Citizens’ agora
The new urban question
andy merrifield
What would Rousseau, who penned his classic Dis-
course on Inequality in 1755, have made of things
today? Had he still been around, had he travelled
around the globe a bit, he’d have doubtless despaired of
how little ‘civilized’ society had ameliorated the ‘arti-
ficial’ inequalities that derive from the conventions that
govern us. Maybe he’d have also played a cameo role
in a new documentary, Inequality for All, directed by
Jacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as the
unlikely lead.1 Already a big hit at the 2013 Sundance
Film Festival, Inequality for All follows Reich teach-
ing his packed undergraduate class on Wealth and
Poverty at the University of California, Berkeley. In
1978, says Reich, your typical male worker doing just
fine in the USA was pulling in around $48,000 a year;
your boss back then was probably making around
$390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the former
struggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the latter’s
average share has bloated to well over a million bucks
a year. ‘Where America leads’, Reich says, ‘the rest of
the world follows. This same thing is affecting people
all over the world. If nothing is done to reverse this
trend, Britain will find itself in exactly the same place
as America in just a few years’ time.’ Indeed, as at
December 2010, 10 per cent of the fattest cats in the
UK own 40 per cent of the national wealth; and Royal
Bank of Scotland bankers, after finagling Libor interest
rates and suffering losses for 2012 of £5.2 billion, now
award themselves bonuses in excess of £600 million.
Never before has growth – especially urban growth
– depended so centrally on the creation of new mecha-
nisms to wheel and deal finance capital and credit
money, on new deregulated devices, underwritten by
the state, for looting and finagling, for absorbing
surplus capital into real-estate speculation. These days
capital accumulation predicates itself not so much on
production as such but on dispossession, on expro-
priation. 2 In the nineteenth century, Baron Haussmann
tore into central Paris, into its poor neighbourhoods,
dispatching denizens to the periphery as he speculated
on the centre; the built urban form became simultane-
ously a property machine and a means to divide and
rule. Nowadays, neo-Haussmannization is a process
that likewise integrates financial, corporate and state
interests, yet tears into the whole globe and seizes land
through forcible slum clearance and a handy vehicle for
dispossession known as ‘eminent domain’, wherein the
public sector expropriates land and then gives it away
for upscale private reappropriation, letting private eco-
nomic interests cash in on what is legalized looting.
In our nouveau régime that Reich evokes in
Inequality for All an upper bourgeoisie has risen to
such prominence, has accumulated such wealth and
power, that now they assume the mantle of a new
aristocracy, an astonishingly rich, new-monied group
of people who behave like a class of old feudal lords,
presiding not only over particular companies, but over
entire national and supra-international governments
as well. At the same time, a big chunk of the middle
ground has caved in, imploded, meaning middling
types have slipped into the ranks of the sans-culottes,
finding it ever more difficult to make ends meet. In
the process, the top 1 per cent has decoupled itself
from the rest of us and has become the parasitic bearer
of merchant and rentier capital, filching profits from
unequal exchanges and interest-bearing assets, as well
as claims to absolute rent from class-monopoly control
of urban land.
From the city to la cité
In one of the great works on the French Revolution,
The Sans-culottes (1968), Albert Soboul points to the
influence Rousseau exerted on the popular revolution-
ary throng, even if few had actually read his texts. Yet
the sans-culottes weren’t a class as such, Soboul says:
instead they comprised artisans and small shopkeepers,
modest merchants and ‘journeymen [and women] day
labourers – along with a bourgeois minority’; 3 those,
32
we might say, who’ve slipped into the popular ranks
and are now, in our day, beginning to know it. The
sans-culottes represented an irresistible force, says
Soboul, undergirding a coalition collectively conscious
of a common aristocratic enemy; they propped up a
strategic alliance that recognized a common revolution-
ary project. Today insurrection must rid itself of a new
aristocracy without a liberal bourgeoisie stepping in in
its stead. Any new revolutionary movement against our
economic absolutism needs a sans-culottes leading the
way. A passionate desire for equality might cue this
militancy, drafting, en route, a new social contract. It
is, however, the question of what kind of social contract
this might be that I want to address here.
