The Independent Mind of Edward Banfield

This essay originally appeared in Edward C. Banfield: An Appreciation, edited by Charles R. Kesler and published by the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

Had Edward Banfield thought that his writings would bring him fame, he would no doubt have molded his bold arguments to fit the temper of the times, and so never would have suggested that political machines are useful, that most urban problems are spurious and the few that exist cannot be solved by any popular remedy, and that art museums should display perfect copies of their paintings and sell the originals to people foolish enough to think they can tell the difference. Those who knew Banfield would have understood why his great intellect and coherent argument stood so powerfully against much of elite opinion. They would have understood why this man of common origins and an uncommon mind tested the conventional opinions of intellectual elite against the practical needs of ordinary people.

Those of us who were privileged to know Edward Banfield can only with some difficulty convey to others his true greatness. If you neither knew nor read him, he is unknown to you, for he had no interest in fame or publicity. On one occasion, the publishers of Who’s Who announced that he would be included in their next edition. He wrote back to say that he did not want to be included; if they printed a sketch of him despite his objections, he would sue them. Had he thought that his writings would bring him fame, he would no doubt have molded his bold arguments to fit the temper of the times, and so never would have suggested that political machines are useful, that most urban problems are spurious and the few that exist cannot be solved by any popular remedy, and that art museums should display perfect copies of their paintings and sell the originals to people foolish enough to think they can tell the difference. If you read his books but did not know the author, you might well be intrigued, but since you would be surrounded by people who believe that the opposites of these claims are true, you would be left alone to defend heresy against orthodoxy, no easy task. But if you knew Banfield you would have understood first-hand why his great intellect and coherent arguments stood so powerfully against much of elite opinion. You would have understood, in short, why this man of common origins and an uncommon mind tested the conventional opinions of intellectual elites against the practical needs of ordinary people.

Prophet without Honor

In time, much of what Banfield wrote was accepted by bright people as, slowly and unevenly, they were mugged by reality. In 1955, he and Martin Meyerson published a book about Chicago public housing projects, explaining why these tall, grim buildings, located in areas that guaranteed racial segregation, were a serious mistake. At the time this was a powerful dissent from the view that housing projects must be built and that alternatives-such as supplying vouchers to those who needed financial help in renting housing-were unthinkable. Today, vouchers are intellectually respectable, and some housing projects are being dynamited to remove these eyesores from their cities.

In 1958, Banfield, with the assistance of his wife, Laura, published The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, in which they explained why a region in southern Italy was poor. The reason, they said, was not government neglect or poor education, but culture. People in this area were reluctant to cooperate outside of their families. This kind of -amoral familism,” as they called it, was the result of a high death rate, a defective system of owning land, and the absence of extended families. By contrast, in an equally forbidding part of southern Utah, the residents were engaged in a variety of associations, each busily involved in improving the life of the community. In southern Italy, people did not cooperate; in southern Utah, they scarcely did anything else.

Foreign-aid programs, Banfield later wrote, ignored these profound cultural realities and instead went about persuading other nations to accept large grants to build new development projects. Few of these projects led to sustained economic growth; indeed, the grant money was often stolen by local political elites. As P. T. Bauer later put it, foreign aid was a policy whereby poor people in rich countries had their money sent to rich people in poor countries. Where rapid economic growth did occur, as in Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, foreign aid, to the extent it existed at all, made little difference. Today, scholars recognize the great importance of culture in explaining why some areas of the world are poor and others prosperous. Few of them, however, refer to Banfield’s writings. One recent exception is Culture Matters, edited by Samuel P. Huntington and Lawrence Harrison, which was dedicated to Banfield.

In 1970, Banfield published his most famous book, The Unheavenly City, in which he argued that the “urban crisis” was misunderstood. Many aspects of the so-called crisis, such as urban residents’ flight to the suburbs, were not really problems at all, he argued, but instead great improvements in human lives. True problems such as crime, poverty, and racial injustice continued to exist because we do not know how to end them.

Take the problem of poor African Americans. Racism, though much diminished in recent years, still exists and has significant effect. But the central difficulty for many black Americans is not racism but poverty, and a large part (though far from all) of that poverty, Banfield argued, arises from a lowerclass culture. By this he meant a culture that reflects a short time-horizon, in which life consists in living from moment to moment. To the extent people in such a culture think about the future, they feel it is largely shaped by fate, not by their own activities. They are interested in present action, and among males, in risk-taking, fighting, and respect. The last quality is especially important to people who have trouble making friends and who resent any sign of authority. A lower-class culture is often the product of female-headed households where women have a series of lovers, none of whom take much responsibility for raising the children that result from casual encounters. This is a problem for all lower-class people, white or black, but for blacks it acquires a special edge because “much of what appears . . . as race prejudice is really class prejudice.”

Banfield predicted that his book would probably strike many readers as the work of an ill-tempered and mean-spirited fellow,” and he was absolutely right. Academic denunciations were hurled down on him; he was called, among other things, a reactionary and a racist. Within 20 years, however, books were appearing that, without mentioning Banfield, discussed how social class had shaped inner-city life for African Americans. In 1987, William Julius Wilson wrote in his widely acclaimed book The Truly Disadvantaged that though racism exists, social class could explain the plight of many blacks. To Wilson, an “underclass” existed because of the absence of inner-city jobs. Banfield would have agreed, up to a point, but he would have argued that there are also independent cultural factors at work.

