Wittgenstein

From Alexander Waugh, the author of the acclaimed memoir Fathers and Sons, comes a grand saga of a brilliant and tragic Viennese family.

The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented, and most eccentric in European history. Karl Wittgenstein, who ran away from home as a wayward and rebellious youth, returned to his native Vienna to make a fortune in the iron and steel industries. He bought factories and paintings and palaces, but the domineering and overbearing influence he exerted over his eight children resulted in a generation of siblings fraught by inner antagonisms and nervous tension. Three of his sons committed suicide; Paul, the fourth, became a world-famous concert pianist, using only his left hand and playing compositions commissioned from Ravel and Prokofiev; while Ludwig, the youngest, is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. In this dramatic historical and psychological epic, Alexander Waugh traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty, and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars. Through the bleak despair of a Siberian prison camp and the terror of a Gestapo interrogation room, one courageous and unlikely hero emerges from the rubble of the house of Wittgenstein in the figure of Paul, an extraordinary testament to the indomitable spirit of human survival.

Alexander Waugh tells this saga of baroque family unhappiness and perseverance against incredible odds with a novelistic richness to rival Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

Urban Social Processes

Overview
Scope and Purpose: The aim of this program is to facilitate research and studies for selected graduate and undergraduate students, professional journalists, and researchers who are studying some aspect of Cuba. We address a wide array of social, economic and political issues unfolding in contemporary Cuba. In particular, we employ an interdisciplinary approach to understand how the built environment in both design fields and in a broader cultural context is interpreted. All curious participants are welcome and should not feel that this program is only for planners, architects or students of the humanities.

In addition to a course-pack of diverse readings, the main social science and design reading will be:

Segre, Roberto, Coyula, M., and Scarpaci, J. 2002. Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. This book is required reading and can be purchased at the university bookstores.

Location: This study abroad is located in Cuba, where the students will travel to Havana, Trinidad, Santa Clara, and Varadero. The program includes ground transportation on air-conditioned buses. We will meet largely “outside the classroom,” which includes meetings with community organizations, government offices and NGO headquarters. This will be the eleventh organized trip to Cuba. This will mark Professor Scarpaci's 30th visit to the island. In August 1999, the program received an institutional license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, US Treasury, to conduct educational trips to the island. This institutional license, one of the first granted to an institution of higher education in the U.S., means that the program coordinator can license appropriate individuals to travel to Cuba. This greatly streamlines the paperwork process.

Academic Focus: The thematic focus remains: Urban design and planning under colonial, neo-colonial, and revolutionary rule; housing; the role of NGOs in Cuba's changing political economy; and the new private/mixed market. However, this year we will rely more heavily on the novel and short story to understand contemporary and historical accounts of the Cuban city.

Video: A video, in both English (Urban Design and Planning in Cuba: An Historical Perspective) and Spanish (Diseño Urbano y Planificación en Cuba: Una Perspectiva Histórica en Cuba) are available on this topic. The videos run 33 and 39 minutes, respectively. Also, students have worked on a Service Learning Grant in Cuba. Their community development project in an Afro Cuban neighborhood in Havana (Atarés) is described here.

Venue: The trip consists of a total of 12 days (5 days in Havana May 26 - 30, with a day trip to Pinar del Río) and then traveling to and staying in Trinidad (May 30 - June 1), and Santa Clara (June 2). We return to Havana for the balance of the trip. Trindad and Old Havana are UNESCO declared World Heritage Sites. In Havana we will meet with scholars from the José Antonio Echeverría Polytechnic Institute and in Santa Clara we will hold meetings with the Central University of Santa Clara.

Dates: 12 days, May 23-June 7, 2004. The program officially begins and ends in Miami. We shall clarify the departure point when the program date draws near.

Daily Activities: On class days, lectures or meetings with Cubans will be in the morning and in the afternoon students will go to a site that corresponds to the morning lecture. Trips are planned to museums, architectural landmarks, public agencies, NGO’s, and universities. There will be a fair amount of city walking, and participants should plan accordingly. Students maintain journals throughout the course.

Cost from Miami: $2,400 plus $100 application fee(5% discount if paid by February 1st, 2004). All participants must register for 3 credits and will pay tuition directly to Virginia Tech. Final payment must be made by April 1, 2004. The cost includes round-trip charter flight from Miami to Havana, lodging, 2 meals daily, lectures and daily field trips, visas, bus travel, and lodging (double accommodations) to and from Trinidad, course reading packet, and lectures in Havana, Trinidad, and Santa Clara by architects, geographers, planners, writers, community organizers, common folk, and social scientists.

Instruction: The academic focus will be urban design and planning under colonial, republican, and revolutionary rule; housing; the role of non governmental organizations in Cuba's changing political economy; and the new private/mixed market; the use of the novel and short story in illuminating social and political life in Cuba..

Field Trips: The field trips will correspond to the lectures. This way, students will see first hand some important concepts discussed in meetings and lectures. There will also be a pig roast at a small farm outside Havana. Participants should anticipate a great deal of walking in the study sites.

Non-Virginia Tech students must complete a "Non-degree seeking application form" as part of the application process, which is available on the Virginia Tech admission offices' home pages.

Three (3) credit hours will be given for the program. However, an additional three credits is also available; please contact Professor Scarpaci for more details. Both graduate and undergraduate credit will be offered under GEOG (Geography) 4984 and GEOG 5984. Only a letter grade option is available.

Eligibility: The course is open to any student, professor, journalist or professional studying some aspect of Cuba or comparative aspects of urbanization, planning, social sciences, literature, architecture or community development. Students from other universities or persons enrolling as special students in Virginia Tech summer school may receive transfer credit. However it is their responsibility to arrange for the credit transfer.
Most of all, this program requires flexibility and good social skills, in addition to intellectual curiosity. If you do not think you will be comfortable in a developing country, do not like traveling with small groups, are not a 'team-player,' are a picky eater or vegetarian, then you consider an alternative study-abroad venue.

Student Housing: The students will stay in 3-star bed and breakfast lodgings and some of the time in student boarding housing. Students should anticipate brief power outages in Havana. Participants are advised that this is not a luxury trip and that food and lodging conditions vary widely. Flexibility, to be sure, is the key to a successful program.





Student Evaluations from previous trip: page 1, page 2 Here are the unedited open-ended evaluations from an earlier group. In addition, Professor Scarpaci will provide anyone with a list of e-mail addresses should they wish to contact program participants directly.

See Pictures from the 2002 trip

Application Form: The following form is not interactive, you may either print it out or save it as source and then pull it up in any word processor. The application form must be accompanied with a $100 non refundable application fee.

