Community Self Help and the Law and Regulations of Government

Abstract

"Community self help may be a particularly useful notion for coming to terms with the self organizing and self governing capabilities of people within and across particular historical periods and different political systems. Emphasis on a theory of "the state" as predatory rule and on a theory of politics as exchange has led to too many pessimistic comments about the human condition. At the same time, recent analyses by Jane Jacobs (1984) and Charles Sabel (1982) tend to support the late J.P. Nettl's observation that 'the traditional European notion of state and its structural application in practice may not be adequate for the tasks of goal-setting and goal-attainment in a modern, fully industrialized society' (1968: 587). Jacobs argues that cities and not nation states are the salient basic entities for understanding economic life; Sabel offers evidence to suggest that the future of industrial society lies not in 'Fordism' but in the small, high technological industries such as those he found in several Italian cities."