than the one of constantly re-conquering itself and its own democratic character.

The problem of the union of the city within the context of the modern state stays open. In the same way, the problem of the future of the capitalistic society in the age of secularization stays open in Weber’s The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

But, it is possible that the city lives as a foreign body, a “Fremdkörper” (Abramowski 1966, p. 89), also in and for the modern state. It is also possible that non-legitimate domination could stay as a form of protest, or as a form of social prophecy that, according to Weber, finds its exact birth place in the city.

Secondly, the silence on the future tells us of the excess of the city. If the democratic city is never given fully to itself, new revolutions and new forms of illegitimate power (new cities) are always possible and desirable. The city is always inconclusive, always open, always a future: Weber’s silence on its destiny alerts us against every creative rush, against every temptation of us wanting—and being able—to predict—the future. The city will be what it will be; it will be what we will be.