Social Theory

Mike Gane, French Social Theory, Sage, London, 2003. (207 pp.)
In French Social Theory Mike Gane has produced an absorbing look at the
development of social theory in France from St. Simon to Baudrillard. Written, I
assume, for an English speaking audience, this short but dense text illustrates
not only the depth of Gane’s scholarship but also his ability to understand and
delineate the nuances of French social theory that have intrigued sociologists in
the English-speaking world since the 1960s. As a background to his discussion,
Gane reminds us that social theory in France does not exist, but is a zone
between literary and cultural theory (p. viii) and that methodology is more than a
set of positivist techniques (p.73).
Since theory, an abstract set of ordered ideas, is essential for the construction of
any science; the development of “sociology” is then dependent on its history. By
linking the progress of ideas about society to political context of French history,
Gane uses Comtean sociology to analyze the development of social theory. He
then constructs this history by following the sociological template introduced by
St. Simon and Comte, and divides the search for the “social” into three periods
creating a cycle of social theory: birth/altruism (1800-1879), rebirth/anomie
(1880-1939) and second rebirth/hypertelia (1940-2000).
The first cycle (altruism) is a sweeping narrative of the “social” in the theories of
St. Simon and Comte. It starts with the post-revolutionary void (1815) when
France faced reconstruction “without models, without theories” (p.3). This first
cycle centres on sociology’s relation to religion and Comte’s learning from
progress in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology. Gane
emphasizes that Comte’s analysis is organized around the development of a
“fundamental theory” (p.16) or positive philosophy to harmonize the sciences
into a general theoretical system. In order to emphasize the birth of sociology
and the “social” Comte “coined the word ‘altruism’ … to define that form of
action contrasted with egoism” (p. 9). The section ends with the work of Littré,
Comte’s disciple, who attempted to revise his teacher’s utopian notions and place
the “social” within the confines of the law. Littré fails to keep the discipline alive
as Comte’s following dwindled, as did sociology’s “intellectual discipline” (p.42).
The second cycle (anomie) is focused on the rebirth of the discipline. Gane
shows that it is not the birth of sociology that is secured by Durkheim, but its
renaissance. Durkheim takes on the mantra of Comte in trying to show
sociology’s unique place within the sciences and radicalized the discipline by
breaking with ideology (p.52). Durkheim also follows Comte’s lead in the
development of his concept of anomie in relation to unregulated development
and pathology. Indeed, Gane’s excellent discussion of Rules and the concepts of
social fact, normality and social pathology need to be read by all who are
interested in social theory and especially those in criminology. Like Littré before
him, Mauss took the reigns of French sociology after Durkheim’s death only to
pull them toward anthropology, guiding the search for the “social” through the
realm of culture. Of significance is Mauss’ classic The Gift, which concentrates on
the obligations of exchange in society and, as Gane points out, can be seen as
the beginnings of Structuralism and the analysis of power (p.85). The cycle ends
with the embodiment of anomie in the behaviors of both Mauss and Bataille, a
form of praxis that links with the next cycle.
The third cycle, the second rebirth or hyperteliai, is different from the first two in
that the connection to St. Simon and Comte is tenuous in the discussion of some
of the theorists (e.g. Lyotard) and strong in the discussion of others (e.g.
Canguilhem). Marx now becomes the prime directive of this cycle. Here, Gane
illustrates a number of various streams, which have been forged in search of the
“social” and shows their indebtedness, personified in various forms, to Marxism.
Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lyotard, Canguilhem, Kristeva, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze
and Guattari, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Berthelot are all discussed as key figures
in this search. The attachment to the development of the discipline of Sociology,
however, is lost or in crisisii, while the search for the “social” is now linked to
linguistics, politics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, postmodernism
and fatalism. As in the previous cycles, the second rebirth reflects the turbulence
of the era in which theory is being formed. The plethora of these new schools
and perspectives veer from the original work of St. Simon, Comte and Durkheim
to forge an expanded discipline of sociology. They all reflect the dissolution of
the confines of the discipline. The search for the “social” is no longer bound to
understanding the structure, meaning, progress and boundaries of the social
contract. “This [new] logic is one that attacks and breaks down the traditional
polarities of ritual exchange, and produces new hypertelic forms” (p.185).
I am impressed by the work on the first two cycles, however, I have trouble with
the third. Although the discussion in each of the six chapters in this section is
excellent, in reading them together I am left with the question of why specific
theorists are incorporated in the text while others are left out. Were these
omissions purposeful or simply a matter of space and/or time? Ideally, I think an
expansion of the last cycle to incorporate the unique dialogue, or debate over
what constitutes the “social” within each of the streams would serve the English
audience well: e.g., the relation between Althusser and Poulantzas, Derrida and
Foucault and among Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. The assemblage of the
sections in the last cycle is not linked together as I would have hoped but this
may be that the discussion of these is more like a bricolage I am trying to
impose a structure on.iii
Overall, this is, as the advertisements say, an extraordinarily accomplished book
and Gane’s work will have an impact on my teaching of social theory. Also, I
recommend it to all who teach theory and are interested in the discipline of
sociology.
Barry Edginton, PhD
Department of Sociology
University of Winnipeg
i This term is taken from Baudrillard, which means “a tragic state of passing beyond our own
finalities” (p.99).
ii See the work of Zygmunt Bauman on the crisis of sociology.
iii For example, the section on Lyotard seems unconnected to the rest of the cycle.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest and most remarkable families of Habsburg Vienna. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was an industrialist of extraordinary talent and energy who rose to become one of the leading figures in the Austrian iron and steel industry. Although his family was originally Jewish, Karl Wittgenstein had been brought up as a Protestant, and his wife, Leopoldine, also from a partly Jewish family, had been raised as a Catholic. Karl and Leopoldine had eight children, of whom Ludwig was the youngest. The family possessed both money and talent in abundance, and their home became a centre of Viennese cultural life during one of its most dynamic phases. Many of the great writers, artists, and intellectuals of fin de siècle Vienna—including Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Sigmund Freud—were regular visitors to the Wittgensteins’ home, and the family’s musical evenings were attended by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, and Bruno Walter, among others. Leopoldine Wittgenstein played the piano to a remarkably high standard, as did many of her children. One of them, Paul, became a famous concert pianist, and another, Hans, was regarded as a musical prodigy comparable to Mozart. But the family also was beset with tragedy. Three of Ludwig’s brothers—Hans, Rudolf, and Kurt—committed suicide, the first two after rebelling against their father’s wish that they pursue careers in industry.

As might be expected, Wittgenstein’s outlook on life was profoundly influenced by the Viennese culture in which he was raised, an aspect of his personality and thought that was long strangely neglected by commentators. One of the earliest and deepest influences upon his thinking, for example, was the book Sex and Character (1903), a bizarre mixture of psychological insight and pathological prejudice written by the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, whose suicide at the age of 23 in 1903 made him a cult figure throughout the German-speaking world. There is much disagreement about how, exactly, Weininger influenced Wittgenstein. Some allege that Wittgenstein shared Weininger’s self-directed disgust at Jews and homosexuals; others believe that what impressed Wittgenstein most about Weininger’s book is its austere but passionate insistence that the only thing worth living for was the aspiration to accomplish work of genius. In any case, it remains true that Wittgenstein’s life was characterized by a single-minded determination to live up to this latter ideal, in pursuit of which he was prepared to sacrifice almost everything else.

Although he shared his family’s veneration for music, Wittgenstein’s deepest interest as a boy was in engineering. In 1908 he went to Manchester, England, to study the then-nascent subject of aeronautics. While engaged on a project to design a jet propeller, Wittgenstein became increasingly absorbed in purely mathematical problems. After reading The Principles of Mathematics (1903) by Bertrand Russell and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) by Gottlob Frege, he developed an obsessive interest in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. In 1911 Wittgenstein went to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in order to make Russell’s acquaintance. From the moment he met Russell, Wittgenstein’s aeronautical studies were forgotten in favour of a ferociously intense preoccupation with questions of logic. He had, it seemed, found the subject best suited to his particular form of genius.

Wittgenstein worked with such intensity on logic that within a year Russell declared that he had nothing left to teach him. Wittgenstein evidently thought so too and left Cambridge to work on his own in remote isolation in a wooden hut that he built by the side of a fjord in Norway. There he developed, in embryo, what became known as the picture theory of meaning, a central tenet of which is that a proposition can express a fact by virtue of sharing with it a common structure or “logical form.” This logical form, however, precisely because it is what makes “picturing” possible, cannot itself be pictured. It follows both that logic is inexpressible and that there are—pace Frege and Russell—no logical facts or logical truths. Logical form has to be shown rather than stated, and, though some languages and methods of symbolism might reveal their structure more perspicuously than others, there is no symbolism capable of representing its own structure. Wittgenstein’s perfectionism prevented him from putting any of these ideas in a definitive written form, though he did dictate two series of notes, one to Russell and another to G.E. Moore, from which one can gather the broad lines of his thinking.

In the summer of 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein was staying with his family in Vienna. Unable to return to Norway to continue his work on logic, he enlisted in the Austrian army. He hoped that the experience of facing death would enable him to concentrate his mind exclusively on those things that mattered most—intellectual clarity and moral decency—and that he would thereby achieve the degree of ethical seriousness to which he aspired. As he had told Russell many times during their discussions at Cambridge, he regarded his thinking about logic and his striving to be a better person as two aspects of a single duty—the duty, so to speak, of genius. (“Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same,” Weininger had written, “they are no more than duty to oneself.”)

While serving on the Eastern front, Wittgenstein did, in fact, experience a religious conversion, inspired in part by Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (1883), which he bought at the beginning of the war and subsequently carried with him at all times, reading and rereading it until he knew it practically by heart. Wittgenstein spent the first two years of the war behind the lines, relatively safe from harm and able to continue his work on logic. In 1916, however, at his own request, he was sent to a fighting unit at the Russian front. His surviving manuscripts show that during this time his philosophical work underwent a profound change. Whereas previously he had separated his thoughts on logic from his thoughts on ethics, aesthetics, and religion by writing the latter remarks in code, at this point he began to integrate the two sets of remarks, applying to all of them the distinction he had earlier made between that which can be said and that which must be shown. Ethics, aesthetics, and religion, in other words, were like logic: their “truths” were inexpressible; insight in these areas could be shown but not stated. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words,” Wittgenstein wrote. “They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Of course, this meant that Wittgenstein’s central philosophical message, the insight that he was most concerned to convey in his work, was itself inexpressible. His hope was that precisely in not saying it, nor even in trying to say it, he could somehow make it manifest. “If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable,” he wrote to his friend Paul Engelmann, “then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered.”

Near the end of the war, while he was on leave in Salzburg, Austria, Wittgenstein finally finished the book that was later published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the preface he announced that he considered himself to have found “on all essential points” the solution to the problems of philosophy. “The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated,” he wrote, “seems to me unassailable and definitive,” and, “if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.” For the most part, the book consists of an austerely compressed exposition of the picture theory of meaning. It ends, however, with some remarks about ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life, stressing that, if its view about how propositions can be meaningful is correct, then, just as there are no meaningful propositions about logical form, so there can be no meaningful propositions concerning these subjects either. This point, of course, applies to Wittgenstein’s own remarks in the book itself, so Wittgenstein is forced to conclude that whoever understands his remarks “finally recognizes them as senseless”; they offer, so to speak, a ladder that one must throw away after using it to climb.

Consistent with his view that he had solved all the essential problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein abandoned the subject after World War I and instead trained to be an elementary school teacher. Meanwhile, the Tractatus was published and attracted the attention of two influential groups of philosophers, one based in Cambridge and including R.B. Braithwaite and Frank Ramsey and the other based in Vienna and including Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and other logical positivists later collectively known as the Vienna Circle. Both groups tried to make contact with Wittgenstein. Frank Ramsey made two trips to Puchberg—the small Austrian village in which Wittgenstein was teaching—to discuss the Tractatus with him, and Schlick invited him to join the discussions of the Vienna Circle. Stimulated by these contacts, Wittgenstein’s interest in philosophy revived, and, after his brief and unsuccessful career as a schoolteacher came to an end, he returned to the discipline, persuaded, largely by Ramsey, that the views he had expressed in his book were not, after all, definitively correct.

In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Trinity College, initially to work with Ramsey. The following year Ramsey died at the tragically young age of 26, after a spell of severe jaundice. Wittgenstein stayed on at Cambridge as a lecturer, spending his vacations in Vienna, where he resumed his discussions with Schlick and Waismann. During this time his ideas changed rapidly as he abandoned altogether the notion of logical form as it appeared in the Tractatus, along with the theory of meaning that it had seemed to require. Indeed, he adopted a view of philosophy that rejected entirely the construction of theories of any sort and that viewed philosophy rather as an activity, a method of clearing up the confusions that arise through misunderstandings of language.

