Learning Through the Wall: Magnusson and Me
By Eugene McCann
Eugene McCann (Simon Fraser University)
In their invitation to contribute to this collection on the legacy of Warren Magnusson’s thinking, Zack Taylor and Roger Keil stated their main aim as “reintroduc[ing] his work to a new generation of scholars.” This prompt leads me to think through how I first encountered then tried to crystalize his encouragement to “see like a city” when studying politics (Magnusson 2013) and how it influences my research on and teaching of urban politics from a geographical perspective. It is a cliché to say that one can best understand a topic by teaching it. It is a cliché because it’s generally true. Certainly, I need to get an idea “down” before I try to teach it. Then I tend to develop my understanding as I teach. This has been the case with “seeing like a city,” as I will explain below.
In the following paragraphs I will discuss how I grapple with the notion of “seeing like a city” as an urban political geographer and how I frame it for my students. I will outline my perspective on how “seeing like a city” is situated within a wider set of approaches to studying urban politics. Finally, I will discuss why it’s worth engaging with Magnusson’s approach as one valuable contribution, among many others, to the ongoing analysis of politics and space, both as a frame for one’s research and for teaching.
To be honest, I’ve always had a problem with Magnusson’s encouragement to “see like a city.” On the one hand, I understand his rhetorical attraction to this particular phrasing as a riposte to Scott’s (1998) notion of "seeing like a state.” Scott developed an analysis of how modern states seek control over society and territory by rendering them simple and legible through various means. In his reflection on Magnusson’s (2013) book, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City, Taylor (2013, 800) summarizes Scott’s argument as follows: “[i]n its totalizing impulse, the state simplifies complex social order through the standardization of identities and practices and, in doing so, impoverishes everyday life.” Yet, a central preoccupation of Magnusson’s work, even before the publication of Politics of Urbanism, was more the impoverished and impoverishing analytical simplifications of state-centric political theory and political science, rather than in the machinations of the state per se (although the two can never be so clearly separated). He was interested in de-centering the state in political analyses, calling “for a shift away from the state as the central object of analysis and contention, and toward the political spaces people were increasingly making for themselves through social movement activity” (Ibid.).
To put it another way, while Scott was interested in what it meant for society and territory when the state engaged in simplification, Magnusson was interested in how politics could (should) be analyzed as more than that which is encompassed by, or addressed to, the sovereign state. “To see like a city,” Magnusson argues,
is to accept a certain disorderliness, unpredictability, and multiplicity as inevitable, and to pose the problem of politics in relation to that complexity, rather than in relation to the simplicity that sovereignty seeks. To put it bluntly: to see like a city is to grow up politically. (Magnusson 2013, 120)
Politics is everywhere, he argues, and it is especially evident in urbanism.
It took me some work to get my head around “seeing like a city” as a framing for de-centering the state when I first read it. After all—and I admit I may be lapsing into pedantry here—if urbanism is the model of the politics to be studied (rather than simplified out of existence), we are not trying to see like it. Instead, we should try to see through the city to see the multivalence of politics. In fact, Magnusson (2013, 123, his emphasis) uses this formulation in the book: “when one examines matters through the city it becomes clear that identities, like values and interests, are protean.” He goes on,
the city beckons us to see like political theorists who are in the midst of a world that exceeds our understanding, rather than like political philosophers who stand outside the world and judge it. (Ibid., 124)
Magnusson’s argument has the greatest resonance for me when I think of the task of analyzing politics in all its diversity since I see myself as thinking, researching, writing, and teaching about society, space, and power through the complexities of urbanism and urbanized/urbanizing places. The city is not the one who sees. It is the lens through which one sees.
With my pedantic paralysis (paralytic pedantry?) out of the way and now with a basic “handle" on Magnusson’s argument, I want to understand it in context. From my perspective as a critical urban political geographer who went through graduate programs in the 1990s, an argument that the state was not the only political game in town seemed pretty obvious when The Politics of Urbanism was published in 2013. Critical geographers, among others, had long understood politics as being a complex, ever-changing, minor as well as major, aspect of life and of cities. From studies of public space, to representation and identity, to the relationships between localities and globalization, critical geographers have long travelled far beyond the state, while still referencing its role at various scales, in our analyses (see Ward et al. 2018 for a comprehensive overview).