In The Social Contract (1762), near the end of the
‘Social Compact’ (pacte social) section, there’s a
footnote added by the author. In it, Rousseau qualifies
what he means by the idea (and ideal) of citizen, of how
it embodies a particular territorial disposition, and how,
‘in modern times’, ‘the real meaning of the word has
been almost wholly lost’. 4 The footnote has one of the
most famously quotable lines from The Social Con-
tract: ‘houses make a town, but citizens make a city’.
(The most famously quotable, of course, is the opening
refrain: ‘humans are born free; and everywhere they’re
in chains.’) The notion that ‘houses make a town, but
citizens make a city’ is the standard English riff on
Rousseau’s original French, passed down the historical
line, unchanged and unchallenged. The phrase gets pre-
ceded by this musing: ‘most people mistake a town for
a city, and a townsman for a citizen’. 5 Yet, in our own
modern times there’s something woefully inadequate
about this translation; and Rousseau’s concern about
losing the real meaning of citizen seems more presci-
ent than even he might have ever imagined. Worse, the
standard translation hints at a certain bourgeois reap-
propriation and makes Rousseau’s radical text sound a
lot less radical than it still might be. So let’s consider
his original text more closely: ‘la plupart prennent une
ville pour une cité, et un bourgeois pour un citoyen.
Ils ne savent pas que les maisons font la ville, mais
que les citoyens font la cité.’6 These two sentences, it’s
true, pose difficulty for any Anglo translator. Not least
because the word ‘town’ doesn’t really exist in French:
petite ville is often its everyday usage, a small city,
but Rousseau isn’t using the word petite ville; he says,
quite clearly, ville. On the other hand, cité has no direct
equivalent in English. And yet, if we move beyond
semantics and get into the spirit of Rousseau’s intended
meaning, the standard translation might satisfy politi-
cal scientists and philosophers, but it can no longer be
acceptable for radical political urbanists.
For a start, ‘town’ is a much too archaic term, and
a much too limited (and redundant) political jurisdic-
tion to have meaning for a contemporary reader; and
so, too, is ‘city’ a problematic basis for a ‘modern’
concept of citizenship. Cité, though, does continue to
speak politically, yet only if its domain is reconsidered
imaginatively, perhaps even normatively. In that sense,
here’s how a contemporary urbanist, a contemporary
philosopher of the urban, might recalibrate Rousseau:
‘the majority [of people] take a city for the cité and a
bourgeois for a citizen.’ (Rousseau, we might note, uses
the politically charged ‘bourgeois’ not benign ‘towns-
man’.) He continues: people ‘don’t know that houses
make a city, but citizens make a cité’. I’ve left this
notion of cité untranslated for the moment, because it’s
the part that needs a refreshed vocabulary, a contem-
porary reloading. And this is what I’d like to propose
and develop as a working hypothesis: ‘the majority [of
people] take a city for the cité, and a bourgeois for a
citizen. They don’t know that houses make a city but
citizens make the urban [la cité].’
The urban, then, might be better suited for Rous-
seau’s notion of cité: it satisfies more accurately, and
more radically, a politically charged concept of citizen-
ship that goes beyond nationality and flag waving. (Cité,
we might equally note, raises the ‘popular’ spectre in
bourgeois circles, pejoratively evoking quartiers des
sans-culottes, the no-go zones sensibles, the global
banlieues.) For the physical and social manifestation of
our landscape, for its bricks and mortar, we have what
most people would deem ‘city’. But as a political ideal,
as a new social contract around which citizenship
33
might cohere, we have something we might call ‘the
urban’: a more expansive realm for which no passports
are required and around which people the world over
might bond. Citizenship might here be conceived as
something urban, as something territorial, yet one in
which territoriality is both narrower and broader than
‘city’ and ‘nationality’; a territory and citizenship
without borders.