Philosophers, Wittgenstein believed, had been misled into thinking that their subject was a kind of science, a search for theoretical explanations of the things that puzzled them: the nature of meaning, truth, mind, time, justice, and so on. But philosophical problems are not amenable to this kind of treatment, he claimed. What is required is not a correct doctrine but a clear view, one that dispels the confusion that gives rise to the problem. Many of these problems arise through an inflexible view of language that insists that if a word has a meaning there must be some kind of object corresponding to it. Thus, for example, we use the word mind without any difficulty until we ask ourselves “What is the mind?” We then imagine that this question has to be answered by identifying some “thing” that is the mind. If we remind ourselves that language has many uses and that words can be used quite meaningfully without corresponding to things, the problem disappears. Another closely related source of philosophical confusion, according to Wittgenstein, is the tendency to mistake grammatical rules, or rules about what it does and does not make sense to say, for material propositions, or propositions about matters of fact or existence. For example, the expression “2 + 2 = 4” is not a proposition describing mathematical reality but a rule of grammar, something that determines what makes sense when using arithmetical terms. Thus “2 + 2 = 5” is not false, it is nonsense, and the philosopher’s task is to uncover the multitude of more subtle pieces of nonsense that typically constitute a philosophical “theory.”

Wittgenstein thought that he himself had succumbed to an overly narrow view of language in the Tractatus, concentrating on the question of how propositions acquired their meaning and ignoring all other aspects of meaningful language use. A proposition is something that is either true or false, but we do not use language only to say things that are true or false, and thus a theory of propositions is not—pace the Tractatus—a general theory of meaning nor even the basis of one. But this does not imply that the theory of meaning in the Tractatus ought to be replaced by another theory. The idea that language has many different uses is not a theory but a triviality: “What we find in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities.”

Wittgenstein regarded his later book Philosophical Investigations as just such a synopsis, and indeed he found its proper arrangement enormously difficult. For the last 20 years of his life, he tried again and again to produce a version of the book that satisfied him, but he never felt he had succeeded, and he would not allow the book to be published in his lifetime. What became known as the works of the later Wittgenstein—Philosophische Bemerkungen (1964; Philosophical Remarks), Philosophische Grammatik (1969; Philosophical Grammar), Bermerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (1956; Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), Über Gewissheit (1969; On Certainty), and even Philosophical Investigations itself—are the discarded attempts at a definitive expression of his new approach to philosophy.

The themes addressed by Wittgenstein in these posthumously published manuscripts and typescripts are so various as to defy summary. The two focal points are the traditional problems in the philosophy of mathematics (e.g., “What is mathematical truth?” and “What are numbers?”) and the problems that arise from thinking about the mind (e.g., “What is consciousness?” and “What is a soul?”). Wittgenstein’s method is not to engage directly in polemics against specific philosophical theories but rather to trace their source in confusions about language. Accordingly, Philosophical Investigations begins not with an extract from a work of theoretical philosophy but with a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400), in which Augustine explains how he learned to speak. Augustine describes how his elders pointed to objects in order to teach him their names. This description perfectly illustrates the kind of inflexible view of language that Wittgenstein found to underlie most philosophical confusions. In this description, he says, there lies “a particular picture of the essence of human language,” and “in this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”

To combat this picture, Wittgenstein developed a method of describing and imagining what he called “language games.” Language games, for Wittgenstein, are concrete social activities that crucially involve the use of specific forms of language. By describing the countless variety of language games—the countless ways in which language is actually used in human interaction—Wittgenstein meant to show that “the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” The meaning of a word, then, is not the object to which it corresponds but rather the use that is made of it in “the stream of life.”

Related to this point is Wittgenstein’s insistence that, with regard to language, the public is logically prior to the private. The Western philosophical tradition, going back at least to Descartes’s famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), has tended to regard the contents of one’s own mind as being foundational, the rock upon which all other knowledge is built. In a section of Philosophical Investigations that has become known as the private language argument, Wittgenstein sought to reverse this priority by reminding us that we can talk about the contents of our own minds only once we have learned a language and that we can learn a language only by taking part in the practices of a community. The starting point for philosophical reflection, therefore, is not our own consciousness but our participation in communal activities: “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.”

This last remark, along with Wittgenstein’s robust rejection of Cartesianism generally, has sometimes led to his being interpreted as a behaviourist, but this is a mistake. He does not deny that there are inner processes, nor does he equate those processes with the behaviour that expresses them. Cartesianism and behaviourism are, for Wittgenstein, parallel confusions—the one insisting that there is such a thing as the mind, the other insisting that there is not, but both resting on the Augustinian picture of language by demanding that the word mind has to be understood as referring to some “thing.” Both theories succumb to the temptation to misunderstand the grammar of psychological descriptions.

Related to Wittgenstein’s rejection of theorizing in philosophy are two more general attitudes that have to be taken into account if one is to understand the spirit in which he wrote. The first of these attitudes is a detestation of scientism, the view that we must look to science for a “theory of everything.” Wittgenstein regarded this view as characteristic of 20th-century civilization and saw himself and his work as swimming against this tide. The kind of understanding the philosopher seeks, Wittgenstein believed, has more in common with the kind of understanding one gets from poetry, music, or art—i.e., the kind that is chronically undervalued in our scientific age. The second of these general attitudes—which again Wittgenstein thought isolated him from the mainstream of the 20th century—was a fierce dislike of professional philosophy. No honest philosopher, he considered, could treat philosophy as a profession, and thus academic life, far from promoting serious philosophy, actually made it almost impossible. He advised all his best students against becoming academics. Becoming a doctor, a gardener, a shop assistant—almost anything—was preferable, he thought, to staying in academic life.

Wittgenstein himself several times considered leaving his academic job in favour of training to become a psychiatrist. In 1935 he even thought seriously of moving to the Soviet Union to work on a farm. When he was offered the prestigious chair of philosophy at Cambridge in 1939, he accepted, but with severe misgivings. During World War II he worked as a porter in Guy’s Hospital in London and then as an assistant in a medical research team. In 1947 he finally resigned his academic position and moved to Ireland to work on his own, as he had done in Norway before World War I. In 1949 he discovered that he had cancer of the prostate, and in 1951 he moved into his doctor’s house in Cambridge, knowing that he had only a few months to live. He died on April 29, 1951. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Urban Social Processes

Since the 1990s, the São Paulo government has attempted to transform the low-income Luz neighbourhood into a so-called 'Cultural Pole' through cultural institutions and urban design. Architects and government officials have represented their audience as an all-inclusive 'public'. However, the Cultural Pole actively promotes gentrification, that is, social exclusion. I contrast the official notion of 'public' brandished by the São Paulo government with a critique of space - not only the space designed by architects, but also that configured by use, occupation, and conflict. I consider how social groups have protested the Cultural Pole, building a realm of debate, conflict, and negotiation. I characterize this realm as a public sphere relating to and intersecting the spatial domain. By pointing to the intersection of discourses, social representations, and spatial practices, I suggest that these realms are mutually constitutive. While the revamping of the Luz neighbourhood and the proposed Cultural Pole are steeped in the particular context of São Paulo - a deeply unequal metropolis in a country marked by severe social disparities - the present discussion holds global value. First, the Cultural Pole is part of far-reaching urban and economic processes associated with globalization - as Smith puts it, gentrification as a new 'global urban strategy'. Second, inequality is not exclusive to poorer countries. The restructuring of labour and production markets and the pressure for financial competitiveness have sharpened differences within wealthier regions. The focused examination in this paper is thus also intended to resonate with other places and processes.

Social Theory

Social Theory In Archaeology
Since the debut of the New Archaeology in the 1960s, approaches to the science of interpreting the material past have proliferated.
Seeking to find common ground in an increasingly fractious and polarized discipline, a group of archaeological theorists representing various schools of thought gathered in a roundtable during the fall of 1997. As organizer, Michael Schiffer sought to build bridges that might begin to span the conceptual chasms that have formed in archaeology during the past few decades. Many participants in the roundtable accepted the challenge of building bridges, but some rejected the premise that bridge building is desirable or feasible. Even so, every chapter in the resulting volume contributes something provocative or significant to the enterprise of constructing social theory in archaeology and setting the agenda for future social-theoretic research.

With contributions from every major school of thought, whether informed by evolutionary theory, feminism, chaos theory, behavioralism, or post-processualism, this volume serves as both handbook to an array of theoretical approaches and as a useful look at each school's response to criticism.

Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Nicholas C. Burbules and Michael Peters

(for 100 Key Thinkers on Education, Joy Palmer and David Cooper, eds.)

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London....a rather bad guide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born to an aristocratic family in Vienna, April 26 1889. He was the youngest of eight very precocious children, and was preoccupied all his life with questions of genius, artistic creativity, and suicide (three of his brothers died that way). In 1911, on the advice of Gottlob Frege, he went to meet Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, after which he was admitted to Trinity College. Russell was impressed by Wittgenstein, and urged him to study mathematical logic. They worked as colleagues, even though Wittgenstein was technically an undergraduate. Over time, however, the relations between Wittgenstein and Russell became strained, and in 1913 Wittgenstein left Cambridge. He enrolled in the Austrian army just a few days after WW I was declared; he was eventually taken prisoner in Italy, but during these years he managed to write the one philosophical book published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The manuscript was sent to Russell while Wittgenstein was still a prisoner, and with Russell’s (somewhat equivocal) support and Introduction it was eventually published in 1922, exerting an enormous philosophical influence, particularly on the positivists of the Vienna Circle, which included Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Moritz Schlick, and Friedrich Waismann, with whom Wittgenstein became acquainted.