But I was not Magnusson’s primary audience. He was addressing political theorists and political scientists. While many social scientists had long agreed to understand the sovereign state as the primary authority and reference point through which to “see” politics, Magnusson inveighed against the recalcitrance of his disciplinary peers. From a critical geographer’s point of view, this internal disciplinary debate is like listening through the wall to a loud argument the neighbors are having: the details are muffled but you get the gist and, let’s face it, you know who’s right.
So, for me, Magnusson’s perspective, in general terms, was not particularly new. Nonetheless, the book is well-written, engaging, and shows, rather than tells, its readers how seeing politics lived, multiple, and complex is worthwhile, using a range of fascinating examples. Therefore, it is a welcome addition to the multi-disciplinary study of the political, since more voices in more rooms, echoing versions of the argument that the political is about much more than just the state, can only be useful. Moreover, Magnusson’s focus on the city, on urbanism, and on local politics that was always also part of a global context make it a valuable addition to an existing collection of approaches to place and politics that inform my research and teaching.
In my research, conducted on my own and with my graduate students, I approach politics in and through the city, which is part of the global (thus resonating with Magnusson who argues that “urbanism … is implicitly global. The frontier of the urban is not at the boundary between one state and the next; nor is it at the boundary between state and society” (Magnusson 2013, 122). This has entailed thinking about how urban politics shapes and is shaped by global networks of policy mobilities in ways that involve but frequently circumvent the state (McCann 2011 and see Prince, In Press, for an overview). Other work has involved the creative politics involved in anti-gentrification activism, including an analysis of the politics of social events held in urban public spaces (Mahieus and McCann 2023).
Magnusson has made his way into my urban political teaching through direct influence and also via interpreters, such as Enright and Rossi (2017)—political scientists with strong connections to the discipline of geography, whose edited book The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism includes engagements with the notion of “seeing like a city.” Their book was one of three core texts I assigned in the most recent iteration of an upper-level undergraduate reading and discussion-based course on Cities, Space, and Politics. I required the students to go out and experience “urban politics on the ground” through an assignment where they had to choose an event, protest, or activity that they considered political, in the most broad, small-p political sense. They then presented on a series of questions: What was the event? How was it political? How did the event use urban space and/or how was it about urban space? How did the event make you feel about politics, place, and power? The students’ experiences very much reflected Magnusson’s argument about the multiplicity and complexity of politics. They studied events ranging from political debates (a provincial election took place in fall 2024, as the course was being held, and the state is always part of politics), to art installations, and discussions of health and well-being. These and other engagements allowed them to perceive cities and urbanism as shaped by and productive of various forms of political relations and spatialities that were more or less formal, state-centric, and local, depending on the case.
Not all my undergraduate and graduate students will continue their careers in academia, but some will. Not all my research will look for politics through the city, but most will. In all these future pathways, Magnusson’s work will be a valuable addition to a nuanced, critical discussion of politics and (urban) space. It’s undoubtedly worth the attention of new generations of scholars.
References
Enright, Theresa, and Ugo Rossi, eds. 2017. The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism. Springer.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Mahieus, Lise and Eugene McCann. 2023. “‘Hot+ Noisy’ Public Space: Conviviality, ‘Unapologetic Asianness,’ and the Future of Vancouver’s Chinatown.” Urban Planning 8(4): 77–88.
McCann, Eugene. (2011). “Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1): 107–130.
Prince, Russell. In Press. Understanding Policy Mobility. Edward Elgar.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Taylor, Zack. 2013. “Magnusson’s challenge: Can political science learn to ‘see like a city’?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(2), 800–802.
Ward, Kevin, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Byron Miller, and David Wilson, eds. 2018. The Routledge handbook on spaces of urban politics. New York: Routledge.
Eugene McCann is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University.