So maybe the idea of cité – a territory both real and
ideal – satisfies the jurisdictional ideal of Rousseau’s
Social Contract: the living space of modern democracy
in the making. That’s why there are no passports for
Rousseauian citizens of the urban universe, no pass-
ports for those who know they live somewhere yet feel
they belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. This
conjoining of knowing and feeling is what engenders
a sense of empathy whose nom de plume might really
be citizenship itself. Here we might take the notion of
‘dwelling’ in its broadest sense: as the totality of politi-
cal and economic space in which one now belongs.
The urban helps affinity grow, helps it become aware
of itself, aware that other affinities exist in the world,
that affinities can encounter one another, become
aware of one another as sans-culottes, the 99 per cent,
in a social network connected by a certain tissuing, by
a planetary webbing: an affinity of urban citizenship.
Houses make a city, but citizens make la cité.
What Rousseau terms the people’s ‘general will’
today can only ever express itself within this urban
[cité] context. The general will [la volonté générale] is
the sum of urban affinities taking shape, an expression
of dissatisfaction en masse, perhaps at first knowing
better what this will doesn’t like, what it is against,
than what it’s actually for.7 At any rate, Rousseau’s
logic is rather beautiful: the general will of the people,
he explains, is both infallible and fallible:
The general will is always upright and always tends
to the public advantage; but it doesn’t follow that
the deliberations of the people always have the same
rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, but
we don’t always see what it is; the people is never
corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occa-
sions only does it seem to will what is bad. 8
Yet how might this general will work itself out? And
how might the common urban affinities that cement
people together actually develop today? Where might
these affinities, and this general will, emerge? How can
particular wills be made aware of themselves as some-
thing more general, as a larger collective constituency
that is something greater than the sum of individual
parts? What are the institutions through which affinity
might develop? A direct response to these questions
might be: in the citizens’ agora, in the space of the
urban, in the popular realm where a public might come
together and express itself as a general will.
Every revolution has its agora
The citizens’ agora is something more than the public
spaces of the city; more, even, than the public institu-
tions we once knew as public – state institutions
forever under fire. One reason for this is that it isn’t
clear any more just what the public domain constitutes,
what it is, let alone what it might be. In our day, the
public realm hasn’t so much fallen from grace as
gone into wholescale tailspin. Eighty-odd years after
The Social Contract, and almost sixty after the 9th
Thermidor counter-revolution, Marx, in The Com-
munist Manifesto, demonstrated what liberal bour-
geois democracy had bequeathed us: ‘no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous cash payment ... drowning the most heavenly
ecstasies of ... chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calcu-
lation’. Bourgeois society, Marx says, ‘has resolved
personal [and public] worth into exchange value’, and
rips away halos of every sort, converting all erstwhile
hallowed and holy realms, including the public realm
itself, into another money realm, into another means
to accumulate capital.9 Marx, in a nutshell, leaves us
with the rather bleak task of picking up the pieces of
what the public realm might still mean.
There’s a consequent need to redefine not an urban
public realm that’s collectively owned and managed by
the state, but a public realm of the cité that is somehow
expressive of the people, expressive of the general
will – a will, maybe, that incorporates an affinity of
common notions, notions that Spinoza always insisted
were not universal notions, not universal rights. Spinoza
was against such an abstract conception of universality,
which he thought was an inadequate idea. Common
notions are general rather than abstract, general in
their practical and contextual applicability. From this
standpoint, when something is public, its channels for
common expression remain open, negotiable and debat-
able, political and urban in the sense that they witness
people encountering other people, dialoguing with
other people, arguing with other people, formulating
an infallible general will.