Wittgenstein, on the death of his father in 1913, had inherited a substantial part of his family’s fortune. In 1919 he gave it all away and went to work as a teacher in the small Austrian villages of Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg, and Otterthal during the years of 1920-26. Following a series of short stints, he resigned his post in Otterthal under a cloud of suspicion over allegedly striking a female student (not the first student he had struck during his teaching years, apparently). After working as a gardener and helping to design and build a house for one of his sisters, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. His Ph.D. was granted based on the Tractatus as his thesis, he was given a five year fellowship, and he taught at Trinity College until 1935, when he left again, spending time in Russia, Norway, Austria, and Ireland. By 1935 Wittgenstein was having serious doubts about the value of philosophy, and was actively counseling his students to find a more "useful" line of work. Yet in 1938 he returned to Cambridge, becoming a Professor in 1939.

During the 1930s and 40s he wrote a great deal in the form of remarks, aphorisms, and fragments; but none of this work was published during his lifetime. A major part of what was to become his second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, was compiled by 1945, but was not published until 1953, two years after his death. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein criticized, and to a large extent rejected, the views developed in the Tractatus , specifically in developing a more "anthropological" and pragmatic view of language – and so we have the remarkable phenomenon of someone giving impetus to two major, and opposed, philosophical movements during his lifetime. Wittgenstein resigned his professorship in 1947, continuing to work on the Investigations and other projects until his death from prostrate cancer in April 1951. Throughout his career, Wittgenstein struggled with self-doubt about his worth as a philosopher and the value of philosophy itself; about his identity and moral character; and about his sexual and amorous relationships.

Wittgenstein is rarely considered an educational thinker per se. Except for a few comments and aphorisms, he wrote very little about the topic. But it is also clear that he thought very seriously about education. It is well-known, for example, that he taught in a highly idiosyncratic manner, and that for years after young philosophers at Cambridge mimicked his habits and style. It is less well-known that he taught in rural Austria during the "wilderness years" of the 20’s, during which time he wrote a school textbook. We have also been struck by Wittgenstein’s frequent use of pedagogical examples and analogies to make philosophical points in his writing. Indeed, we have argued elsewhere that Wittgenstein’s style of writing and doing philosophy is fundamentally pedagogical: that is, premised on teaching a way of thinking about philosophical problems or – in certain instances – on unlearning certain bad philosophical habits.

There are at least three ways, then, to explore Wittgenstein’s educational thought and practice: First, through his university teaching; second, through the accounts of his experiences as a primary and secondary school teacher in Austria; third, through his style of writing and composing his philosophical ideas, particularly in his later work.

(1) Much of what we have from Wittgenstein relies upon recollections or reconstructions of his teaching by his university students. Many of his posthumous "works" are actually transcriptions, discussions, course notes, or lectures recorded by his students and colleagues. His styles of teaching and thinking in performance, therefore, constitute a significant proportion of his extant works. These accounts of his teaching confirm his intensity of thinking and his honesty as a thinker and teacher. If he was unforgiving in his treatment of his students, it is because he was unforgiving with himself. The long painful silences that interspersed his classes, his disregard for institutional conventions in pedagogy, and his relentless criticism (and self-criticism) were an essential part of his teaching style.

Accounts of Wittgenstein as a teacher of philosophy are legendary. D.A.T. Gasking and A.C. Jackson report the following description Wittgenstein gave of his own teaching:

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times – each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.

This passage indicates Wittgenstein’s penchant for comparing doing philosophy with making a journey.

Gasking and Jackson focus on the "technique of oral discussion" Wittgenstein used, a technique they describe as, at first, bewildering:

Example was piled up on example. Sometimes the examples were fantastic, as when one was invited to consider the very odd linguistic or other behavior of an imaginary tribe....Sometimes the example was just a reminder of some well-known homely fact. Always the case was given in concrete detail, described in down-to-earth everyday language. Nearly every single thing said was easy to follow and was usually not the sort of thing anyone would wish to dispute.

The difficulty came from seeing where this "repetitive concrete" talk was leading. Sometimes he "would break off, saying, ‘Just a minute, let me think!’...or he would exclaim, ‘This is as difficult as hell.’’’ Sometimes the point of the many examples became suddenly clear as though the solution was obvious and simple. Gasking and Jackson report Wittgenstein as saying that he wanted to show his students that they had confusions that they never thought they could have and admonished them by saying, "You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it."

Karl Britton reports that Wittgenstein thought there was no test one could apply to discover whether a philosopher was teaching properly: "He said that many of his pupils merely put forward his own ideas: and that many of them imitated his voice and manner; but that he could easily distinguish those who really understood." Indeed, this degree of influence made Wittgenstein wonder whether he was a good teacher at all:

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me.

G.H. Von Wright, a far from unsympathetic observer, thought that Wittgenstein’s concern was well-founded:

He thought his influence as a teacher was, on the whole, harmful to the development of independent minds in his disciples....The magic of his personality and style was most inviting and persuasive. To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catchwords and even his tone of voice, his mien and gestures, was almost impossible.

Doing philosophy always took priority for Wittgenstein, whether this was in oral or written form: it was important to show the deep puzzles in our language (and our culture and thinking) as well as dissolving them. Doing philosophy let the fly out of the fly-bottle: it cured our buzzing confusion and allowed us to lead useful and practical lives. Wittgenstein said "a philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about.’" His style of teaching philosophy was designed to enable listeners to shift their thinking, to think differently about a problem, which was often in his view the only way to "solve" it. In this respect, one can teach only as a "guide."

(2) Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein’s primary biographers, devotes a chapter ("An Entirely Rural Affair") to Wittgenstein’s years as a school teacher during the 1920s. His account of Wittgenstein’s teaching service in the village schools of rural Austria paints Wittgenstein as a teacher with exacting standards and little patience, one who was given to violent outbursts against his students.

These are significant biographical details. Indeed, it is suggested by Fania Pascal that it was an episode in Wittgenstein’s career as a teacher that involved hitting one of his girl pupils (and which he later denied to the principal), that "stood out as a crisis of his early manhood" and caused him to give up teaching. Rhees, commenting upon this same episode, quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell: "how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!"

Monk describes Wittgenstein’s misgivings about Glöckel’s school reforms and the publication of Wittgenstein’s Wörterbuch für Volksschullen – a spelling dictionary – in 1925, and yet does not recognize the significance of Wittgenstein’s experiences as a school teacher for his later philosophy. William Bartley is one of the few scholars to devote any space to Wittgenstein’s development during the 1920s. His major historical claim is that there are "Certain similarities between some themes of Glöckel’s program and Bühler’s theories on the one hand, and ideas which infuse the later work of Wittgenstein." Otto Glöckel was administrative head of the socialist school-reform, which had attacked the old "drill" schools of the Hapsburgs based on passive rote learning and memorization, to argue for the establishment of the Arbeitsschule or "working school" based on the active participation of pupils and a doctrine of learning by doing. Bartley conjectures that the themes of the school-reform movement and, in particular, the views of Karl Bühler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, who was invited to Vienna by Glöckel and his colleagues in 1922, in large measure accounted for the profound change in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in the late 1920s. He bases this claim upon the "striking similarities" between their ideas and some historical circumstantial evidence. Bartley also provides some textual evidence; he quotes Wittgenstein in Zettel: "Am I doing child psychology?....I am making a connection between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning." He recounts a story that Wittgenstein used to tell his pupils in Trattenbach from 1921 concerning an experiment to determine whether children who had not yet learned to speak, locked away with a woman who could not speak, could learn a primitive language or invent a new language of their own. Bartley asks us, by way of corroboration, to consider that the Investigations begins with a critique of St. Augustine’s account of how a child learns a language.

Yet Bartley’s work has also been criticized. Eugene Hargrove, for instance, argues, with Paul Englemann, that it was the direct effect of Wittgenstein’s contact with children rather than the school reform movement or Bühler’s ideas that influenced Wittgenstein’s views about language:

I believe we can see the influence of Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher on almost every page of the Investigations, for there are very few pages in a row that do not make some reference to children. Throughout his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often supported the points he was making by citing personal observations about children. It is these observations, which he made as a school teacher and used as a pool of data later, that, as I see it, are the true influence on Wittgenstein’s work, and not principles taught at the teachers college or waved in his face by the school reformers.

C.J.B. Macmillan terms this Wittgenstein’s "pedagogical turn": "we often find him turning from a consideration of the meanings of a term or concept to ask, ‘How was this learned?’ or ‘How would you teach it?’"

(3) Wittgenstein’s way of "doing philosophy," as we have noted, differed from traditional attempts to do philosophy: it is aporetic but not Socratic; it is dialogical but not in the traditional philosophical sense. Wittgenstein writes, "Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing." Moreover, Wittgenstein expresses his impatience with the game of eristics:

Socrates keeps reducing the sophist to silence, – but does he have right on his side when he does this? Well, it is true that the sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can’t be a case of "You see! You don’t know it!"–nor yet, triumphantly, of "So none of us knows anything!"

Hence it should be no surprise that Wittgenstein says that his approach is the opposite of Socrates’. Where Socrates, professing his ignorance, sought to disabuse others of their mistaken beliefs, Wittgenstein, through his dialogical forms of teaching and writing, sought to externalize his own doubts and questions, showing the nature of certain problems as he tried to work them through in his own mind: "Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-à-tête." (Much the same might be said of his teaching, as we have tried to show.)

The Philosophical Investigations is Wittgenstein’s primary example of a dialogical work; yet clearly it is not dialogical in the sense established by Socrates. And judging by Wittgenstein’s comments on Socrates it is evident why the Investigations does not follow or try to emulate the Socratic form or method. While the Investigations is written in the form of a dialogue, it draws upon a repertoire of dialogical strategies and gestures. Terry Eagleton recognizes this when he calls the Investigations

a thoroughly dialogical work, in which the author wonders out loud, imagines an interlocutor, asks us questions which may or may not be on the level...forcing the reader into the work of self-demystification, genially engaging our participation by his deliberately undaunting style.