In 1990, sociologist Elijah Anderson published a book that completed Banfield’s analysis. In Street Wise, he wrote about African-American adolescent boys living in a poor neighborhood. These youth lacked concern for the future, regarded sex as an opportunity for conquest rather than an aspect of marriage, and valued above all the respect of their peer group. The result was a growing number of unwed parents who raise children in what Anderson calls “unprotected nests.” The book was widely praised, often by the same people who had denounced Banfield’s book 20 years earlier.

Edward Banfield’s life is an example of that old saying about a prophet without honor in his own country-or at least in his own times. He was a boy raised on a Connecticut farm who later found himself plunked down in a scholarly Camelot: Harvard University. There he met the intellectual Knights of the Roundtable and their allies in other high places. But Banfield, like the “practical Connecticut farmer” whom Mark Twain portrayed in his famous novel, used his native skill to defeat Merlin and other mental magicians.

Humble Beginnings

Edward Christie Banfield was born on November 19, 1916, in Bloomfield, Connecticut. He once remarked that his father was a farmer “by temperament and taste” while his mother “adored the city,” and so they compromised: His father worked in a Hartford factory, but they spent much of their time on a small farm in Bloomfield. Living in both places bequeathed to Banfield a somewhat distant perspective that allowed him to better understand both. He wrote perceptively about city and rural life and lived in both worlds: in the cities of Chicago, Cambridge, and Philadelphia, but with long visits to Utah and southern Italy and summers on the Vermont farm that he and his wife tended with great skill and affection.

Although his family was Unitarian, Banfield never professed any religious beliefs. He later described Unitarians as a church that “believes in one God, at most.” But like many nonbelievers, he thought it important for society, created and sustained by custom and belief, to think of some things as sacred. Just how one might reconcile personal skepticism and social reverence was never clear to him. On one occasion, having spent weeks reading some important Biblical works, he said to me that religion might be a good idea if its leaders did not write such nonsense.

As a young man, Banfield went to Connecticut State College, where he intended to study animal husbandry. But after a short exposure to books about cows and pigs, he announced to his roommate that he was sick of livestock. The roommate sternly replied that if Banfield was going to speak critically about animals he would invite him to step outside for a fight. The fight was avoided, and Banfield became an English major. He was a gifted writer and soon became editor of the college newspaper. In college he met Laura Fasano, who was one year ahead of him, and in September, 1938, they were married.

Upon graduation they found themselves in the midst of the Great Depression. Jobs, especially for writers, were few and far between. The search for decent employment caused them to move repeatedly. At first, Laura worked in the animal disease laboratory at the U. S. Department of Agriculture, while Edward took a job selling advertising at the Rockville, Connecticut, newspaper. In 1939, he took a job at the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation and the couple moved to Concord, New Hampshire. The following year he took a better offer as a public-relations man for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), an important New Deal agency, but this meant moving again, this time to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Two years later, keeping the same job, they moved to Indianapolis, and a few months afterwards they went on to Washington, D.C. It was in this period, Banfield later remarked, that he began to learn about bureaucracy.

Banfield gradually became disenchanted with the FSA. He was later to say that its policies often hurt the very people–tenant farmers-that it was trying to help. He was thinking of quitting the agency, but he had no other job available to him. His next job, however, was to materialize out of a happy coincidence. It seems that the FSA was planning to destroy some old files, and one of Banfield’s acquaintances, Paul S. Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, expressed an interest in their contents. Banfield agreed to write for Taylor a memo about the files, and Taylor saw to it that this memo came to the attention of Rexford Guy Tugwell, an important member of Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust.” Tugwell was impressed with Banfield’s intelligence and knowledge and invited him to come to the University of Chicago where Tugwell was going to head a new program in planning.

Intellectual Influences

Banfield became a graduate student in political science at what was a remarkably fine and intellectually exciting school. That excitement had several sources. The University of Chicago began as a graduate school and took graduate instruction very seriously. Most faculty lived within easy walking distance of the campus, thereby allowing community contacts to reinforce university ones; it was intellectually diverse, with people from the Left and Right both present and working amicably together. And as Milton Friedman later remarked, it was a thousand miles from Washington, D.C., and thus free from many of the distractions of national politics.

Banfield was especially drawn to the classes taught by Herbert Blumer, a sociologist, who introduced him to the writings of William Graham Sumner and George Herbert Mead. He learned about the sociology of knowledge in classes taught by Louis Wirth. Another important influence was the social theorist Edward A. Shils, with whom he collaborated in writing some conceptual models on such topics as authority and influence. He began to acquire in these studies a larger view of how society worked and human personalities were formed.

Though he took no courses from Frank Knight, the latter’s writings–especially those on the role of risk, uncertainty, and entrepreneurship–were very important to Banfield, as were courses taught by the agricultural economist Theodore W. Schultz. Later on he would remark that many of his best ideas were derived from Knight’s work. Though the Chicago economics department was a center of free-market thinking, Banfield was not drawn into it. He did not get to know Milton Friedman well until after he had moved to Harvard and acquired a farm not far from Friedman’s summer home.

Banfield became interested in the theory of planning through his acquaintance with two young Chicago scholars, the economist Julius Margolis and city planner Martin Meyerson. Banfield focused on the theoretical basis of planning, the very enterprise in which the FSA was involved, by a close reading of many philosophical texts and an examination of the arguments about rationality offered by Herbert Simon and Chester Bernard. This work led to a profound change in his outlook, one that helped him understand that his unease with the FSA reflected not merely a job mismatch but an intellectual rebellion.