Beyond Binaries
By Diane Davis
Diane Davis (Harvard University)
Although I regret never having had the pleasure of personally meeting Warren Magnusson, his paradigm-shifting conceptual provocations and widely-cited academic contributions have given voice to much of my own scholarly aspirations over the past several decades, even as they also have clearly impacted dialogue over the role of the urban in political theory and the ways that cities and states are understood across a variety of disciplines. His ideas have long been an inspiration, and in ways far beyond the routine assignment of his writings in several of my courses. Along with Warren’s rejection of the haughty and self-serving academic distinction between high and low politics, built on claims for disciplinary hegemony among political scientists (that still prevail in far too many circles), his admonition that politics unfolding at the scale of the city should not be seen as inferior or less impactful than the politics of nation-states – particularly when it comes to foreshadowing the types of social worlds to which we all aspire – may in fact be more critical than ever in this historical moment. When Warren proposed that a deeper understanding of urbanism as a way of life would provide the basis for more freedom and equality, because by focusing on the city we could see that politics might be built on “persuasion not coercion,” he was doing much more than making a statement about the dangers of national states or even criticizing the obsession with national politics and the unchecked power of sovereigns. He also was highlighting the important role that citizen engagement, face-to-face relationality, and the material grounding of what it means to live, work, and inhabit space can and should play in making better futures based on a meaningful social contract. With these and other contributions, Warren moved political theory away from general abstractions about national state power and about which scale of politics is most ontologically meaningful even as he heralded a call for mobilizing and making claims in and on the city if emancipation is to be the desired socio-political project at hand.
Warren Magnusson’s writings and arguments will and must continue to inspire us all. Seen from the present, I would also make a plea for the urgency of the agenda that he established. In a world that has become even more rapidly urbanized since Magnusson first made these claims, it would appear almost impossible to understand humanity’s political future without seeing or thinking through an urban lens. Having said this, one must also acknowledge that the contemporary era brings us much more than accelerated urbanization. It also has ushered in a resurgence of extremist nationalism and an all-out battle for national state control of territory, whether expressed in efforts to impose national mandates on cities and on the movement of bodies within a single nation-state, or whether expressed in efforts of a given country to destroy or occupy cities of rival nations. Think Kyiv, Gaza, and now Tehran. Bringing this message close to my current home, one need only look at the ways that nationalist backlash in a country like the United States not only comes with calls to annex Canada and Greenland. This particular form of nationalism both emerges from and reinforces a new political divide between “blue” cities and the ostensible aspirations of “red” backed nation-state, with support for the latter partially built upon growing distinctions between urban and rural ways of life. Combined with ongoing global warmaking, these and other recent developments are precisely why we need to keep Magnusson’s work alive.
But might we also take it in new directions to address the contemporary era? Indeed, seeing like a city remains a priority because it will continue to keep us connected to everyday lifeworlds in an era where inequality, precarity, and fear hover over cities and their residents. When federal authorities send in the national guard and marines to Los Angeles to quell urban protest against autocratic presidential overreach and violations of constitutional law, the connection between city and nation loom large. Even if we care deeply about cities and their sovereignty, we cannot put our heads in the sand about the continued – if not resurgent – power of nation-states in their efforts to stop cities from imposing their visions on the nation let alone to advance their own urban priorities through local politics. So how should or can we see like a city while also focusing our attention on the national state? One way is to rethink these binaries.
My own reading of Magnusson suggests that he doth protest too much about the dangers of analytically embracing the politics of (national) states as the stand-in for sovereignty, and that a more nuanced reading of the territorialities of sovereign power might produce a pathway for understanding that states and sovereigns operate at various scales simultaneously, for good and for bad, including at the urban scale. To be sure, Warren has taken this city-centric posture almost as a rhetorical device in order to refocus attention on the urban as the site of politics and emancipatory practice. I am all for that. Yet as a scholar of the global south, whose original writings on Mexico focused on the inter-relationality between Mexican national state sovereignty and the growth and political influence of its capital city, I believe it would be a mistake to analytically separate the political evolution of that city from its nation and vice-versa (Davis 1994). In Mexico at least, the city and the nation were deeply intertwined over the long sweep of history, in no small part because of the political projects of colonialism, independence, and Revolution linked urbanization to political struggles and national economic development trajectories. To the extent that the historical embeddedness of urban and national politics may be less common in the global north, it might explain why Magnusson, writing with an eye to global north scholarship to a great degree, wanted to put his provocation on our collective intellectual map. Even so, we should be careful to always situate these and any other larger theoretical claims in historical and geographical contexts. What makes sense for Canada might not for Cameroon. In my current work on corruption, impunity, and drug-trafficking in Mexico, for example, I have found that coercive tactics and the political power to “grant exceptions” vis-à-vis the law occurs at the city level as much as the national level. I have also argued that drug-traffickers themselves are frequently considered active sovereigns – by citizens and state authorities alike – despite having no formal claim to national state power (Davis 2010). To the extent that in almost all parts of the world there are both local states and national states with jurisdictional authority, and to the extent that in certain places and times sovereignty is as likely to be formal as informal and may also materialize in multiple locations and manifest itself in plural forms (Davis and Mueller 2025), we must think about Magnusson’s distinction between the city and the state with a huge dose of caution.