Twenty-first-century urban spaces of the cité will be
public spaces not for reasons of pure concrete physical-
ity or centrality, nor even because of land tenure, but
because they are meeting places between virtual and
physical worlds, between online and offline conversa-
tions, between online and offline encounters. Space
34
won’t so much be divided between public and private
as between passive or active; between a space that
encourages active encounters of people and a space
that resigns itself to passive encounters, a space that
isn’t so much public as the Sartrean ‘practico-inert’:
it envelops us as passive backdrop, like dead labour
functions in redundant fixed capital, as plain old bricks
and mortar, as concrete and steel. For urban spaces to
come alive, to be public in Rousseau’s republican sense
(not the Tea Party’s), they need to express dynamic
social relations between people, between people there
and elsewhere, elsewhere in other urban spaces, creat-
ing a network of living, conjoined spaces – sovereign
spaces, we might say – not dead zones that alienate and
separate. Thus people in these sovereign spaces might
come together to create a function, to talk and meet, to
hang out; sometimes they’ll come to protest, to express
themselves in angry not tender ways. In either sense,
they’re not responding to a function like a crowd of
shoppers. In coming together they express active rather
than passive affects; plazas, parks, squares, streets and
civic buildings become what Jeffrey Hou calls, in a
contribution to the collection Beyond Zuccotti Park,
‘insurgent public space’. ‘[A]s we envision the future
of public space in North America and beyond,’ Hou
says,
it is clear that the focus of our efforts should be
equally, if not more, on the making of the public
than on the making of space. While space remains
critical as a vehicle for actions and expressions, it is
through the actions and the making of a socially and
politically engaged public that the struggle for public
space as a forum of political dialogues and expres-
sions can be resuscitated and sustained.10
Following Rousseau, the ‘incorruptible’ Robespierre
insisted that the poor have most need of ensuring its
voice gets heard, that its needs take priority.11 But to
speak out, in the making of an active public of the
kind that Hou articulates, there is first then a need,
among other things, for a free press, or at least, in our
day, for an alternative free press that reports on the
sort of news items people ought to hear about. Today,
this is clearly not the celebrity gossip and right-wing
propaganda mainstream media boom out every day,
at every hour, the fear and loathing peddled by the
likes of Fox and News International, but other sources,
often online, sometimes clandestine media. If a space
to petition guarantees a citizen’s right to be heard,
then a free press guarantees a citizen’s right to hear,
to listen to social truths getting circulated within the
cité. To speak and to hear correspondingly require an
urban space in which to debate and argue, and, above
all, to meet, for citizens to come together. Robespierre
acknowledged the need for any democracy to allow
people to assemble, to do so peaceably and without
arms; although, of course, if this right is denied, if the
principles of free urban assembly are opposed, then the
subclause is that citizens ought to be able to assemble
through any means necessary, peaceable or otherwise.
It is in this space that citizens have the power to act,
to act after being heard, to act after having listened to
other citizens; mutually reinforcing public agoras, in
other words – citizens’ agora – as much experiential
spaces as physical locations.
The dilemma here, however, is that the citizens’
agora is needed either side of urban insurrection: on
the one hand, it’s required to put in place any revolu-
tionary insurrection; it’s instrumental, in other words,
for insurrection itself, for propagandizing and organ-
izing it, for spreading the word and for news sharing –
even if, sometimes, this organization initially needs to
be discreet, needs to tread cautiously in its propagation
of open democracy. New social media can obviously
be one component for creating a new citizens’ agora.
On the other hand, the day after the insurrection
such an agora needs to be inscribed into any written
constitution, into any actual urban social contract
guaranteeing they remain the rights of all citizens. In a
way, Rousseau’s Social Contract seems better attuned,
in this sense, to the post-insurrectional epoch, to the
aftermath of citizens’ revolutionary upheaval, when
the urban carnivals are over, when the insurrection has
triumphed, if it ever triumphs; ‘rights-talk’ beforehand
isn’t maybe the best means through which to gain one’s
rights. In fact, one might wonder whether the whole
theme of ‘rights’, so prevalent again today – rights
of man, right to the city (le droit à la ville), and so
on – really helps either in changing society or in
understanding how society changes. Rights-talk can
inhibit rather than enable things to happen. Rights can
be positive and negative depending on how you frame
them politically: they are empty signifiers that need
filling with content; and once you’ve filled them their
implications are so indeterminate that opposing parties
can use the same rights language to express absolutely
differing positions.