But Banfield’s revolt took a few years to run its course. Though he was an increasingly disillusioned New Dealer, he was not yet a defector. In 1952 he voted for Adlai Stevenson for president, and during the late 1940s and early 1950s he published papers, some written jointly with Tugwell, in which he defended the planner’s view that governmental affairs would be better managed if decisions were made rationally.

A Planner’s Faith

Banfield believed that when you wrote a seminar paper for a course it ought to be good enough to be published. Many of his were, and so we have a coherent view of his thought while he was a student and young university teacher in his early thirties. These writings were of two sorts: empirical and rather critical accounts of government programs he knew from the inside, and conceptual and rather idealistic papers about how he thought government ought to function. The critical accounts and the conceptual proposals were, for a few years, not really brought together. Banfield was changing, but like most important intellectual changes his did not happen in a blinding flash of newfound insight but rather in a slow working out of difficult puzzles. Moreover, these puzzles had to be worked out in tumultuous economic and political times. The nation had entered the Second World War from the depths of the depression, and many serious thinkers believed that when the heavy government expenditures of the war ended the nation would collapse back into an economic recession. Key people in the federal government were trying to prepare for this by seeking to strengthen federal agencies, such as the National Resources Planning Board, that might engage in economic planning. Outside the government, many economists were predicting the worst, and political radicals were looking forward to a chance to renew their demands for fundamental social change. But when the soldiers and sailors came home, prosperity erupted as accumulated earnings were spent on new homes and cars. The migration from farms to cities, already underway before and during the depression, now became even more pronounced.

In 1949 Banfield wrote about this change in an article for the Journal of Farm Economics, in which he evaluated Washington’s efforts to help tenant farmers. During its 10year effort, the FSA had managed to make loans to only about 2 percent of all the tenants; at this rate, it would take 400 years for the program to reach all of them. To make matters worse, Congress had imposed limits on the size of the farm a tenant could buy with his federal loan, and the limit was so small that few such farms could be economically efficient. Banfield noted that a main reason for this limit was to prevent black farmers from getting ahead. For him, the answer to this problem was obvious: Encourage farmers to leave the land and join the migration to the cities where many jobs were available. But he was still wedded to some of his old FSA views: The farm loan program, with its “emphasis on planning and supervision, would be wonderfully well fitted” for the task of assisting “boldly and creatively in the reorganization of Southern agriculture.” By reorganization, he appears to have meant breaking up “the large corporate land-holdings of the South and West.”

That same year and in the same journal Banfield pointed out the failure of the Department of Agriculture to do much about reducing farm surpluses. The department had spent a lot of money on research and marketing in order to find new uses for agricultural products and facilitate the sale of those that existed, but the surpluses continued to increase. What was supposed to be detached science turned out, on close inspection, to be politically influenced. But when he considered what might save this program from ineffectiveness, Banfield still concluded the answer lay in planning. The existing program was claimed to be planning, but in fact it was not, and this was unfortunate because planning may serve a useful purpose by changing the terms of the power struggle.To confirm this, Banfield pointed to city planning, especially the development of master plans, in which a desirable pattern of growth” is projected “far into the future” so that existing projects can be judged by how well they conformed to the plan. Many years later, he told me that the Department of Agriculture responded to this article by saying that it did plan, but on a day-to-day basis.

Banfield applied his argument for planning to the entire federal government, but still in the context of an empirical account of why it was not likely to work. In 1949, he published another important essay, arguing that the congressional budget process had much to learn from systematic planning. Budgeting, he wrote, should be a process whereby scarce funds are allocated among competing purposes “in a manner calculated to achieve the optimum result.” But in reality the budget was not that at all; instead, it was merely a collection “of bits and pieces gathered up from the various bureaus” that Congress used as a way of managing the bureaucracy. People had made various suggestions as to how this process might be improved, but none of them appeared to him to be very promising. Some wanted congressional committees to have larger staffs, but no staff of any feasible size could possibly learn all that would be required for comprehensive planning. Others called for a more unified, coordinated approach to fiscal policy, but Congress had already done that in ways that had had little practical significance other than to increase its ability to manage the executive branch. And still others suggested that Congress estimate the total revenue to be spent before deciding how to spend it, but Banfield saw no way whereby Congress could know in advance how much tax money would be available and no reason to think that Congress would care very much if it did. (A quarter of a century later, the idea of a single revenue estimate and an omnibus spending bill had been adopted by Congress, with exactly the results he predicted.)

Banfield went on to raise even deeper problems. There is no human way of weighing all of the uses to which funds might be put and no political (and possibly human) means to fully reconcile conflicts among the goals on which these funds might be spent. And even if these problems could be overcome, how would the government deal with unanticipated events, such as a war? “No full or partial answers can be given to any of these questions”; nevertheless, he added, “it is possible to offer some tentative and partial answers.” The lessons, again, were to be found in the city-planning movement and in industrial scientific management. “It is true that we cannot plan when there is conflict over goals,” but “we may hope that the time is not far off when the old notions of individualism will have given way to a more workable conception of man and society.” He did not say what this workable conception might be except to suggest that in cities, where all of the big problems had been settled, “government has become an undramatic technical matter which can safely be left to the experts.” The federal government had not yet entered this happy state, but in the meantime we could make use of a “scheme of values” to help us measure the relative value of schools and hospitals and to develop a system of social accounting that would help us assess alternative means. We could not plan scientifically, but at least we could do so with more, rather than less, rationality. This planning would be done by each government bureau under the leadership of a Central Planning Agency. Every year the latter would provide Congress with a six-year financial program to implement the plan and then assess how well government actions had achieved its goals.