Although thinking about and “like a city” remains on the agenda, and I would like to suggest that Warren’s legacy can be best advanced by offering an assemblage line of questioning built on critical analysis of the relations between cities and sovereignty. Should treatment of the city and state sovereignty as inseparable hold in all time and all places, why or why not? Is there something about the contemporary era that might lead to a new way of framing the relations between cities, states, and sovereignty? I am confident that if Warren were still with us he would be the first to take this provocation and run with it. Despite the fact that he spent much of his time privileging the urban by arguing that scholars and activists alike need to see like a city, Warren regularly acknowledged that (national) states were not likely to disappear. That is, he was not working under the assumption that sovereignty – or state power – was or could ever be permanently rescaled from the nation to the city. Rather, his desire to see like a city was as much a normative and analytical project as a theoretical abstraction. And that is precisely why his provocation remains so important and powerful in these dark times.
As urban and political scholars we can honor Warren’s legacies by embracing the normative project behind the call to see like a city while also recognizing that states and coercive powers will continue to operate both nationally and locally. In light of this, I would like to suggest that we try to understand the nature of the conflicts that are produced when those who want to “see like a city” – that is, who seek to embrace the urban scale on its own terms – find themselves in tension with those who choose to “see the city like a state.” When is there a clash between these distinctive ways of knowing, seeing, and politically acting in the city; and how might recognition that both are possible change our practical and theoretical understandings of sovereignty? This is an empirical question as much as a plea for urbanists to accept different ways of seeing and knowing how political power operates in cities. I have already made tentative steps in this direction through preliminary writings on competing and overlapping sovereignties and the ways that politics and coercive practices unfold within and between the urban, national, and global scales simultaneously (Davis 2020). In carrying this research agenda forward I have Warren Magnusson to thank, and I know his writings will continue to be an inspiration and a guide for me and for any other urbanists who would care to join me on this scholarly journey.
References
Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Translated as Leviatán urbano: La ciudad de Mexico en el siglo XX. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999].
Davis, Diane. 2010. “Irregular Armed Forces, Shifting Patterns of Commitment, and Fragmented Sovereignty in the Developing World,” Theory and Society 39(3): 397–413.
Davis, Diane. 2020. “City, Nation, Network: Shifting Territorialities of Sovereignty and Urban Violence in the Global South.” Urban Planning 5(30): 1–12.
Davis, Diane. 2025. “Deconstructing sovereignty: (Non-)life, territorial power, and the everyday ecologies of hybrid governance (co-edited with Frank Mueller), Special Issue of Territory, Politics, Governance titled, (Il)liberal Governance Arrangements and the Material Foundations of Sovereignty.
Diane Davis is Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University
Forming, Deforming, Un-forming the Political
By Julie-Anne Boudreau
Rereading Warren Magnusson from the Streets of Mexico City
Julie-Anne Boudreau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
A political science student's annotations in The Search for Political Space (1996). Photo: Julie-Anne Boudreau.
In order to write these lines, I went back to The Search for Political Space (1996), which I read at the beginning 1997 while finishing writing my M.A. thesis in political science. Apart from the awkward feeling of seeing my annotations from almost thirty years ago, rereading Warren Magnusson was incredibly refreshing (figure 1). Warren was a political theorist who flirted all his life with urbanists. His roots are European classical philosophical texts, not the street. As an urban ethnographer who thinks from the sweat and dirt of everyday life, exchanging with Warren has meant displacing my source of thought. And it was worth it. His reflections on “urbanism as a way of life” and “seeing like a city” came not from ethnography but from a careful deconstruction of classic philosophical texts, which led him to reveal how state-centric conceptions of politics enclose the political.