Le droit à la ville is an unfortunate victim. At
the United Nations-sponsored ‘World Urban Forum’,
held in Rio in March 2010, the UN and the World
Bank both incorporated ‘the right to the city’ into
its charter to address the global poverty trap. On the
other side of the street in Rio, at the ‘Urban Social
Forum’, a people’s popular alternative was also being
staged; there activists were appalled by the ruling
35
class’s reappropriation of such a hallowed grassroots
ideal, of its right not theirs. The mainstream has now
converted its own right into a tactical right that has
often become a watchword for conservative rule. The
Tories in Britain are quick to acknowledge people’s
right to self-management, happily endorsing ‘com-
munity rights’ and ‘citizens’ right to choose’, since
all this means the neoliberal state can desist from
coughing up for public services. Self-empowerment
thereby becomes tantamount to self-subsidization, to
self-exploitation, to even more dispossession, mollified
as ‘social enterprise’ and the voluntary ‘third sector’.
So rights, including the right to the city, have
no catch-all universal meaning in politics, nor any
foundational basis in institutions; neither are they
responsive to any moral or legal argument. Ques-
tions of rights are, first and foremost, questions of
social power, about who wins. The struggle for rights
isn’t something ‘recognized’ by some higher, neutral
arbiter; instead, for those people who have no rights,
rights to the cité must be taken; they involve struggle
and force. What has been taken must be reclaimed
through practical action, through organized militancy,
through urban insurrection. A Bill of Rights remains
the ends not the means for enforcing one’s democratic
right. It’s the joyous product not the guiding light in
the dogged process of struggle: the struggle for the new
and necessary citizens’ agora we have yet to invent.
Notes
1. See Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Inequality for All: Another In-
convenient Truth?’, Observer, 2 February 2013.
2. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, New York, 2003, pp. 137–182.
3. Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, Princeton University
Press, Princeton NJ, 1980, p. 256.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Dis-
courses, trans. G.D.H. Cole, Dent, London, 1973, p. 192.
5. Ibid.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, Éditions So-
ciales, Paris, 1968, p. 68.
7. ‘“The people”’, Peter Hallward says, ‘are simply those
who, in any given situation, formulate, assert and sustain
a fully common (and thus fully inclusive and egalitar-
ian) interest, over and above any divisive and exclusive
interest.’ ‘The Will of the People: Towards a Dialectical
Voluntarism’, Radical Philosophy 155, May/June, 2009,
pp. 17–29.
8. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p. 203.
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Mani-
festo; www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/com-
munist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
10. Jeffrey Hou, ‘Making Public, Beyond Public Space’, in
Ron Shiffman et al., eds, Beyond Zuccotti Park, New
Village Press, Oakland CA, 2012, p. 94.
11. See Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Le droit de pétition’, in
Robespierre: pour le bonheur et pour la liberté, La Fab-
rique, Paris, 2000, pp. 101–4.
Exclusive offer for Radical Philosophy subscribers.
To order the book for only £12.75 (RRP £16.99)
including free UK P&P simply visit
www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/gamble
A critical and deeply informed survey of the brave
new world of UK Higher Education emerging from
government cuts and market-driven reforms.
The Great University Gamble
Money, Markets and the Future of
Higher Education
Andrew McGettigan
April 2013 / £16.99 / 9780745332932 / Pb
“Andrew McGettigan’s critique is essential reading. He brings a
unique perspective to the debate, which is all the richer for it.”
Shabana Mahmood, Shadow Minister of State for Higher Education
“This book is essential and deeply worrying reading."
Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy,
University of Cambridge
