The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence
and greed. Political awareness was made a precondition for personal
survival and advancement. The clock was turned back.
Weber's "Homo Economicus" yielded to communism's supercilious version
of the ancient Greeks' "Zoon Politikon". John of Salisbury might as
well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he
penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people
with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if
they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to
countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring
about the ruin of the body as a whole". The body in the text being the
body politic.
This inimical attitude should have come as no surprise to students of
either urban realities or of communism, their parricidal off-spring.
The city liberated its citizens from the bondage of the feudal labour
contract. And it acted as the supreme guarantor of the rights of
private property. It relied on its trading and economic prowess to
obtain and secure political autonomy. John of Paris, arguably one of
the first capitalist cities (at least according to Braudel), wrote:
"(The individual) had a right to property which was not with impunity
to be interfered with by superior authority - because it was acquired
by (his) own efforts" (in Georges Duby, "The age of the Cathedrals: Art
and Society, 980-1420, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1981).
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