The Investigations self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of language-games and gestures it attempts to describe. It functions as an exemplary pedagogical text the aim of which is for Wittgenstein’s students to think these problems through for themselves (an aim, it must be said, which he did not feel had always been successful, as we have seen). Wittgenstein’s adoption of the dialogue form, along with his innovations with form and composition in writing, were part of his deliberate experimentation designed to shift our thinking. He certainly did not want his readers or audience to imitate him in either the forms or the contents of his thought. Nor did he think that there is only one way to "do" philosophy.

He agonized over the form of his work and he developed very complex methods of composition: "Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me....I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all." He wrote philosophical remarks or fragments, and sometimes referred to his procedure of composition as one of assemblage – philosophy "consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose."

Hence we see that the Investigations and later works are interspersed with frequent remarks that begin with asking us to "imagine," as in "Let us imagine a language..." and elsewhere. At other times he constructs this as "Suppose..." or "Think..." or "Ask yourself..." and so on. These thought experiments play a crucial substantive and stylistic role in the Investigations, and they are characteristic of a way of writing about philosophy that is more oriented to triggering a shift in thought than in demonstrating a proof; more to showing than to saying; more to pointing than to leading (note the frequent references in Wittgenstein’s later work to signposts, wandering through a city, being lost, needing a guide, finding one’s way about, and knowing how to go on). This is a conception of teaching, and teaching through writing, far different from the classic Socratic engagement of the Meno, one based on instruction along a specific path of reasoning to a definite conclusion.

Another recurring element in the Investigations is a question Wittgenstein asks to himself, posed by an imaginary interlocutor, with multiple possible answers or a hypothetical response, followed by his typical dissatisfied reply, "But...." Fann notes that Wittgenstein asks on the order of eight hundred questions in the Investigations, yet he only answers one hundred of them and of these the majority (some seventy) are answers that he pointedly rejects. Wittgenstein wants to stop us from asking certain kinds of questions: the sort of "philosophical" questions which require that we provide a theoretical answer abstracted from the context of use and social practice. Instead, his questions and replies serve as reminders, bringing us back to familiar aspects of human language and experience; the significance of the fact that we can identify the related members of a family, for example, even when they do not all share the same features in common.

This mode of dialogue, then, is not one of demonstration but of investigation. Wittgenstein’s use of imagined interchanges, thought experiments, diagrams, pictures, examples, aphorisms, or parables is meant to engage the reader in a process that was, in Wittgenstein’s teaching as well as in his writing, the externalization of his own doubts, his own questions, his own thought processes. His philosophical purpose was manifested, shown, in how he pursued a question; his style was his method, and his writings sought to exemplify how it worked. His concern with matters of form and composition were not only about the presentation of an argument, but about the juxtaposition that would best draw the reader into the very state of puzzlement he himself felt. An appreciation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical style leads us directly to an understanding of the fundamentally pedagogical nature of his endeavor.

Wittgenstein’s Primary Writings

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969)The Blue and Brown Books, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980) Culture and Value, G. H. Von Wright (Ed.) (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1979) On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) (3rd Ed. 1972).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1981) Zettel, 2nd Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 74.

Biographical Material on Wittgenstein

W.W. Bartley, III (1973) Wittgenstein (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott).

Paul Engelmann (1967) Letters from Wittgenstein with a memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Norman Malcolm (1984) Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

Brian McGuiness (1988) Wittgenstein: A Young Life, 1889-1921 (London: Duckworth)

Ray Monk (1991) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage).

Rush Rhees (ed.) Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press).

G.H. Von Wright (1982) Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell).

Secondary Sources on Wittgenstein

G.E.M. Anscombe (1971) An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

G.P. Baker & P.M.S. Hacker (1980) Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

G.P. Baker & P.M.S. Hacker (1985) Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Stanley Cavell (1979)The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

P.M.S. Hacker (1990) Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Allen Janik & Stephen Toulmin,(1973) Wittgenstein's Vienna (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson).

Anthony Kenney (1975) Wittgenstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

Saul A. Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).

H. Sluga and D.G. Stern, eds., (1996) The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Urban Social Processes in the U.S.

Descriptors:
Black Population Trends; Geographic Concepts; Ghettos; Metropolitan Areas; Negro Housing; Racial Segregation; Real Estate; Residential Patterns; Urban Problems

Abstract:
Focuses on the factors which influence black residential patterns in Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle; attempts to move a step beyond the traditional demographic projection of changing numbers in time to that of projecting the spatial locus of the population. (RJ)



Designed as supplementary material to undergraduate geography courses, this document focuses on a contemporary social problem and its relation to geography. The paper examines existing patterns of residential separation in which ethnic and racial groups--primarily black Americans--generally are spatially clustered in segments of urban space that frequently assume a territorial identification. The purpose is to explore the operation of forces that are responsible for patterns which are molded by both economic and social behavior. After an overview of the problem is in chapter 1, a brief history of the black ghetto as a legacy of the past is included in chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines urbanization of the early 1900s and its relation to ghetto formation. The location of urban space throughout the United States is explored in the fourth chapter, determining that the ghetto is a universal spatial configuration in large urban centers. The fifth chapter presents an explanation of the mechanism which produces such spatial patterns. It includes social, economic, and political variables. These variables are examined in relation to balck and white residential patterns in chapter 6. A list of references cited in the text concludes the document. (Author/JR)