“From the vantage point of the state (which is the normal vantage point of political analysis),” he writes, “the institutionalization of social movements is simply a matter of regularizing their political form” (Magnusson 1996, 67). The resonance of these lines three decades later, now that I live in Mexico City and work in an Institute of Geography, is astounding. From political philosophy, Warren speaks a geographical language of enclosure and form; he pleads for institutional flexibility in order not to suffocate the political process. Reading this from the streets of Mexico City, where the stuff of political life is all about negotiating in(form)ality, makes much sense. What is most interesting to me is that Warren Magnusson came to this conclusion on the basis of classical European texts.
The irresistible impulse to shape and give form to the political is perhaps the most visible characteristic of today’s urban geopolitical moment. Indeed, authoritarian impulses exhibited by Donald Trump, Javier Milei and the likes can be read as reactions to everything that foregoes the need for coherence, all of what resists being formed. And where does this unformed politics take place? On the streets, in what AbdouMaliq Simone (2022) calls the surround. “The question is whether we can constitute our activities without reifying them;” writes Magnusson, “give them form and presence while ensuring that they don’t become things that dominate our lives; open possibilities without foreclosing our means to reconstitute our activities in accordance with our changing needs and desires” (1996, 101). Warren always understood the dangers of the authoritarian impulse inherent to state-centric politics. This is crystal clear today with the growth of authoritarian regimes; it was not so obvious from the standpoint of comfortable liberal democratic regimes thirty years ago. This is why he dedicated all his writing to “seeing like a city.” The unformed causes discomfort. And as we can witness today, authoritarian impulses to form and shape street politics are generally also anti-urban.
Three decades ago, as a young political science student, I met Warren Magnusson during a summer school at York University in Toronto. His thought had a long-lasting influence on my work, which culminated in an intense series of exchanges with him as I was finalizing my Global Urban Politics book (Boudreau, 2017). Warren taught me many things: that one can be a political scientist and an urbanist. But perhaps more interestingly, he taught me how to combine the philosophical text and the street, how to conjugate the feeling and the form of politics.
References
Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2017. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Magnusson, Warren 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Duke University Press.
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
The Magnussonian Approach
By Ross Beveridge
Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow)
Warren Magnusson’s contribution to scholarship on (urban) politics was substantial. He was a brilliant writer and a highly original thinker. Daring even. I remember first encountering his work in the paper “The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political” (Magnusson 2014) and being genuinely taken aback (is he really arguing that the urban is the only way to envisage the political? Okay…). It took a while to digest this seemingly outlandish argument, so different from other strands of scholarship on urban politics (let alone politics per se). A real engagement with his work requires a commitment, a willingness to break not only with mainstream scholarship but also sometimes with more critical strands with which he nevertheless shared political sympathies. I was never fortunate enough to meet him – my occasional emails were always answered in friendly and encouraging tones – but I wondered if he quite enjoyed being apart from the crowd: the leftist scholar who cited Hayek, the political theorist who wrote about urbanism, the urbanist who wrote about Vancouver Island, the resident of the small Canadian city of Victoria who saw the world as one giant city. His eclecticism was part of his strength even as it no doubt removed him from academic “scenes.” I am not sure when exactly it started but, no doubt in recognition of this originality, the term Magnussonian crept into my conversations with collaborators and colleagues. What might it mean, then, to be Magnussonian? What kind of commitment could it entail?
The first, and most fundamental, element in any definition of being Magnussonian would be that (1) we can never fully know politics – and this has implications not only for researching politics but also for doing politics. From this, comes the next: (2) there is no entity, no state, that can fully know and order politics – sovereignty is impossible. This is Magnusson’s most well-known, if still provocative, formulation: the state is only one horizon of politics and source of authority, one of many folded into each other in a complex, sporadically susurrous, yet causally cacophonous topography of politics; otherwise known as the “City.” This latter formulation, and the plea to See Like a City, and not like a state, is Magnusson’s most obvious intellectual legacy. It leads him to argue, sometimes almost in the anarchist vein of David Graeber, that through abandoning sovereignty we can embrace new forms of political self-organization.