But within two years much of Banfield’s rationalistic optimism would be in retreat, and by 1956, when as a graduate student at Chicago I first met Banfield, hardly a trace of it would be left. I am not certain how or under whose influence his views changed so greatly, but I suspect that he arrived at this conclusion independently. The more he thought about the facts, the less likely rational planning appeared to be.

The Problem of Cooperation

In 1951 Banfield published his doctoral dissertation as a book, Government Project. The volume had grown out of that first memo he had written for the Berkeley economics professor who had been interested in the FSA. It explained how the Resettlement Administration had failed to achieve its goal, namely, to relocate desperately poor farmers onto cooperative farms. By a close study of one such farm in Casa Grande, Arizona, Banfield was able to show that despite the dedicated and efficient efforts of honest federal bureaucrats, and notwithstanding the creation of a farm that raised their incomes, the farm failed for one profound reason: The farmers would not cooperate. Though there were never more than 57 families there, these settlers were unable to cooperate “because they were engaged in a ceaseless struggle for power.” That struggle may have been caused by their sense of having failed in life, by their aggressive personalities, or by hostility toward other settlers, but whatever the cause there was no way for the farm to satisfy all of the demands for power and status. At only one time did things run more or less smoothly, and that was when, for a year or so, one government-appointed project manager made it clear that he was the boss and thus there would be no opportunities for farmers to share power. Banfield linked this state of affairs to Chester Barnard’s theory of organizational incentives which recognized the importance of noneconomic motives. To lead, Barnard said, one must often rely on “intuitions that are correct, notwithstanding doctrines that deny their correctness.”

Tugwell, who once ran the Resettlement Administration, wrote a foreword for the book in which he admitted that Casa Grande was a failure–one of many,” he added. In retrospect, “we were doomed to failure from the start.”

This book, and Banfield’s reflections on the cooperative farm, was, in my opinion, the central fact in his intellectual development. In the years ahead, the focus of his inquiry became an enlarged version of the Casa Grande question: How can people be induced to cooperate? And since some degree of cooperation is essential for any society, the larger question is: How can a decent society he sustained?

In the same year that the book appeared, Banfield and Tugwell published a jointly authored article in the Journal of Politics that was, I suspect, Banfield’s last effort to keep some life in his now eroding view that human affairs could be greatly improved by rational planning. It was a remarkable essay in that it both laid out in compelling prose the many reasons why people find it hard to cooperate under expert planning, and argued that some way must be found to make them do just that. Its central argument was that we must create “governmental institutions for discovering and objectifying the future,” a need that required Americans to ignore Federalist 10 and protect some important matters from meddling” by legislatures and politicians. To do this, Congress must make only broad “value judgments,” leaving the contents of policy to be decided by executive-branch planners. In this way, the authors suggested, we can avoid another Great Depression. The beginnings of this approach could be found in city planning, forestry conservation, and industrial scientific management, but for these auspicious starts to affect the national government much more would be needed.

Their article set forth many questions, all stated so that they could be answered in ways that favored planning, but which taken all together implied to the careful reader that the “right” answers would not be forthcoming. The questions were these: Will the government accept permanent responsibility for the future? Can the right to private property be altered to permit more planning? Can we agree on national goals? Will Congress confine itself to making “fundamental value judgments”? Will planners acquire a rationale or theory that will give them the criteria for making choices? Can special interests be prevented from blocking the government’s efforts to build a “fiscal policy in the general interest”? Will the new Council of Economic Advisers be able to give “correct advice” so as to maintain economic stability? Will the government acquire more power to control the decisions made by businesses? Will newspapers and radio broadcasts stop relying on controversy so that an “adequate public will” can emerge?

At the time Tugwell and Banfield wrote this article, Friedrich Hayek had already argued that planners would never have the information necessary to achieve their purposes, and in trying to get that information (and power) planners would destroy human liberty. The authors recognized and rejected this argument because “there is no evidence” that planners lack the necessary information, and because people do not “regard liberty … as the ultimate goal.”

Beyond Planning

Between 1951 and 1955 Banfield finally let go of the planner’s illusion. His 1955 book with Martin Meyerson on housing plans in Chicago was not called “Planning Housing,” but was given the far bolder title, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest. Meyerson was a consultant to the Chicago Housing Authority who kept detailed notes on its deliberations; Banfield developed the theoretical basis for the book and wrote much of its contents.

The conceptual scheme for the book expressed his final break from his planning background, for in it he laid out in tight, logical form the various ways in which organized human activity occurs. In this he was influenced by his intellectual relations with the social theorist Edward A. Shils. His conceptual scheme deserves careful study, not only because Banfield explains what he has learned but also because he sets forth a profound insight into how people manage on occasion to work together. By politics he meant the activity by which some human disagreement is managed. There are four ways to do this, only one of which is cooperation; the other three are contention, accommodation, and dictation. Cooperation is the most difficult of the four, because it requires that people agree on the ends to be served (which rarely occurs) or on some procedural principle by which disagreements can be decided. To the extent cooperation occurs, it often is because someone–a politician, for example–has arranged for incentives to be offered to the contending parties, a role that makes politicians far more important than the kind of meddlesome miscreants described in the Tugwell-Banfield paper.