Social Theory

Education and Social Theory Trevor PatemanAbstract: A survey of determinist, demystifying and voluntarist explanations of inequality of educational outcomes and the kinds of policy which have been proposed to address such educational inequality.
If one takes the term "socialization" to refer to the sum of practices by which new individuals are made into members of existing societies, then "education" is that subset of practices which have as their intended outcome particular kinds of more or less reflected upon shaping. More narrowly still, "education" is used as a synonym for schooling, specific institutional provision for the transmission of knowledge and skills, the development of competences and beliefs.
There is a pervasive background assumption in twentieth century social thought that socialization is the right way to characterize what transpires between new - that is, newborn - individuals and their societies, and that individuals are plastic to an indefinite number of kinds of shaping. Against this background, sociologists appear to have the straightforward descriptive task of characterising how different societies socialize individuals, and what they socialize them into. But if there are failures of socialization, as there are, it becomes hard(er) to sustain the idea of plasticity (cf. Hollis, 1977; Wrong 1977). For example, if individuals do differ innately in intelligence this will limit the possible success of any schooling system that provides equality of treatment in the expectation that this will produce equality of achievement.
Political commitments to achieving equality of opportunity, treatment and / or outcomes have inspired (and funded) innumerable research programmes and projects in twentieth century sociology. For example, in the context of a commitment to the view that schooling ought to enable social mobility by identifying talent and / or effort independently of social origins thus making talent and effort available (as `merit') as identifiable discriminators for occupational selection there have been a large number of studies of why origins and destinations remain obstinately linked, despite at least formal meritocratic commitments. Three kinds of resultant explanation may be distinguished, which can be labelled determinist, demystifying and voluntarist. The explanations are not mutually exclusive, though often presented as such.
Determinist Explanations. There are two kinds of determinists.
First, those who argue that individuals differ innately in intelligence and / or that groups (usually blacks and females, as against whites and males) differ on average in biologically determined intelligence and this explains outcome differences. The literature on this kind of determinism is both vast and vastly overrated, since very few if any policy conclusions are clearly derivable from it, whatever the truth of the matter is. For example, suppose some children just are cleverer than others. What follows about their education and the education of those who are less clever? Absolutely nothing, since the most obvious question to then ask is this: Should those who are cleverer get more / better education (to benefit the rest indirectly) or less (since they don't need it)? And nothing in the mere fact of difference helps settle this question. Most educational systems tacitly acknowledge difference and spend more both on those who they reckon cleverer and on those who are reckoned handicapped and identified as having special educational needs.
The second kind of determinist argues from society, rather than biology, showing how children come to school advantaged or burdened by their social (class, educational, status) background. Consequently, relative success and failure in school is determined by the assets or burdens children bring with them, and schooling itself cannot compensate for society the school is a causally less powerful agent than home or community (see Halsey et al., 1980).
The actual mechanisms of social determination are many and various. If at home there are no books, nowhere to study, no computer to produce elegant coursework, mum and dad are always arguing, the baby doesn't sleep, and your mates are always knocking on the door for a game of football well, what chance a good exam result in history?
Demystifying explanations. Schools are themselves social institutions, staffed by teachers whose precise social class or status has been the subject of considerable debate (see Ozga and Lawn, 1981). The reality of schools may, and in fact does, diverge from their rhetoric. So, for example, a formal commitment to equality of opportunity does not guarantee that a teacher treats girls and boys in such ways that both have equal chances of succeeding in that teacher's classroom. Indeed, the evidence is, overwhelmingly, that teachers male and female discriminate in their treatment of boys and girls in educationally significant ways (Stanworth, 1983). In addition, schools are shaped as institutions by the formal requirements of national and local governments, and informally shaped by the pressures exerted by parents, governors and local commerce or industry. The conjunction of formal requirements and informal pressures actually conspires to ensure that the recognition and reward of individual merit is only one of several conflicting goals which schools pursue. Schools also have a `hidden curriculum' (Snyder, 1971) which recognizes and rewards conformity to its norms of good behaviour and acceptable self presentation (see Ball, 1990). These norms are not neutral as between groups, but instead systematically discriminate by class and gender. So, to take a less than obvious example, at secondary school level the norm of neat handwriting used to favour girls, though the `reward' was actually acceptability for work which had low rewards, and moderate status, specifically clerical and secretarial employment. In that context - altered by the advent of the office organised around Information Technology - no girl in her right mind should have allowed herself to have neat handwriting.
In general, says the demystifying sociologist, schools are not `neutral' social locations, helpless in the face of `external' social determinations. Their own institutionally embedded practices shape outcomes differentiated by class, gender, ethnicity and other irrelevant discriminators
Voluntarist explanations. Both the determinist and the demystifier are, in effect, assuming not only the plasticity but also the passivity of the school pupil. But it may be that children are themselves active in shaping their own destinies, and from an early age. They have their own perceptions of their origins and aspirations towards social distinction: they want to be doctors, nurses and pop stars. They do or do not want to do the job their Dad does. In this context, teachers may or may not represent a status or set of values with which pupils can identify or to which they can aspire. And this is important because it can shape an orientation to the whole business of learning. In an influential study, Paul Willis (1977) argued that part of the explanation for the fact that working class kids get working-class jobs is simply that they want such jobs; they positively reject the more `white collar' culture of the school, which is not that of their families of origin. The way teachers behave and live (a subject of some fascination to most pupils) does not strike them as something to be copied or sought after.
Whatever mix of explanations is the right one, working class kids get working class jobs and girls end up doing women's work. Social and sexual mobility is always much less than anyone committed to equality of opportunity can be satisfied with. Detailed sociological work on the reproduction of a stratified labour force is offered within the British tradition by Halsey et al. (1980) and from an American Marxist perspective in Bowles and Gintis (1976).
Some have sought to ensure that schooling becomes a more powerful influence than origin. They have then proposed lengthening the period of compulsory schooling - a policy actually pursued in all countries throughout the twentieth century. Or they have tried to ensure that each school takes in some pupils at every level of ability - as in the comprehensive school system of the United Kingdom .And they have downgraded the culture of `useless' knowledge (Latin and Greek, for example), the main motive for the acquisition of which is, or would be, the desire to mark social distinction (see Bourdieu, 1979). In reality, the study of Latin and Greek has all but disappeared in many countries.
Against the background of such actually-implemented - but not always successful - policies, some have become critical of the institution of schooling itself. From the New Left, Ivan Illich argued in the very influential Deschooling Society (1971) that schools privilege certification over actual competence, unreasonably restrict the domain of what counts as worth learning, and prescribe restrictive and unhelpful modes of learning. When I originally wrote that last sentence (in 1991) it occurred to me that the next day my daughter would put on a new collar and tie without which she would not be allowed to learn anything. She was about to spend her first day at an ordinary English secondary comprehensive school.
The New Right has adapted to its own purposes some of the themes of the New Left critique of schooling, expressed as the idea of producer capture. Teachers (the 'producers') have set their own agendas for schools when it should be parents (the 'consumers') who set agendas for teachers. The New Right then argues for breaking up schooling monopolies and for enfranchizing the consumer.
Both New Left and New Right thinking is at odds with those central, social democratic and liberal democratic conceptions such as John Dewey's (1966) which see schooling as a leading institution in the creation of a just, democratic and unified society. And within the Marxist tradition, Antonio Gramsci expresses positive approval of the kind of traditional schooling system of which he was an individual beneficiary (Entwistle, 1979). Gramsci's case should also serve to make us aware that while sociologists have generally occupied themselves with explaining why children fail at school, there is also another interesting research question which asks why certain children, who ought by all sociological accounts to fail, actually succeed in the most unlikely circumstances. There are very few schooling systems which cannot boast their poor boys made good. A biographical approach to the study of their success may highlight factors overlooked in macrosociological approaches to the study of education. (For rather different uses of a biographical approach, see Hoggart, 1957, and Lacey, 1970.)
Bibliography Ball, S. J. ed, 1990 Foucault and Education London:Routledge
Bourdieu, P. 1979 Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste London: Routledge
Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert 1976: Schooling in Capitalist America. London: Routledge
Dewey, J. 1966 Selected Educational Writings ed F W Garforth London: Heinemann
Entwistle, H. 1979 Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics. London: Routledge
Halsey, A.H., Heath, A. and Ridge, J.M. 1980: Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Hoggart, R. 1957 The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus
Hollis, M 1977 Models of Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Illich, Ivan 1971: Deschooling Society. London: Calder and Boyars
Lacey, C. 1970 Hightown Grammar. Manchester University Press
Ozga, J and Lawn, M. 1981 Teachers, Professionalism and Class. Barcombe: Falmer Press
Snyder, B. 1971 The Hidden Curriculum. New York: Knopf
Stanworth, M. 1983 Gender and Schooling. London: Hutchinson
Willis, Paul 1977: Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House
Wrong, D. 1977 "The Oversocialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology". In his collection of essays, Skeptical Sociology. London: Heinemann
Originally written 1991 and published in W Outhwaite and T Bottomore, eds. The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1993), pages 188 - 190. Reprinted in the second edition of the Dictionary, edited by William Outhwaite (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 2002). Lightly revised 2002 for this website version; the original material reproduced by permission of William Outhwaite and the copyright holder, Basil Blackwell. Standard restrictions on any further re-publication apply.

Wittgenstein

The Global City:
People, Production, and Planning in the Third World
(City and Regional Planning: CRP 101)

Ben Kohl
bk20@cornell.edu
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Spring 2001
This course is also available online at
http://www.crp.cornell.edu/courses/spring2001/CRP101/CRP101syll.htm


SYLLABUS
Note: Syllabus is subject to change
(See below for Ben Kohl's Comments On Teaching This Course).

Course Description
This course provides an introduction to international urban studies, focusing on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We begin with basic questions about the nature of cities and different approaches to studying cities and urbanization. We then explore factors driving urban growth and how this growth affects urban environments. We then examine questions of social organization and governance. In the final section of the course we address topics related to planning and the future of the city.

We meet for two lectures and one section per week.

Readings
Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler, Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, 2nd ed., 1992, and a reading packet, available at KC Copy. We will place a copy of The City Reader as well as copies of the individual chapters on reserve in the Fine Arts Library.

Optional Texts
URS students should buy Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, 2nd ed., 2000.
All students should have a writing guide. I have ordered Jan Venolia, Wright Right, for those of you who do not already have a guide you like.



Expectations and Evaluation
We expect you will do all the readings and attend all lectures and sections. As we are a relatively large class, we will also have a web-based classroom discussion board for your comments and questions on readings, lectures, and sections. Your contributions to the discussion board will contribute to your grade on participation. We will often give 'quizzes' to see how you interpret the major concepts from the readings and the lectures. In addition, we will assign two short papers, an in-class midterm, a take-home final, and a course review and evaluation. We will not accept late assignments.

Evaluation
20% Attendance at lectures, contributions to the discusion board, and participation in sections
10% In-class quizzes
20% In-class midterm
20% Short papers (10% each)
25% Final take-home exam
5% In-class evaluation and course review
Website
Become familiar with the website (http://courseinfo.cit.cornell.edu/courses/crp101/). During the first three weeks of class please 'enroll' in the class website. We will not do this for you. If you are not familiar with the use of "CourseInfo" please let us know.



PART I: URBANIZATION AS A GLOBAL PROCESS

INTRODUCTION: CITIES IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD

We define the scope of the course. Why are we interested in cities and urbanization? Are cities becoming more alike? How can we study cities? How are cities in ‘developing’ countries different from those in ‘developed’ countries?
Key words: urban, urbanization, urbanism.

Review syllabus, urban, urbanization, and urbanism
(Monday, January 22)

Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler, Cities, "Introduction," pp. 1-13 in Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, 1992 (Gilbert and Gugler)
What is urbanization and how can we study it? Cities as things, cities as processes.
(Wednesday, January 24)
Read Harvey's piece closely. What does he mean when he writes of a 'process thing' relationship?
David Clark, "Global Patterns and Perspectives," pp. 1-11, in Urban World/Global City, 1996
David Harvey, "Contested Cities: Social process and spatial form," pp. 19-27, in N. Jewson and S. McGregor, eds., Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, 1997
Mumford, Lewis "What is a City?" pp. 92-96 in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, in 2nd ed., 2000 (LeGates and Stout)
Sections. Introductions and interests
(Friday, January 26)
Understanding Cities in Developing Countries Cities in developing countries share many of the same characteristics as those in developed countries. They are centers of economic and social processes that affect areas well beyond their borders. Yet they also are fundamentally different from cities in richer countries. What do we mean when we talk about developed and underdeveloped countries?
Keywords: development, underdevelopment, dependent urbanization, colonialism

Dependency and Dependent Urbanization
(Monday, January 29)
Frank, Andre Gunder, "The Development of Underdevelopment," pp. 17-31, Monthly Review 18(4), 1966
Hymer, Stephen, "Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation," pp. 11-36, Monthly Review, September, 1971
Video: Children of the Miracle
(Wednesday, January 31)
This video provides a window into the lives of the urban poor in Brazil, the country with the 10th largest economy in the world. How do the images compare with Engels’ description of life for the British working class?
Frederich Engels "The Great Towns," pp. 46-53, in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, 1996
Gilbert and Gugler, "Urban Development in a World System," pp. 14-32
Early Cities
(Friday, February 2) Section
Cities existed before the industrial revolution. Then, as now, developments in urban design occurring in one part of the world affected what happened in other parts of the world.

Early Cities
(Monday, February 4)
Gilbert and Gugler, "Urban Agglomeration and Regional Disparities," pp. 33-61
Early Cities
(Wednesday, February 6)
Jacques Gernet, "Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion: 1250-1276," in Janet Abu-Lughod and Richard Hay, Jr., eds. "Introduction," pp. 1-13, in Third World Urbanization, 1977
Sections
(Friday, February 9)
Hand out first assignment, due Feb. 16 (3-4 pages).