But as important as this contribution was, this is Magnusson only in a nutshell, a beginning rather than an end. There is so much to glean from a (re)reading of his work, to think with him as he asks questions few other scholars ask. We should never overlook his earlier work, notably the wonderful co-edited and co-written A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound (Magnusson and Shaw 2002). Of course, much of our attention will fall on his seminal The Politics of Urbanism (2011). Here, Magnusson not only addresses statists (and political scientists) but also activists (and leftist thinkers) with his appeal to disown sovereignty. His point is simple but devastating: we may be able to change the world, but we can never fully direct that change or know its outcome. Politics, for Magnusson, is far too contingent upon far too many moving parts to obey rules of theory or ideological commitment, let alone force of will. We have to ask ourselves: What does this mean for politics, and for the scholarly left? (to whom Magnusson belonged). How can we build a democratic and just politics of transformation when we cannot know where politics will lead? If Magnusson never provided a clear answer, the potency and originality of the question demands our continuing attention. It is such a compelling and vital problematic, so thoroughly resonant today in the contemporary impasse in progressive scholarship about the city and politics more generally. It is also tribute to the final element of a Magnussonian approach (3) being bold, using scholarship to ask difficult questions, rather than demonstrating fealty to a theory or movement. While this brings occasional difficulties in his work (was it really necessary to engage with Hayek as much?), it also provides a critical, self-reflective, and generative edge to his legacy.
This was apparent in what might be one of his last pieces of written work (Magnusson 2024), and what a privilege it was that he responded to a paper I co-authored with Philippe Koch with a very Magnussonian title: Seeing Democracy Like a City (Beveridge and Koch 2024). Magnusson’s focus in his piece was an absence in ours: can an urbanized democracy really deal with the crises confronting the world today? He appears almost to be asking the question of his own work as much as ours, reflecting critically on the legacy his insights provide. Can we confront the challenges of climate emergency, of Gaza, of Trump through the city, he asks? As he stresses his doubts even in his hopes, it is easy to agree with him in our anxious times. It is, as he would no doubt say, difficult to be certain about anything, and no person, scholar or sovereign can provide us with the definitive answer.
Nonetheless, in his own distinctive way, Magnusson has provided political theory, urban theory and leftist thinking with so much to consider, so many questions to ponder and so many daring moves with which we might try to inch forward. As I reflect on what a non-sovereign politics of the city might look like, and how it might compete with the state, I hope that his work reaches the even wider audience that it deserves. To this purpose, and to conclude, I hope that the term Magnussonian might come to enter scholarly discourse and be defined as follows: (1) a disavowal of certainty in knowing politics, (2) a disavowal of sovereignty as the organizing force of politics, and (3) a disavowal of conformity in political thinking, a boldness in scholarship.
References
Beveridge, Ross. and Koch, Philippe. 2024. Seeing democracy like a city. Dialogues in Urban Research, 2(2): 145-163. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231203999
Magnusson, Warren, and Karena Shaw, eds. 2002. A Political Space: Reading The Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. "The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12144.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Ross Beveridge is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies, University of Glasgow and author, with Philippe Koch, of How Cities Can Transform Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022).
Warren Magnusson and the Hope of Democracy
By Martin Horak
Martin Horak (University of Western Ontario)
In the ten years since Warren Magnusson published his last book, Western liberal democracies have come to a dangerous inflection point. Their institutional foundations, whose robustness most of us have long taken for granted, seem weak and brittle in the face of a rising tide of authoritarian populism. As the unwritten conventions that underpin representative democracy crumble, elections, legislatures, and legal institutions are being repurposed with shocking speed and effectiveness to serve the objectives of illiberal demagogues and ambitious plutocrats.
How we got to this point is the subject of much research and debate. It is increasingly clear, though, that the long run of democratic stability in the West that followed the cataclysm of World War II was made possible by an exceptional confluence of world-historical conditions. Continuous economic growth – fueled by technological innovation, ever-increasing natural resource use, and the exploitation of labor and resources in a colonized and post-colonial Global South – stabilized and legitimized democratic institutions by ensuring that governments could facilitate profits for capital while also ensuring steadily rising quality of life for most citizens. And until the 1990s, the Soviet bloc served as a foil, a "constitutive other” that further bolstered broad public support for liberal democratic regimes.