A plan is a feasible and rational course of action that someone believes will achieve a set of ends. But for a plan to be rational-that is, for it to achieve a set of ends better than any alternative plan-it must be based on some unusual (and politically unlikely) circumstances. The author of the plan will have to consider all the alternative courses of action, evaluate the consequences of each alternative, and select that course that will produce the greatest gain in terms of the ends desired. With this explanation, Banfield was following the lead of Herbert A. Simon, a scholar with whom he had some disagreements but from whose definition of rationality he learned a great deal. Planning implies extraordinary knowledge (precisely the kind of knowledge that Hayek argued people do not have): The planner must be able to state all of his ends, reduce them to concrete alternatives, and evaluate each alternative. This is sometimes possible in private firms that have limited objectives, but it is rarely so in public ones that have many ends, countless courses of action, and a great likelihood of unintended consequences.

The public interest cannot be understood simply as a statement of what is good for society, because people will not easily agree on what constitutes either the “public” or its “interest.” Indeed, there are two ways to define the public interest, the first as a unitary view of what is good for everybody and the second as the summation of individual preferences. The former conception implies government action, the latter market action. But Banfield had no simplistic faith in markets, for as he noted, some people’s ends are more important than those of others. (We do not, for example, weigh the goals of a Ku Klux Klan member the same as we weigh those of an African American seeking to buy a home in a white neighborhood.) Markets are splendid ways of allocating resources among ends we regard as morally equivalent but not as adequate when important moral differences exist.

The Discovery of “Culture”

Not long after his thesis was published in 1951, Banfield, together with his wife and children, went to the small Mormon town of Gunlock, Utah, to study what he then called the “sociology of efficiency.” Impressed by what he learned of the cooperative farm in Casa Grande and still of the view that planners could teach people how to farm more efficiently, Banfield wanted to find out whether low-income farmers living voluntarily in a desolate area would work together any better than others had on the government-sponsored cooperative farm. He concluded in his 1953 unpublished manuscript that the 22 Mormon families of Gunlock did not engage as much as they might in cooperative action and community planning. When he reached this conclusion, he had not yet seen what uncooperative behavior really looked like, and so he was critical of farmers whom he later realized were cooperating to a remarkable degree. But his views would be transformed in Chiramonte.

The transformation began when Banfield and his family went to a small town in the poorest part of southern Italy, one to which he gave the pseudonymous name of Montegrano but which was in fact Chiramonte. His intellectual interest remained unchanged: Under what circumstances will people cooperate? But now he posed the question more broadly. If cooperative activity was essential to economic growth, might the absence of that growth be attributed to the absence of cooperation? There was little such cooperation in Casa Grande, but these impoverished farmers had been wrenched loose from the grim hovels in which they had lived during an economic disaster. By contrast, people had lived in Montegrano since the beginning of time; still, it remained desperately poor.

To explain why, Banfield wrote, with the assistance of Laura, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. It is a masterpiece, one of the great classics of modern social science. In less than two hundred pages, Banfield destroyed the argument that some physical or economic problem kept these Italians poor. Their problems were instead political: People scarcely participated in political activities, turned strongly against whomever was elected to office, did nothing about the poor quality of schools, and would not campaign to get a hospital built there (the nearest one was five hours away). The conventional explanations for their failure to cooperate were that they were so poor and so lacking in schooling that they could not organize. As a result, the argument went, the inhabitants were divided by class antagonisms, afflicted by a deep distrust of the state, and ignorant of political life.

But Banfield showed that each of these explanations was either wrong or seriously incomplete. The Montegranese were indeed poor, but each had a lot of free time that could easily be donated to some community undertaking. They were uneducated (many were illiterate), but they understood at least as much as working-class Americans about politics and parties. The rich and the poor led separate lives, but the poor made no effort to organize against the largely powerless and civically idle rich, nor, when they voted, did they usually vote along class lines. And they did not pathologically distrust the state; when interviewed, they tended to give balanced assessments of people in government.

The central difference between the people of Montegrano and those in Gunlock, Utah, where natural resources are as scarce as in southern Italy, is that in the American town, people cooperated industriously: They contributed to the church and to other, often distant, causes; they formed voluntary associations, campaigned for local improvements, and worked to support the schools. In contrast, the Montegranese maximized the material, short-term interests of the nuclear family and assumed that everyone else would do the same. This attitude, which Banfield called “amoral familism,” was consistent with the results of a psychological assessment–the Thematic Apperception Test–that he gave to many residents. People cared very much for their own families and not at all for other people. This amoral familism developed, Banfield speculated, out of an abiding fear of premature death, a land-tenure system that made the formation of extended families very difficult, and other complex factors.

When Banfield had finished this research, he realized the error of his conclusions. about Gunlock. His earlier study had been written under the assumption that these Mormon farmers did not cooperate enough, when in fact they cooperated to an extraordinary degree. Once the presuppositions of a rationalistic planner had been abandoned, human beings could be seen clearly and cultures distinguished from one another, not as compared with some idealistic standard but on the basis of how people really behaved.

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, later regarded by many scholars as a seminal work, was largely ignored when it appeared. It was first printed as photocopied typescript and was rarely reviewed. Scholars were not yet ready to accept “culture” as the answer to any practical question. Surely the answers must involve money, leadership, and planning. Banfield said that, important as these things may be, they did not explain the fundamental facts. A third of a century later, it was cited approvingly in Robert Putnam’s important book on how democracy works (or fails to work) in contemporary Italy.

