The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Collective military aggression, I submit, is as much a special invention of civilization as is the collective expression of curiosity through systematic scientific investigation. The fact that human beings are naturally curious did not lead inevitably to organized science; and the fact that they are given to anger and…

The ancient Greeks thought that their own respect for custom and common law, as against tyrannous caprice, was a unique product of their culture. But actually it was a witness to their continuity with an older village democracy we first meet in Mesopotamia: an institution that seems to precede all more sophisticated…

For all that, the embryonic structure of the city already existed in the village. House, shrine, cistern, public way, agora - not yet a specialized market - all first took form in the village: inventions and organic differentiations waiting to be carried further in the more complex structure of the city.

The modern city itself, for all its steel and glass, is still essentially an earth-bound Stone Age structure.

Village life is embedded in the primary association of birth and place, blood and soil. Each member of it is a whole human being, performing all the functions appropriate to each phase of life, from birth to death, in alliance with natural forces that he venerates and submits to, even though he may be tempted to invoke…