The unraveling of this post-war equilibrium has been several decades in the making. In the 1980s, globalization and deregulation decreased the capacity of governments to respond to the needs of their populations, even as income disparities grew. Since the turn of the millennium, the threat of climate change has increasingly called into question the sustainability of the continuous-growth model. At the same time, the rise of the politics of group identity, along with increasing social diversity and inequality in Western countries, have splintered domestic political landscapes. These transformations have in turn fueled public disaffection with liberal democratic institutions and have laid the groundwork for the rise of a technologically turbocharged illiberalism facilitated by the algorithmic fracturing of political discourse and exploited and amplified by unscrupulous political elites. As their legitimacy erodes, liberal democratic institutions risk becoming empty shells, forms devoid of their intended content.
Faced with this reality, how should political scientists and other scholars respond? Most of us believe that some form of democratic practice offers the best hope for just and sustainable governance in our world, but as state-centered liberal democracy destabilizes, what is to be done? Can social trust in liberal democratic institutions be revived? Should that even be a goal? How might the foundations of democratic practice be rebuilt in a world beset by crises and complex challenges?
In response to such questions, Warren Magnusson’s work offers an idea that is both simple and radical: Look beyond the state. For Magnusson, the idea that the state is the guarantor of political order and the primary site for democratic practice is misguided. It reflects what he called, in his 2011 book Politics of Urbanism, the “dream of sovereignty” – the belief that we can somehow become masters of our own collective destiny if we consolidate our efforts to govern ourselves in a single, overarching authority.
The dream of sovereignty, Magnusson argues, has blinded both political theorists and empirical political scientists to the actual foundations of political order, which rest on the human capacity for self-government. According to Magnusson, this capacity is most richly realized in urban settings, where the confluence of geographical proximity and social diversity poses problems of coexistence and collective goods provision that can only be addressed if people govern themselves – that is, if they behave in ways that recognize that their well-being is contingent on their interdependence with diverse others.
This notion of self-government is the foundation for Magnusson’s deeply hopeful vision of the sources of political order and, by extension, democratic practice. The complex problems that arise in urban settings challenge people to continuously develop their capacities for individual and collective self-government. The result, Magnusson says, is the spontaneous bottom-up production of social order.
“To the extent that people learn to live with people who are not of their own family, clan, tribe, village, religion, culture, or nation,” Magnusson wrote in Politics of Urbanism, “it is through the everyday negotiations of life: the ones that enable people who are otherwise strangers to live beside one another as neighbors, to pass each other peacefully on the street, work together, do business with one another, or even come together in joint projects for mutual benefit” (2011, 118-19). These local, daily interactions are not only what ground democracy – they are democracy.
Much like his account of social order, Magnusson’s understanding of democracy directs our attention beyond the state. Democracy, Magnusson writes, “is an idea of equality, a denial of the relevance of any of the familiar hierarchies – not only of race, class, and gender, but of intelligence, experience, and sensitivity – for the problem of self-government, understood not just as a question of individual freedom as modern liberals imagine it, but as a question about our lives together, how we are to manage them collectively.” Democracy thus emerges out of the ongoing practice of self-government at all scales. “To be a democrat in the fullest sense is to believe … that we can work out institutions and practices that enable us to live freely and responsibly under conditions that we decide together, with no person or group of people having any special privilege” (Magnusson 2015, 157).
For Magnusson, then, the state is but one of many spaces for politics, one of multiple sites of self-government, some institutionalized, others not. State-centered democratic politics is part of a much broader set of practices through which the norms and capacities that sustain democracy are developed and enacted. There is something of a Tocquevillian strain to Magnusson’s writing, with its insistence on the importance of local self-government. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Magnusson does not view local self-government as a training ground for representative democracy. Rather, it is a constitutive element of democracy itself, since democracy inheres in, and emerges out of, the interaction of many practices of government and self-government across multiple scales and domains of social life.
Warren Magnusson was no utopian anarchist. He acknowledged that state structures are needed to maintain macro-level social order in contemporary societies. But the democratic potential of the state, its ability to act as a venue for large-scale collective self-government, depends on the character of the many self-governing practices that permeate the society from which it arises. “Sovereignty may secure civilized life,” Magnusson wrote, “but it does not create it” (Magnusson 2011, 18). As we struggle for a way forward among nightmare visions of sovereignty peddled by authoritarian demagogues, Magnusson’s work offers us an encouraging message: Self-government is a deeply embedded human capacity. If we want to build a just and inclusive future, we must wake up from the dream of sovereignty and nurture the democratic impulse wherever it emerges in our lives with each other.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Martin Horak is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.