The Importance of Politics

At this point Banfield might well have returned to Gunlock, Utah, to get a fresh view of its communal life, but his empirical research (though not his intellectual focus) was redirected by a generously funded invitation to write a book about Chicago politics. He examined several case studies of that city’s civic issues and made them the factual core of an impressive account of human conflict and political leadership. The book, Political Influence, was about one way of achieving human cooperation–the use of influence. To Banfield, influence–the ability to get others to act as you intend–was essential in American politics because people disagreed about means and ends and because governmental authority was highly fragmented. At the time he was writing, influence had become a hot topic in American political science, but much of what was written about it was based on opinion polls about who had “power” or exercised leadership.” These approaches led to unreliable generalizations about the great (and, as the authors supposed, adverse) influence of business leaders on government decisions. Banfield wanted to know how concrete issues were actually decided, and so he studied six major controversies in Chicago and drew his conclusions about influence from his detailed account of who did what for (or to) whom.

Civic disputes in Chicago, he concluded, did not result from struggles for votes, competing ideologies, or the work of a shadowy power elite; they arose instead from the maintenance and enhancement needs of large organizations. One organization (say, a hospital) wanted something, another organization (say, a rival hospital) opposed it. The resulting conflict had to be managed by an outside authority if it were to be settled at all, and in Chicago, politicians did most of. the managing. But that management was hardly dictatorial. Though Chicago politics was organized around a powerful political machine, the machine did not simply impose its will. Instead, the mayor let every interest get its say, postponed decisions until some common ground could be found, and then nudged the contestants in that direction.

To many people–and to Banfield when he believed in planning–the great defect of the Chicago system was that it did not provide “sufficient central direction.” If that central direction had been imposed, planners (and a younger Banfield) might have claimed that the result would have been a “comprehensive and consistent policy” that was more in accord with the public interest. But now Banfield argued the opposite. The politically managed results were in his judgment remarkably good. People might disagree about how some issues were resolved, but to him these outcomes were ones he would have chosen had he been making the decisions. In Chicago, of course, the outcomes were less the result of decisions than of protracted exercises in political influence. But despite the fact that the “wrong” reasons (that is, reasons that were illogical, irrelevant, or even improper) governed the outcomes, these outcomes were nevertheless correct. Even if one disagreed with this judgment, one still had to admit that often “obviously wrong” reasons will, at least sometimes, lead to results that are “not obviously wrong.” Politicians should not be confined to making broad value judgments, leaving to experts the role of making choices. Rather, because of the time they spend discovering and evaluating the probable consequences of an action, politicians tend to improve final outcomes even when they decide, as they sometimes do, that nothing needs to be done.

Banfield took his manuscript to Mayor Richard Daley to get his reaction, saying that he could not promise to change anything to which the mayor objected, but that he would take his views into account. In time, he was summoned to Daley’s office, where the mayor was in a rage. The author worried that he was in for big trouble. “You can’t print this,” the mayor fumed. “You quote me uttering some vulgar comments. Don’t you know my daughter is a nun? What is she going to think when she reads this?” Banfield promised to remove the vulgarities.

The New Study of Urban Affairs

In 1959 Banfield left Chicago and accepted an appointment as a professor of government at Harvard, where Martin Meyerson, who bad earlier taken a post there as a professor of planning, had urged his selection. There Banfield decided to extend his argument about politicians by writing a general book on city politics. He recruited me as his coauthor and we began writing the book while my family and I spent the summer of 1961 with the Banfields on their Vermont farm. From the first it was obvious that he no longer held his 1949 view that city government is an “undramatic technical matter which can safely be left to experts.” City government was about politics, and that was a good thing, too. On the very first page of City Politics, published in 1963, the reader is told that the day-to-day workings of city government are best understood “by looking at the differences of opinion and interest that exist within cities, at the issues that arise out of these differences, and at the ways institutions function to resolve (or fail to resolve) them.” That may all seem obvious today, but when we wrote, most of the published studies of urban affairs were administrative accounts of how cities were organized. In these scholarly books, one learned more about appointed than elected officials, routine than fundamental issues, and legal arrangements than informal political influence.

To us, what, was crucial to understanding politics was to grasp the importance of rival political views, including those between the rich and the poor, whites and blacks, and suburbanites and city dwellers, but also the deeper cultural conflict between those who wanted to do good for the city “as a whole” and those who wanted the city to benefit them as individuals. The former wanted efficiency, impartiality, honesty, nonpartisanship, planning, and strong executives; the latter wanted favors, personal support, and influential legislators who could help neighborhoods. This competition between these opposing cultural groups was, we argued, the most profound force shaping city life and could be used to understand why some cities had embraced a “reform” style of government and others had resisted it. We later developed this idea in studies of voting behavior and public opinion, distinguishing empiritally between what we came to call the “unitary” and the “individualist” ethos.

The book had a chapter on master planning, but in it we quickly admitted that very little of this went on in America. Real planners did something rather different: They gathered facts, drew up zoning ordinances, and oversaw the design of particular projects. This kind of “planning in the small” was often feasible, but “planning in the large”–designing a plan for the shape and growth of an entire city–was not. Indeed, small-scale planning often made large-scale planning impossible. Experienced planners had discovered that the decentralization of authority in the city meant that there was no way whereby experts could base a design on the general interest. And so the chapter was really not about master planning but about theorists who had argued that this kind of planning was desirable. The theorists were easily refuted, and so in this chapter, written by Banfield, his earlier fascination with planning was given its funeral.

