Powers of Decision

Abstract

The forces busy binding the world together are not thereby binding up its divisions. The wealth that market capitalism creates and spreads generates much else besides, and the sociability implicit in globalization is no guarantor of solidarity. Rousseau’s cardinal observation was that mutual dependence in confined circumstances stimulates conflict. Proximity is a recipe for friction and it is to put paid to the wretchedness this occasions that government of almost any kind comes as a relief. Although he wrote before industrialism and improved communications produced the great concentrations of modern urban life, the dense policing that is now a commonplace of large cities suggests he was right to urge that living huddled together in large numbers results in living under powerful government. Perhaps because cities are fulcrums of wealth and imaginative activity, they need most ruling. Abrasiveness and creativity are disorderly.