NOTE: This is the last day to add a class or a section. Please be sure you are enrolled.


PART II: URBAN GROWTH

MIGRATION AND POPULATION GROWTH

Changes in the population of a city are the answer to the following equation:
(births + immigration) - (deaths + emigration)

In developing countries rural to urban migration accounts for about 40% of urban growth. The other 60% of urban population growth come from natural increase (births-deaths). Some of the rapid growth of cities is also due to improved health and public services (water and sewerage). Birth rates in Europe have fallen below replacement levels and immigrants, often from developing countries, are beginning to decline, which will lead to aging populations and a new set of problems for urban centers. Aging populations in developed countries have demanded labor that has led to increases in transnational migration.
Keywords: urban bias, migration, remittances, demographic transition

Urban Bias
(Monday, February 12)
Lipton, Michael, "Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development," pp. 40-51 in The Urbanization of the Third World, Josef Gugler, ed., 1st ed., 1988
Gilbert and Gugler, "The Urban-Rural Interface and Migration," pp. 62-86
Migration
(Wednesday, February 14)
GUEST SPEAKER, Terry Plater
Nigel Harris, "The Sweated Trades in Developing Countries," pp. 56-84, in The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker, 1995
Sections. Urban Economies
(Friday, February 16)
First assignment due.
Keywords: formal and informal economy, globalization


UNEVEN URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Uneven urban development
(Monday, February 19)
Mike Savage and Alan Warde, "Cities and Uneven Economic Development," pp. 264-77, in LeGates and Stout
Gibert and Gugler, "The Urban Labour-Market." pp. 87-113
Formal and informal sector
(Wednesday, February 21)
Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, "World Underneath: the Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy," in A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. Benton, The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, 1989
Section. Informal Sector
(Friday, February 23)
Lea Jellinek, "Displaced by Modernity: The Saga of a Jakarta Street-Trader’s Family from the 1940s to the 1990s," pp. 139-155, in Josef Gugler, ed. Cities in the Developing World, 2nd ed., 1997
HOUSING AND SEGREGATION

Housing
(Monday, February 26)
Gibert and Gugler, "The Housing of the Urban Poor," pp. 114-54
Video. "On Borrowed Land"
(Wednesday, February 28)
Reading to be added.

Housing And Segregation
(Friday, March 2)


PART III: INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

INFRASTRUCTURE

Transportation
(Monday, March 5)
Jonas Rabinovitch and Josef Leitman, "Urban Planning in Curitiba," pp. 46-53, Scientific American, March 1996
Eduardo Vasconcellos, "The Making of the Middle Class City: Transportation policy in Sao Paulo," pp. 293-310, Environment and Planning A, v. 29
Telecommunications
(Wednesday, March 7)
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, "The Transformation of Cities," pp. 568-78, in LeGates and Stout
Section.
(Friday, March 9)


URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Urban Environment
(Monday, March 12)
"Let Them Eat Pollution," Feb. 15, pp. 17-9, The Economist 1992
Alexander Stille, "The Ganges' Next Life," pp. 58-67, The New Yorker, Jan. 19, 1998
Kirk Smith and Yok-Shui Lee, "Urbanization and the environmental Risk Transition," pp. 161-179, in John Kasarda and Alan Powell, Third World Cities, Problem, Policies and Prospects, 1993
EXAM
(Wednesday, March 14)

Section
(Friday, March 16)
Opadawala and Goldmsith, "The Sustainability of Privilege, Reflections on the Environment, the Third World City, and Poverty," pp. 627-40, World Development, 20(4)
SPRING BREAK
(MARCH 17-25)


PART IV: SOCIAL CONTROL, CITIZENSHIP, AND GOVERNANCE

CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship
(Monday, March 26)
Reading to be added.
T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," pp. 93-111, in Gershon Shair, ed. The Citizenship Debates, 1998
Street kids
(Wednesday, March 28)
Scheper-Hughes "Street Kids," Worldview, pp. 15-24, 10(1)
Gilbert and Gugler, "Social Organization in the City," pp. 155-176
Section
(Friday, March 30)

International Institutions and Urban Policy
(Monday, April 2)
Reading to be added.
John Williamson, "The Washington Consensus," pp. 1329-36, World Development, 21(18)
International Institutions and Urban Policy
(Wednesday, April 4)
Reading to be added.

Section
(Friday, April 6)
GOVERNING

Participatory budgeting
(Monday, April 9)
Rebecca Abers, "From Ideas to Practice," pp. 35-53, Latin American Perspectives, 23(4) 1996
Decentralization and planning
(Wednesday, April 11)
Reading to be added.
Ben Kohl, "Decentralization and Privatization in Bolivia," 2000, photocopy
Section
(Friday, April 13)
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Social Movements
(Monday, April 16)
Amy Lind, "Gender, Development and Urban Social Change: Women's Community Action in Global Cities," pp. 1205-23, World Development, 25(8)
Gilbert and Gugler, "Pattern of Political Integration and Conflict," pp. 177-219
Social Movements
(Wednesday, April 18)
Castells, Manuel, "Squatters and the State," pp. 338-66, in Gugler, ed. 1st. ed.
Vivienne Bennett, "Gender, Class and Water: The Role of Women in the Protests over Water," pp. 106-27, in The Politics of Water, 1995
Section
(Friday, April 20)
Hand out assignment two, due April 27 (3-4 pages).


PART V: PLANNING AND THE FUTURE OF THE CITY

PLANNING

Planning
(Monday, April 23)
Lisa Peattie, "The Production of False Consciousness," pp. 153-71, in Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana, 1987
James Scott, "The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique," pp. 103-146, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998
Planning
(Wednesday, April 25)
Gilbert and Gugler, "Urban and Regional Systems: A Suitable Case for Treatment?" pp. 220-62
Section
(Friday, April 27)
Second assignment due


URBAN FUTURES

Panel discussion on urban futures. TBA.
(Monday, April 30)


David Clark, "Urban Futures," pp. 579-589, in LeGates and Stout
Panel discussion on urban futures. Part II. TBA.
(Wednesday, May 2)

Section
(Friday, May 4)
In-class evaluation exercise.
Note: The exercise in this class will account for 5% of your grade.


Ben Kohl's Comments On Teaching This Course
This course is the second course of a two semester introductory sequence for undergraduate students in Urban Studies. This course meets twice a week as a lecture course with about 50 students and once a week in discussion sections with 16 students. About 60% of the students are from Urban Studies, with the remainder coming from across the university, using the class to fulfill general distribution requirements.

The course presented here requires students to read 100 pages a week of demanding material and was successful as designed only because of the caliber of the students. In many universities the reading might be more appropriate for an intermediate course. The students complained about the text by Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler, Cities, Poverty And Development: Urbanization In The Third World, 2nd ed., 1992, and I don't think I would use it again. Unfortunately, I haven't found a text I like better and would welcome other suggestions.



Syllabus copyright ©2001 Ben Kohl. All rights reserved.
Permission to copy and use under "fair use" in education is granted, provided proper credit is given.

Urban Social Processes in the Third World

Third World Urbanization
(City and Regional Planning: CRP 474/674)

Ben Kohl
bk20@cornell.edu
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Fall 2000



SYLLABUS

(See below for Ben Kohl's Comments On Teaching This Course).

Course Description
This course explores trends in urbanization, focusing on Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. We first look at the nature of cities and explore different theoretical approaches to understanding cities and urbanization. We ground the theoretical issues through an examination of Brasilia, one of the models of modernist development, and compare it with other cities around the world. We then examine a range of topics that include how a city’s design affects the social lives, how global economic systems affect cities, how urban social movements have responded to economic and cultural globalization, and how global trends in decen tralization affect residents of cities around the world. During the second half of the semester we read texts selected by students that are relevant to their research projects.

Readings
During the second half of the semester students will chose readings which reflect their research interests, to complement the assigned texts.
Readings include a number of articles in addition to the following texts:
David Clark
Urban World/Global City
Lisa Peattie
Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana
James Holston
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, 1989
David A. Smith
Third World Cities in Global Perspective, 1996 (optional)
Requirements and Evaluation
You must attend class and participate in discussions. I expect you to read and think about the texts before class and have assigned a number of reading responses to ensure that you read closely. I have assigned a number of intermediate assignments - abstract or problem statement, annotated bibliography or literature review -- that will help you prepare the final paper. As I believe that any piece of writing should undergo a number of drafts and that learning to read critically the work of others helps develop writing skills, I require you to turn in a draft of your paper for peer review. I do not expect you to act as a copy editor or write a paper for a fellow student; I do, however, expect you to critically engage the ideas of your peers. The final evaluation serves as an opportunity for you to reflect on the semester as well as for me to improve the course. Your final grade will be based on the following criteria.

