Michael Weinman, New School for Social Research
This paper seeks above all to demonstrate a normative claim: the decentralization of power, as achieved in the United States, is neither an increase of democracy nor a diffusion of power. I am far from the first to pursue this claim and very much hope not to be the last. My goal is to provide a case for this claim which is both theoretically grounded and factually persuasive.
In
order to demonstrate the necessity of my normative claim, I will examine its
history by investigating the legacy of urban reform and how that movement and
those movements which have followed it have been theorized and practiced since
the second World War, and especially in the last 20 years.
I will be especially concerned with the twin mantras of
“professionalization” and “rationalization.”
Having completed this survey there will be two conclusions: first, that
the political forces mobilized in decentralization are not only not democratic,
but also fundamentally anti-democratic; second, that the solution to this deep
structural anti-democracy is not a
manipulation of politics with its horizontal and vertical axes, but rather a
rejection of this whole manipulation as an inherently elitist totalitarianism.