By the early 1960s, Banfield had reached intellectual maturity. He now believed that planning, and any other strategy to organize and rationalize society on the basis of reason alone, was suspect. Politicians played a far more important and desirable role than experts, because they paid attention to cleavages of opinion and especially to those that reflected a fundamental disagreement about how government should be organized. The long and settled experience of a people that has been fortunate enough to live in a democratic society is the best test for what works.

Lower Than the Angels

The book that brought Banfield to public notice was The Unheavenly City, published in 1970. The title taken from a phrase used by Cotton Mather in 1710 when he urged Americans to join him in seeking out a “heavenly city” inhabited by an “innumerable company of angels, and by the spirits of just men.” Real cities, Banfield said, were inhabited by real people, not angels, and by people who were just only some of the time.

The idea for the book grew out of a series of commentaries that he and Martin Meyerson had written for a Boston bank; the bank published them as educational advertisements. These commentaries were later gathered into a book entitled Boston: The Job Ahead. Banfield was never quite satisfied with the product; it was limited by its focus on Boston and was too narrow in its approach to urban reality. But like the ads, his new book, he wrote, was not so much a work of social science as a view of urban life informed by what other social scientists had learned.

The central problem of cities–central in the sense that it was both important and resistant to any feasible solution–was that city life was shaped by differing cultures, and in the view of its citizens the standards by which urban life should be judged were always rising faster than the real progress cities have made in meeting human needs. Cities were seen to be in a crisis because observers judged them by constantly rising standards. If people were to judge cities by a fixed standard, then by many measures–personal income, housing quality, and cultural opportunities–they would be seen to have done well. But even with a fixed standard, cities have not done so well in crime and scarcely much better with respect to education.

Crime and education have one thing in common: Much depends on what a possible criminal or an incoming student brings to the enterprise. And to understand that, one must investigate the culture of each, a culture that is the product of social class. To Banfield, class was a state of consciousness based on a person’s attitude toward time. The longer a person’s time-horizon, the greater his willingness to defer present pleasures for future benefits, the more convinced he is that his own behavior will determine what the future will bring, and so the higher his (or her) class position.

Banfield argued that social class, thus defined, is not the same as income or race. There are impoverished medical students who are upper class (they are studying hard for higher incomes that are years in the future), and there are selfindulgent sons of rich fathers who are lower class (they are spending their inherited wealth on immediate pleasures with little thought to the future). Similarly, there are upper, middle, and lower-class blacks just as there are upper, middle, and lower-class whites. Immigrants to the United States may arrive with nothing in their pockets; they will be poor, but their future, and that of their children, will depend heavily on how much they bet on the future. However, the proportion of people who are both rich and truly upper-class will be high; if it were not, few would be rich except by inheriting a fortune or hitting the jackpot. And there will also be a high correlation between being poor and being lower class; if there were not, the ranks of the poor would decline sharply as economic growth created even small opportunities for advancement. America has greatly rewarded people who were interested in the future. At one time, the cities were composed mostly of poorly paid workers; now they are mostly composed of wellpaid members of the middle class.

This argument was the main reason why Banfield’s book was so successful–going through 22 printings, selling tens of thousands of copies, and republished in a revised form in 1974–and why it was so hated. One scholar called it “patent racism” and another compared it to social Darwinism by attaching to it the label, “survival of the fattest.” There were also many positive reviews, and some magazines published colloquia on the book. The reaction of almost every reviewer revolved around race and class. Banfield understood this reaction. To him, intellectuals were often paralyzed by their ideological commitments to good race relations or to narrowing the income gap, even though programs based on those commitments often did little to improve race relations or change economic prospects. Banfield’s argument was a powerful denial of the efficacy of some commonplace programs (such as the minimum wage and compulsory high school) and many pet projects (such as the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and a domestic Marshall Plan).

The hostile critics ignored much of what Banfield wrote. His argument was cultural, not biological; it found a lower-class culture among every ethnic group and not just among African Americans; it never denied that progress was possible (indeed, it predicted that a significant part of the lower class would disappear as a result of economic growth, the declining birth rate, and the relentless spread of middle-class values). What the thesis did deny was that professional problem-solvers and their upper-middleclass allies were likely to make much of a difference.

Art for the People

Following the political controversy over The Unheavenly City, Banfield decided it was time to strike out in a new direction, and so he entered into an agreement with the Twentieth Century Fund to write a book about public support of the arts. The Fund had been impressed by a 1972 essay Banfield had written on public libraries, in which he argued that they seemed to have lost a sense of purpose. These libraries were doing some things that they could not or should not do and neglecting other things that they ought to do. For example, they devoted much energy to helping light readers, even though this served no public purpose, and very little effort to serious readers despite the gains that (he assumed) would come from such an effort. The Fund probably supposed that the author would bring the same sense of higher purpose to art museums. If so, it was quite mistaken.

After much thought and reading, Banfield concluded in The Democratic Muse, published in 1984, that public support of art is undesirable. There is such a thing as the public interest, he believed; it has to do with what benefits citizens generally by meeting their need for what is right and just and for settling principles as to how social decisions ought to be made. (This unitary view of the public interest departed a bit, but I think only by way of emphasis, from his earlier individualistic view that stressed the satisfaction of human wants.) The public welfare, he wrote, was served by a tax-supported courthouse but not by a tax-supported statue in front of it. The courthouse administered justice; the statue conferred pleasure. It was not the task of government to confer pleasure unless one thinks (as some nineteenth-century writers did suppose) that art exists to elevate and refine public tastes. But by the’ 1970s scarcely any artist believed that; for them, art existed for its own sake or simply to shock the public.