GRADING CRITERIA
25% attendance and participation in discussions
25% a research project
problem statement due Oct. 2
draft due Nov. 20
final paper due Dec. 4

undergraduate students: 2-3000 words
graduate students: 3-4000 words

15% annotated bibliography or a literature review (due Oct. 23)
10% presentations of readings and research results
10% weekly reading responses (3-600 words)
10% peer review of a research paper or case study (due Nov. 27)
5% final evaluation of the class (due Nov. 27)



ASSIGNMENTS AND CLASS SCHEDULE
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
(Week 1, August 28)
What is urbanization and how can we study it? Why study cities in low- and middle- income countries? What is urbanization and how does it differ in richer and poorer countries? Is there a ‘natural’ form that cities should take? How do events in Los Angeles shape cities in Brazil?
Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince and the Discourses," pp. 19-21, in Abu-Lughod and Hay, Third World Urbanization
Frederich Engels "The Great Towns," pp. 46-57, from the Condition of the Working Class, in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, 1996
Edward Soja, "It all comes together in LA," in Postmodern Geographies, 1989
David Clark, "Global Patterns and Perspectives," pp. 1-11, Urban World/Global City, 1996
Janet Abu-Lughod and Richard Hay, Jr., "Introduction," pp. 1-13, in Third World Urbanization, 1977
James Holston, "Blueprint Utopia," pp. 31-41, in The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, 1989
Kevin Lynch, "What is the Form of a City and How Is It Made?" pp. 37-50 in Good City Form, 1981

CITIES AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
(Week 2, September 4)
Clark’s short book serves as a good introduction to study cities within a global context. We will discuss the major issues and use La Paz, Bolivia, a capital city in a peripheral country, as an example.
David Clark, Urban World/Global City, 1996
David A. Smith, Third World Cities in Global Perspective, pp. 1-45 (optional), 1996
Assignment:
Reading response, 250 words. Do not restate the reading but use it to help frame a question that you will bring to the discussion. You may use this assignment as an opportunity to introduce yourself to the class and let us know what questions you would like to address during the semester. Post your response to the course website and bring three copies to class.


THEORIZING URBANIZATION
(Week 3, September 11)
A number of different theoretical approaches can be used to understand urbanization. This week’s readings reflect a range of these approaches. One challenge for the class will be to apply some of these approaches to the study of cities outside of North America and Europe. A second challenge will be to link theories based on the analysis of global systems to specific cities.
David Harvey, "Contested Cities: Social process and spatial form," pp. 19-27, in N. Jewson and S. McGregor, eds., Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, 1997
John Browder and Brian Godfrey, "Theoretical Perspectives on Frontier Urbanization: Toward an Urban Systems Approach," pp. 20-54, in Rainforest Cities, Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, 1997
Michael Leaf, "Habitat II and the Globalization of Ideas," pp. 71-78, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17, 1998
Smith, Third World Cities, pp. 39-46, pp. 47-168 (optional)
Edward Soja, "Metropolis in Crisis," pp. 95-116, in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions, 2000
Michael Dear, "Introduction," pp. 1-9, and "Taking Los Angeles Seriously," pp. 10-24, in The Postmodern Urban Condition, 2000
Reread Lynch from week 1
Assignment:
Reading response.


THE CITY IN HISTORY
(Week 4, September 18)
Cities are not twentieth century inventions. This week we retrace our steps and look at the growth of cities through the 19th century. We see that many of the earliest ‘global’ cities -- Beijing, Cairo, Istanbul, and Cuzco -- are in what is now considered the developing world. Many cities in developing countries were built as part of European colonial expansion.
James C. Scott, Chapter 2. "Cities, People, and Language," pp. 53-83, in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998
Jacques Gernet, "Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion: 1250-1276," in Abu-Lughod and Richard Hay, eds.
Dora Crouch, Daniel Garr, and Axel Mundigo, "City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies," pp. 1-47, in Spanish City Planning in North America, 1982
Henri Pirenne, "City Origins and Cities and European Civilization," pp. 37-45 in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, [1925] 1996
Eric Wolf, "The World in 1400," pp. 24-73, in Europe and the People without History, 1982 (optional)
Recommended: Gordon Childe, "The Urban Revolution," pp. 20-30, in LeGates and Stout

PLANNED CITIES AND CITY PLANNING
(Week 5, September 25)
In some places, the design and construction of cities in developing countries has taken the form of monumental architecture. In Latin America, Ciudad Guayana and Brasilia were both constructed as civilizing, nation-building projects. These cities were conceived as model western cities to be built in the wilderness. In both cases, the visions of the planners and architects were not compatible with the economic and social needs of many of the cities’ residents who have actively reshaped both cities.
Lisa Peattie, Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana, 1987
James Holston, "Blueprint Utopia," pp. 31-58, in The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, 1989
Leaf, Michael L. "Urban Planning and Urban Reality Under Chinese Economic Reforms," Journal of Planning Education and Research, 18, pp. 145-153, 1998

PART I. STREETS FOR LIVING AND MOVING
(Week 6. October 2)
We use Brasilia as our case. Holston’s book serves to raise certain questions about urbanization. We complement his work with readings from cities in other parts of the world. In following weeks I will ask you to bring in material from your research projects to compare with the Brazilian experience. As Holston does not address some topics of importance -- urban environments, for example -- we deal with those separately.

One feature of a ‘modern’ city is that streets are designed for cars not for people. The implications of this type of change affect every aspect of urban life. The three readings on Brazil present different perspectives on designing transportation systems in fast growing urban areas.
Holston, Chapter 4, "The Death of the Street," pp. 99-144
Eduardo Vasconcellos, "The making of the middle class city: transportation policy in Sao Paulo," pp. 293-310, Environment and Planning, A 29
Meschack Khosa, "Transport and popular struggles in Africa," pp. 167-88, Antipode 27(2) 1995
Jonas Rabinovitch, "Innovative land use and public transport policy: the Case of Curitiba, Brazil," pp. 51-67, Land Use Policy, Vol. 13, no. 1, 1996
Fumihiko Saito, "A Continuing Role for Rickshaws in Dhaka, Bangladesh," pp. 281-293, Canadian Journal of Development Studies Vol. 14, No. 2, 1993
Amrita Daniere, "Transportation Planning and Implementation in Cities of the Third World: the Case of Bangkok," pp. 25-45, Government and Policy Vol. 13(1), 1995
Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler, "The Urban-Rural Interface and Migration," pp. 62-86, in Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, 2nd ed., 1992
Additional readings to be assigned
Assignments:
Problem statement for research project.


THE CITY IN HISTORY
Part II. Mid-semester Review
The mid-semester review will help us plot the course for the second half of the semester. I have included some readings and will add others, but, in general, I expect you to take an increasingly active role in shaping the remaining classes. In weeks 7-10 we will continue to parallel Holston’s book. I have, however, left room for you to contribute to the readings on these topics. In the final three weeks we will address topics to be determined by the class.

Students who have not presented readings in weeks 7-10 will work in groups to design the final classes. The group responsible for a particular class will need to meet with me and agree on readings and have a complete set of readings ready to be distributed one week in advance. (Ex. Readings for Nov. 6 must be handed out on Oct. 30. Students should define the agenda and then schedule an appointment with me the week of Oct. 23.)


FALL BREAK
Projects and case studies should be approved before break.


WORKING AND LIVING
(Week 7, October 16)
Holston, "Typologies of Order, Work, and Resistance," pp. 145-96
Lea Jellinek, "Displaced by Modernity: The Saga of a Jakarta Street-Trader’s Family from the 1940s to the 1990s," pp. 139-155, in Josef Gugler, ed. Cities in the Developing World, 1997
Carole Rakodi, "Housing Markets in Third World Cities: Research and Policy in the 1990s," pp. 39-55, in World Development 20(1) 1992
Other readings to be assigned.

CITIES AND CITIZENS
(Week 8, October 23)
T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," pp. 93-111, in Gershon Shair, ed. The Citizenship Debates, (1949) 1998
Holston, "Rights to the City," pp. 197-255
Janet Abu-Lughod, "Contemporary Relevance of the Islamic City," pp. 11-36, in Hooshang Amirahmadi and Salah S. El-Shakhs eds., Urban Development in the Muslim World, 1993
Other readings to be assigned.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
(Week 9, October 30)
Holston, "Cities of Rebellion," pp. 257-88
Other readings to be assigned.

PRODUCTION AND THE FORMAL AND INFORMAL SECTORS
(Week 10, November 6)
Holston, "The Brazilianization of Brasilia," pp. 289-318
Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, "World Underneath: the Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy, in A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. Benton, The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, 1989
Other readings to be assigned.
Assignment (optional):
Outline of research project.


URBAN ENVIRONMENTS
(Week 11, November 13)
Kirk R. Smith and Yok-Shiu F. Lee, "Urbanization and the Environmental Risk Transition," pp. 161-179, in John Kasarda and Alan Parnell, Third World Cities, Problems, Policies and Prospects, 1993
Daniel T. Sicular, "Pockets of Peasants in Indonesian Cities: The Case of Scavengers," pp. 137-161, World Development 19(2/3) 1991
Other readings to be assigned.
Assignment:
Working draft of research project.


GOVERNANCE AND DECENTRALIZATION (subject to change)
(Week 12, November 20)
Readings to be assigned.
Assignment due:
Peer review of drafts.


STUDENT PRESENTATIONS
(Week 13, November 27)
Note: We may have to schedule an extra session to allow all students to present their work.
Readings to be assigned.
Assignment:
Papers due Dec. 4.


Comments by Ben Kohl On Teaching This Course

This course is offered as part of the graduate program in City and Regional Planning and is one of the recommended courses for the International Studies in Planning stream. The course was designed to help students understand the processes related to urbanization. The course attracts 12-18 (mostly non US) graduate students with international interests from Planning, Rural and Development Sociology, and Anthropology and is offered alternate years.

I structured the course as a seminar and required students both to write weekly reading reports and present the readings in class. We began this the first class during which, after a brief presentation, I distributed a number of short readings and divided the students into groups to discuss the material and then present their findings to the group. That exercise served to set the tone for the course. Given the diversity of the students -- two-thirds were non-native English speakers - I assumed that few students would do all the readings. To ensure the basis for discussion, students were responsible for reading the reviews posted by their peers.

I taught this course only once and would change the readings if I were to do it again for the same student body. I organized the middle section of the course around Holston's study of Brazilia, The Modernist City. The students, with little preparation in anthropology, found the book very difficult.

During the last four weeks of the semester students took responsibility for identifying and presenting readings related to their research topics.

br> Syllabus copyright ©2000 Ben Kohl. All rights reserved.
Permission to copy and use under "fair use" in education is granted, provided proper credit is given.