Finding Hope in the Shadow of Sovereignty
Loren King (Wilfrid Laurier University)
The whole point of a doctorate, we insist to our graduate students, is to craft original research. We were trained – and we train our students in turn – to find a new question, or a new interpretation of matters we thought were settled, and then to generate new knowledge by answering that question and, hopefully, publishing the resulting book or papers in reputable places (with a glowing acknowledgement singling out our mentors).
The emphasis on novelty is almost certainly overstated in graduate studies, and thus an inevitable rite of passage for all budding scholars is the discovery that what you thought was a pathbreaking new approach has in fact been well-explored.
This was how I first encountered Warren Magnusson.
As a fumbling doctoral student in the 1990s, desperate to find a new research question in well-trodden areas of democratic theory, I wandered into the library one evening to continue exploring how scholars had wrestled with the ridiculously broad search query “democracy and city life.” A more disciplined scholar would have already honed their research question to find a narrow but exploitable lacunae among the myriad works exploring this nebulous theme. I was not a disciplined scholar. I had recently tossed out an earlier idea for my dissertation, in the political economy of development: having found Partha Dasgupta’s magisterial Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, I was certain that anything useful I might have to say on the subject was likely already somewhere in that volume.
So, I’d found another area of interest and plodded ahead without much focus or resolve. There were countless papers and books on the mechanics of urban politics, and of course several justly famous tomes in history, sociology, architecture, and design on the shape of the city and the minutiae of urban life. But one name stuck with me: a Canadian trained at Oxford, a political theorist, but also clearly fluent in the technical work on urban policy and public administration. He had been writing in this space for some time. As a Canadian studying in the United States, I was drawn to these early works that focused on to-me-familiar Canadian cities and places. But his was also a critical voice, drawing on theoretical frameworks and analytic stances that I was aware of, but not yet especially conversant with. And there was a theme unifying his work, the importance of which I think I only began to see much later: an effort – whether in theory, policy analysis, or political practice – to de-center the sovereign territorial state.
I eventually defended a dissertation that cobbled together, somewhat awkwardly, a range of work from urban sociology and democratic theory, using Anglo-American tools of philosophical analysis that owed a great deal to the philosopher John Rawls. The Marxist geographer and public intellectual David Harvey was one of my readers, who remarked (not without justification) that for all of his critical suggestions, he may as well have been braying at the wind. In the end, my dissertation ended up as a work of analytic political theory in which the city was something of a backdrop and useful foil for thinking about democratic engagement and the political economy of advanced industrial societies. A useful backdrop, to be sure, but neither the inspiration for, or the site of, the kinds of critical, and sometimes radical analyses of status quo power relations that has been the signature of Warren Magnusson’s work and legacy.
Looking back on the sweep of his work – which along with original books, chapters, and articles, also included astute and generous commentaries on the work of fellow scholars, often in the form of review articles – it occurs to me that at no point in his career would Warren Magnusson have ever been vulnerable to David Harvey’s concern with my fumbling efforts to become a bona fide PhD. From his earliest publications, Warren married a critical gaze with theoretical rigour and empirical sensitivity. Even in his analyses of, say, the tangled web of actors and incentives bound up in Toronto metropolitan growth (Magnusson 1981), or the historical trajectories of local government in Britain and the United States (Magnusson 1986), there were hints of the deep theoretical preoccupations of so much of Warren’s later work.
Some years ago, I was asked by colleagues to offer some thoughts, as a political theorist, for a journal issue reflecting on Warren’s delightful book, Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011). At the time I quibbled with what I took to be a tension in the work: I worried that the polemical uses of “the city,” as an analytic category, risked undercutting his critical aim of contesting the conceptual and imaginative dominance of state sovereignty. In particular, I felt that Henri Lefebvre went underappreciated in Warren’s sweeping indictment of the western canon, as did the European tradition of subsidiarity that my friend and mentor Thomas Hueglin traces back to Johannes Althusius (Hueglin 1999).
Warren took these quibbles, I think, in the constructive spirit I meant them, although based on subsequent conversations, I suspect he never really warmed to my reading of Lefebvre, nor saw much promise in my hopes for subsidiarity as a challenge to the statist imaginary. Looking back on those reflections over a decade ago, I notice that now – in my research and certainly in my teaching – I am far more inclined to think that we need more polemical force to our critical aims, especially in trying to unsettle, and find alternatives to, the dangerous political conceits bound up in the dominant narratives of state sovereignty.
In one of his last scholarly contributions, Warren offered his thoughts on a paper by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch, “Seeing Democracy Like a City,” as part of a forum of distinguished urban theorists. Beveridge and Koch (2024), in the lead paper of the forum and in their earlier book (2022), argued for a vision of the urban as radically democratic. Their project explicitly builds on Magnusson’s work, and Warren, in his comments, was constructive, yet concerned. He agreed with Beveridge and Koch that “urbanization does not undermine (or overwhelm) democracy, but it does change how democracy must be practised” and further, that “we have been plagued for many years by the idea that there must be some sovereign centre from which we can deal with these interrelated issues effectively and democratically.” This, as Warren had argued for so much of his career, “is a baneful illusion” (Magnusson 2024, p. 182).
What troubled Warren here was perhaps a dynamic that had motivated him in another late paper, published two years before this commentary, where he implored us to imagine radical democratic engagement “premised on the ‘open city’ rather than the closed nation” (Magnusson 2022, p. 64). Drawing us back to the pre-modern tensions between polis and civitas and then forward to Arendt and Merrifield (and Lefebvre and Althusser), Warren shows us how democracy is aligned with the openness and dynamism of urban life, rather than the legal and imaginative enclosure of politics understood in terms of nations and sovereign states. Reflecting on the degree to which “the practices of democracy are mostly below the surface of spectacular politics,” Warren concluded that “we already know how to radicalise democracy, but are reluctant to explore its possibilities,” and that “the familiar disjuncture between boring everyday business and the drama of great events is an obstacle to analysis and effective political action” (Magnusson 2022, p. 77).
Returning to his reflections in 2024, Warren noticed that
Distinctively urban issues, of the sort to which Beveridge and Koch refer, are always also environmental. If we need examples of political practices that relate the local to the global, there are plenty of them within the environmental movement. On the other hand, there are issues like climate-generated migration and the sharing of water resources that have led to violent conflicts. Does seeing democracy like a city help us understand how such issues might be resolved democratically? I hope so, but my hopes are often sorely tested. (Magnussson 2024, p. 183)
Looking back over the intellectual richness of Warren’s body of work, and reflecting on his quiet gifts as a scholar, and especially as a teacher and mentor for the next generations of scholars who have wandered toward the city to explore hopes for democracy, it occurs to me that, however sorely tested, Warren never lost that hope. That, to me, is perhaps his greatest gift to those who encountered and learned from him.
What have I learned from Warren? That my worries about the polemical voice were, and are, overstated. We need more critical polemic, to unsettle our familiar vocabularies and conceptual complacencies. In my research and especially in my teaching, I find myself more and more aligned with, and inspired by, Warren’s relentless but always constructive scepticism with those familiar vocabularies of the state and the sovereign center, but also with his willingness to learn from those engaged, on the ground, in the hard work of democratizing everyday politics.
On that final, vital lesson, I can only offer Warren’s own words in remembrance and hope:
When people act democratically, they have to work out how to deal with the little problems as well as the big ones, and they are surprisingly inventive in this respect. If we want to learn how things are to be done, we need to pay more attention to the actual business of local government. Revolutionary dreamers and political theorists are generally reluctant to do this, but local activists have been inventing new modes of civic engagement for years (Magnusson 2022, p. 77).
References
Beveridge, Ross, and Philippe Koch. 2022. How Cities Can Transform Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
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
Thomas O. Hueglin. 1999. Early Modern Concepts for a Late Modern World: Althusius on Community and Federalism, Kitchener, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1981. "Metropolitan Reform in the Capitalist City." Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (3): 557–85.
Magnusson, Warren. 1986. “Bourgeois Theories of Local Government,” Political Studies 34(1): 1–18.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011a. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2022. “From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City,” Identities 29(1): 63–79.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Loren King is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University.