Moreover, Banfield argued, public subsidies for art were economically irrational. They transferred wealth from poorer people to richer ones (since most museum patrons are relatively well-off), subsidized a self-interested art establishment, took the place of reasonable user charges that most people could easily pay, and allowed the government to define (by its grants) what constitutes art. (All of this was written before the National Endowment for the Arts had begun to give grants to many absurd or hard-to-defend artists.”) Banfield suggested that the public’s interest in art would be better met by selling high-quality reproductions of paintings and statues so that everybody could enjoy art without having to travel to a big city to see the originals. His proposal was, of course, denounced by art critics, both conservative and liberal, and by virtually every art organization. It was curious, he responded, that his idea was said to have no merit, when the same critics endorsed televising opera performances (that is, making copies of the original) and selling recordings of music (some of which were poor reproductions of the composer’s intent).

Neither a Straussian nor a Libertarian

“I am a vintage Burkean,” Banfield would later say. He was convinced that “society exists on the basis of habits and beliefs” that are at risk from the challenge of the “cold light of reason.” One can sit down and try to think up better ways to do things, but “the more you think about [such ideas], the more problematic they become.” We have deluded ourselves into thinking that people are reasonable, he added, but in fact human beings are governed more by passion than by reason.

This was a common view in the eighteenth century and of the men of that era whom he greatly admired–John Adams, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson. “All of society’s problems are at bottom moral problems,” Banfield once noted. They can often be managed, but only by discussion and even then the discussion is not on an entirely rational level. “When things work, it is always a bit of a mystery,” he wrote. What was most remarkable is that there is order in society, especially in a world in which schooling the young had become so important. He valued education and devoted his life to it, but he always said that “thinking is an inherently dangerous business” because it tended to produce a society of moral relativists. In a 1983 essay he wrote that when one “encounters a grandmother who has been sucking eggs for many decades with conspicuous success, one ought to hesitate before presuming to instruct her in the theory of egg-sucking.”

Banfield’s political thought can be usefully compared to two of his former colleagues and friends at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman. Banfield thought Strauss was a genius but never became a “Straussian.” When Banfield left Chicago for Harvard, Strauss spoke at the faculty dinner at which Banfield was guest of honor. Strauss had tried in vain to interest him in natural law, arguing that since Banfield was a man of principle, and since natural law was merely the sum of principles on which honest men usually act, he must respect natural law. But Banfield would have none of it. “His innate impishness,” Strauss said, -does not permit him to conceive of his actions as dictated by any law, natural or non-natural.” He prefers, Strauss continued, “to trace the best in him to whim and mood.” When Banfield bought the Vermont farm, it was whim and mood at work, but whim and mood that led to years of happy satisfaction.

After Strauss died in 1973, Banfield returned his compliments in a commemorative essay. He recalled having been in the first class Strauss taught at Chicago and witnessed the great scholar’s difficulty in deciding whether to smoke in a room that had a “No Smoking” sign prominently displayed. Banfield responded by taking the sign down, an act that began their friendship. To Strauss, Banfield was a prudent man, high praise indeed from a profound student of Aristotle. The two men discovered that they both were critics of modernity, Strauss because modern men had wrongly concluded that they could dispense with the idea of virtue, Banfield because they had often become so preoccupied with a self-expression that was little different from crude hedonism. But neither Strauss nor Banfield ever suggested a philosophical or practical position by which any of the evils of modernity could be overcome. Neither thought a solution possible; after all, many of the greatest minds disagreed about the right course of action. But in the meantime both felt it important to be loyal to the best regime available, and to both that regime was the United States.

Nor was Banfield a libertarian. Though a great friend of Milton Friedman, without doubt the most important libertarian of our time, and though a great admirer of free markets for those things that could be profitably exchanged in markets, he recognized the limits of markets. In a review of Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom in the conservative journal National Review, Banfield praised the book but held back from recommending it strongly to those readers who, he suspected, were too likely to accept all of Friedman’s conclusions. Banfield did not believe that personal freedom was the highest human goal and hence did not believe that any market transaction, voluntarily entered into by free men, would necessarily produce the best outcome. The reason is simple: If freedom is the highest good, then there is no way of judging market transactions other than to say they were freely made. But merely because they were freely made does not make them good. If one man wants to buy a slave and another man agrees to be his slave in exchange for money, slavery would be good. But we know that slavery is bad, for it deprives one person of his humanity and separates him from the fruits of his own labor. People ought to value freedom but value other things as well, especially a “consensual order which permits reasonable discussion, the exercise of reason itself, and whatever substantive values the exercise of reason recommends.”

Not by Reflection but Accident

My favorite passage from Banfield’s writings is this one, penned in 1961 at a conference organized by Robert Goldwin. Banfield disliked conferences generally and only joined the American Political Science Association after being informed that he was about to be made their vice president. However, Goldwin’s meetings, devoted to hard thinking by serious people about central political issues, appealed to him. In this essay, Banfield defended the American political party system against the many people who sought to end it.

A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident-the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society, for all of the institutions of the society, and thus its entire character and that of the human types formed within it, depend ultimately upon the government and the political order.

Edward Banfield died peacefully on September 30, 1999. His doctors told his wife Laura that his death was not the result of any particular disease. His body had just stopped living.

James Q. Wilson is the chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers.