Governing Cities Without Government

By Engin F. Isin in Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, edited by Engin F. Isin, London: Routledge, 2000.

Typically analyses of government centre upon the state as the source of authority and take state institutions as their objects. ‘Government’ in such analyses means both the government in power and its activities sanctioned by a parliament or legislature. More recently, a literature on government following the studies by Michel Foucault (1977; 1979), suggested a shift in focus when studying government. Rather than taking the state and law as its centre, it is suggested, we can define government as a general activity or practice of conduct of conduct. This shift in emphasis, while drawing attention to both the activities and consequences of governing, resulted in various studies of ‘governmentality’, exploring how specific mentalities constitute different practices as their object and subject of government (Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). Government is thus defined as any more or less calculated and rationalized activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of both those who govern and are governed (Cf. Dean, 1999, pp. 11-16).

From this perspective an analysis of government is concerned with the means of calculation, both qualitative and quantitative, the type of governing authority and agency, the form of knowledge, techniques and other means employed, the objects of government and their conceptualization, the ends sought and the outcomes and consequences. The focus is therefore on regimes or practices of government as well as, or rather, insofar as, governmental institutions, procedures or rules are studied. An analytics of government examines the conditions under which regimes or practices of government arise, are maintained and transformed. These regimes of government embody institutional practices in the sense that they are routinized and ritualized in specific manners. This entails a focus on regimes of government as organized practices that become relatively durable and enduring aspects of governing. An analytical approach to these practices is useful precisely because it begins to reveal invented, strategic or programmatic character of otherwise taken-for-granted and relatively enduring practices of government. ‘An analytics of a particular regime of practices, at a minimum, seeks to identify the emergence of that regime, examine the multiple sources of the elements that constitute it, and follow the diverse processes and relations by which these elements are assembled into relatively stable forms of organization and institutional practice’ (Dean, 1999, p. 21).

To secure and maintain institutionalization and routinization of practices, regimes of government depend upon professional and expert forms of knowledge to monitor, enact, evaluate and reform both the subjects and objects of government. Regimes of government thus develop a programmatic character by adopting deliberate and relatively systematic forms of thought that continuously reform its practices. An analytics of government often commences analysis by examining aspects of regimes of practices are thus called into question or problematized. It thus seeks to discover the intrinsic logic or strategy of a regime of practices via exploration of its characteristic forms of visibility, ways of seeing and perceiving as embodied in particular locales, milieus and documents. When doing so it takes special care to emphasize that these characteristic ways (logics and strategies) are intentional but not subjective in the sense that while they are articulable, they are not reducible or attributable to the opinions, views, desires, ideas and claims of any one agent or any group of agents. ‘The critical purchase of an analytics of government often stems from the disjunction between the explicit, calculated and programmatic rationality and the non-subjective intentionality that can be constructed through analysis’ (Dean, 1999, p. 22).

In short, an analytics of government focuses on (i) characteristic forms of visibility, ways of seeing and perceiving; (ii) distinctive ways of thinking questioning, relying on definite vocabularies and procedures for the production of knowledge; (iii) specific ways of acting, intervening and directing, embodying specific types of rationality and relying upon various mechanisms, techniques and technologies, and (iv) characteristic ways of forming and addressing subjects, selves, persons or agents. This is a very different focus than studying governmental institutions, norms, procedures, legislation and policies as intentional and subjective instruments. That an analytics of government focuses on intentional but non-subjective character of the regimes or practices of government makes it possible to link these practices with broader and wider mentalities of rule and trace out their connections, deployment and dissemination, their genealogies, if you like.

If we follow these principles, we cannot consider local government merely as practices engaged and services delivered by municipal governments with specific territorial jurisdiction. Rather, local government can be considered as the multiplicity of authorities and agencies that seek to shape conduct within specific fields that are substantively deterritorialized but territorially organized. Recently, the shift of focus in local government studies from government to governance signifies the recognition of the trend that municipal governments have become entangled with variety of authorities in governing the local (Andrew and Goldsmith, 1998; Wilson, 1998). There is a growing recognition that local government is accomplished through multiple actors and agencies rather than a centralized set of state apparatuses. Some argue that many of the practices considered as new such as quangos have been an essential aspect of local government and that their novelty is exaggerated (Imrie and Raco, 1999). Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there has been a fundamental shift in local government in the last two decades (Aulich, 1999; Eisinger, 1998; Johnston and Pattie, 1996; Lewis and Moran, 1998; Loughlin, 1996; Marshall, 1998; Stoker, 1996a). There has been a paradoxical double movement where, on the one hand, central governments have increased their control over local authorities via new techniques and technologies such as auditing, monitoring, appointing, measuring and regulating, and, on the other hand, they increasingly devolved, downloaded, contractualized, marketized and entrepreneurialized local governmental functions via a plethora on agencies, quangos, and partnerships. It is this double movement of centralization of control and decentralization of function and the techniques and technologies by which it is accomplished that are new and requires new theoretical perspectives and empirical analyses.

Yet, so far the tendency among students of local government has been to invoke broad substantive theories such as regulation or regime theory to ‘explain’ or interpret this double movement (see Clark, 1997; Goodwin and Painter, 1996; Isin and Wolfson, 1999; Jones, 1998; Mayer, 1996; Purcell, 1997). Those who recognize these shifts still remain focused on institutions and agencies, whether it be quangos or partnerships, rather than regimes of local government.

The value of studies on governmentality is precisely their refusal to start with general theories or set of non-negotiable substantive theoretical principles. An analytics of government allows bracketing out theoretical questions and focuses on questions of how different agents are assembled with specific powers, and how different domains are constituted as authoritative and powerful and how these regimes connect up with broader mentalities of rule. By so doing it allows disjunctive interpretations rather than over-determining transformations by evaluating them with older categories. This is no more obvious than with the idea of local democracy. While some argue that the neo-liberal forms of government eradicated local democracy, others argue that they made local governments more democratic by empowering consumers (Beetham, 1996; King and Stoker, 1996; Stoker, 1996b; Teune, 1995). There is certainly an analytical and political need to bracket out values of local democracy and cast a critical eye on both its valorizations and devalorizations. There is obviously no space here to elaborate upon the political and theoretical strengths and weaknesses of such a perspective on local government. Rather, this chapter aims to contribute both to rethinking of government in local government studies as well as to governing the local in studies on governmentality by focusing on a specific regime of government that emerged in Toronto in the second half of the 1990s.

Since the nineteenth century, the liberal conception of municipal government constituted the city as a space of government and liberty at the same time, which was captured by perhaps one of the most revealing phrases of liberalism, ‘local self-government’ or ‘local democracy’. This concept embodied two seemingly contradictory movements. First, it expressed autonomy exercised by municipal governments, where cities were accorded powers to manage their ‘local’ affairs. It was a political space in which the bourgeois man, as owner of property and head of household, learned how to participate in the democratic process and practice his citizenship and develop his virtues, civics, and loyalty. Second, the municipality was constituted as a space of government in which subjects as members of specifically targeted ‘groups’ were subjected to discipline via requirements placed upon municipal government. Hospitals, prisons, schools, policing, correctional institutions were operated and maintained by municipal governments. There is a telling symbolism in the fact that Tocqueville came to America to study the penitentiary system and wrote an influential book about the need for local self-government (Beaumont and Tocqueville, 1964; Tocqueville, 1945). With the celebration of individual liberty in the nineteenth century, there arose a bewildering array of practices that governed the conduct of individuals as members of groups. It seems as if liberty was really the emancipation of bourgeois man from the shackles of aristocracy, but it also meant a new tangled web of obligations for groups of individuals, which the bourgeoisie depended upon. While the nineteenth century is replete with the talk of the liberty of bourgeois man (never specified but always universalized), an immense machinery of regulation was put in place that acted upon the conduct of ‘dangerous’ groups. For labouring men and women, children, youth, the poor, destitute, and mentally ill, the world of freedom was as abstract as the new brave world of wealth, colonialism and imperialism. It is this sense that liberty and order were not contradictory but interdependent realities. The exercise of liberty, constituting oneself as a civil man meant the constitution of the city as an ordered space with its norms, patterns, regularities and properties.

In Canada, France, Germany, Britain and America, resolving this conflict or tension between the two ‘contradictory’ principles of liberty and order within liberal rationalities of government followed different paths. While municipal government in America showed the most entrepreneurial zeal in addressing the conflict and in creating spaces of liberty and order simultaneously by building up a massive disciplinary infrastructure layered upon the autonomous space of expression and investment, in France and Britain the relics of past municipal governments required the heavier hand of states to introduce legislation and open up new spaces of discipline and freedom.

How did liberalism assemble various practices of government into a specific mentality of government, a manner of governing? Nikolas Rose has suggested that in responding to a series of problems about the governability of individuals, families, markets and groups, regimes of truth emerged about these problems as problems of conduct solvable by action at a distance rather than violence or force (Rose, 1996b). The rise of expertise in the sense of authority arising out of a claim to knowledge, to neutrality and efficacy, came to provide a number of solutions to the tension between liberty and order. By a sheer explosion of statistical and other forms of knowledge, the governing authorities described in detail how the lifestyles of various groups (e.g., the mentally ill, immigrants, hysterical women, unruly children) and working classes departed from expected and useful norms. The rise of sites for correcting such departures such as hospitals, correctional facilities, prisons, housing projects and other institutions marked the characteristic form of liberal government. What made liberalism governmental rather than philosophical was its wish to make itself practical, to connect itself up with various procedures and apparatuses of correction, inculcation and disposition.

There is certainly an affinity between liberalism as regimes of truth and assemblages of practices and the regimes of accumulation in the nineteenth-century capitalism. With the rise of factory, workshop and market as fundamental mechanisms of a new regime of accumulation, there was certainly the question of transforming the dangerous classes into working classes. That said, however, liberalism as an assemblage of governing practices cannot be read off from ‘interests’ of capital accumulation or dictates of capitalism. To assume a straightforward causal homology between liberalism and capitalism overlooks the fact that governing practices embody their own histories and develop their own rationalities which may or may not link up with economy. As much as capitalism needed liberalism as a series of technologies of government, the rise of liberalism as a regime of government also made capitalism possible. Well before the rise of factory discipline, for example, the early modern workhouses made a major contribution to the discipline of the working classes. The labouring men and women were not simply found in cities looking for jobs; they were made into a class by technologies of power. Liberalism relied on strategies, techniques and procedures through which different state authorities sought to enact programmes of government in relation to different groups and classes and the resistances and oppositions anticipated or encountered (Burchell, 1996; Rose, 1996b; 1996c). These technologies of power did not derive from a formula but were invented throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and America. The more there was talk about the liberty of the bourgeois man, the more there was a proliferation of such techniques. The constitution of the self as an object of regulation was linked up with the constitution of groups as objects of discipline.

An aspect of the ‘governmentalization of the state’ that both Foucault and the subsequent studies neglected was the tension between order and liberty, between the necessity of making individuals conducive to a moral order and opening up a space of freedom in which individuals govern themselves, was clearly connected with the problem of municipal government. The nineteenth-century liberalism inherited a conception of municipal government that followed the principles of state sovereignty: the municipality was a site of absolute exercise of power over groups of individuals. For example, through the sixteenth and seventeenth century poor laws, beggars, vagabonds and other groups were subjected to brutal and punitive power and cities were ruled by self-perpetuating oligarchies drawn from aristocracy (Isin, 1992a; 1992b). The governing of cities in early modern Europe became a major target of reform for liberalism. In England, for example, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie lacked representation in cities, and, on the other hand, cities had not yet become technologies of power to target the working classes. However, a series of liberal reforms including the Reform Act (1832) and Municipal Corporations Act (1835), dramatically altered the conception of municipal government that liberalism inherited. These acts and a plethora of commissions, reports and surveys associated with them were clearly concerned about governing cities. While the fundamental aspects of local government remained intact throughout the nineteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were also significant changes that locked local government into a network of governing practices. By the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of the welfare state and expansion of government services, municipal government increasingly played a more significant role in the provision and delivery of these services. In addition to policing, education, hospitals, and prisons, welfare and housing were the most important functions that cities assumed. The introduction of metropolitan or regional governments to co-ordinate, rationalize and provide new soft and hard services such us public transportation, housing, and social services became a widely-used experiment within the liberal rationalities of government (Magnusson, 1981). Municipal government was subsumed within the welfare state.

In the late twentieth century, from Canada to New Zealand, we have witnessed the rise of new rationalities of government. The primary focus has been to ‘re-engineer’ the welfare state: the privatization of public utilities and welfare functions in the opening up of health services, social insurance and pension schemes to markets; educational reforms to introduce competition between colleges and universities; the introduction of new forms of management into the civil service modeled upon an image of methods in the private sector; new contractual relations between agencies and service providers and between professionals and clients; and, a new emphasis on the personal responsibilities of individuals, their families and their communities for their own future well-being as well as their own obligation to take active steps to secure this. In other words, we are seeing the emergence of a new ‘governmentality’—the deliberations, strategies, tactics and devices employed by authorities for making up and acting upon a population and its constituents to ensure effective governance (Isin, et al., 1998; Rose, 1996a; 1996c).

The rise of a new regime of governmentality has been called ‘advanced liberalism’ and its tactics, strategies and rationalities ‘neo-liberal’. Consistent with the view that considers liberalism a philosophy, neo-liberalism has been defined by its fiscal conservatism, by the reduction of budget deficits that have been the hallmark of the activist welfare state and hence by the reduction of the role of government in markets. The problem with this definition is that it focuses upon justifications rather than practices. Some studies have shown, for example, that despite severe cutbacks in the public sector, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has actually continued to increase (Carpenter, 1995; Hardt and Negri, 1994). If, however, we consider neo-liberalism as a series of technologies of power, this apparently paradoxical empirical record may assume a different meaning. In other words, it can be argued that neo-liberalism has not been about less government but about shifting the techniques, focus and priorities of government.

Considering the rise of advanced liberalism as an invention of new technologies of power rather than as a decline of the state, three characteristic shifts have been suggested. The first shift concerns a new relationship between expertise and politics. While, in liberalism, knowledge had come to occupy a central role in government by virtue of its ability to raise claims to truth and validity in fields such as education, health and cities, the legitimacy and authority of new knowledges do not derive from their truth and validity but from their ability to gauge performance. Accordingly, there has been a shift from the older occupations of law, medicine and academics to newer occupations of expert consultancy, accountancy and audit (Rose, 1996b; Starr, 1987). If the modes of circulation of knowledges that animated liberal technologies of power were verity, validity, reliability, the new modes of circulation are enumeration, calculation, monitoring and evaluation. With this shift from older occupations to new ones, there is also a shift in the sites where education, training and certification take place. Universities that traditionally educated and trained cadres of public sector professionals in law, medicine and administration are now pressured to shift to new occupations. As well, the new occupations shift their focus from the patient, the ill and the poor to the client and consumer, who are constituted as autonomous individuals capable of making the right choices (Brint, 1994). Risk reduction has become an individual responsibility rather than a collective or state responsibility. Neo-liberalism therefore constitutes the individual not as a subject of intervention but as an active agent of decision and choice. This is a significant shift in the production of subjectivities in that, instead of disciplines, the field of choice and its structure become a contested arena of political struggle.

A second shift concerns the proliferation of new technologies of power. Evidenced by the rise of quasi-autonomous ‘non-governmental’ organizations, the new technologies arise out of the shifting of responsibilities from governmental agencies and authorities to organizations without electoral accountability and responsibility, for example, the ‘privatization’ of ‘public’ utilities, civil service, prisons, insurance and security. Again, with the proliferation of these technologies neither government nor its will to govern (nor its size) declines. Rather, this shift is about the manner in which individuals are constituted as subjects of government and about the agents who are invested with the responsibility of governing.

A third shift concerns a new specification of the subject of government. The rise of the powers of the individual as client or customer of services specifies the subjects of government in a new way. Individuals are now constituted as active purchasers and enterprisers in pursuit of their own choices: vouchers in education, housing and other services replace ‘paternal’ forms of distribution. As much as avoiding risk becomes the responsibility of individuals as authors of their own destiny, ill-fate and misfortune also become the responsibility of individuals: the unemployed, homeless and poor are constituted as responsible for their own condition. Effective governance of such individuals does not necessarily require governmental intervention but a new subjectification.

Just as there were some affinities between the rise of liberalism and capitalism, there are also affinities between neo-liberalism and the rise of new groups and classes and different forms of capital in the late twentieth century. This has been associated with the rise of new classes variously described as the ‘new class’, the professional class or the information bourgeoisie. Sociologists such as Gouldner and Bourdieu have argued that the rise of new groups and classes based on the accumulation of cultural capital (skills and expertise) has considerably transformed the political arrangements and institutions in liberal democracies (Bourdieu, 1987; 1991; Clement and Myles, 1994; Gouldner, 1979; Szelényi and Martin, 1990; Wright, 1997). The widespread adoption of neo-liberal technologies of power undoubtedly favours private sector professionals. Harold Perkin (1989), for example, has argued that the main conflict in liberal democracies today is between public sector and private sector professionals (see also Rose, 1996a). Many aspects of the various neo-liberal technologies shift responsibilities from the paternalistic state or public professions such as law, medicine, and academe toward entrepreneurial professions that emphasize client and consumer control: subjects become consumers who are invested with capacities for making choices and agents are no longer state officials exercising authority over them but experts assisting subjects in making these choices. Again, much of the shift toward privatization does not really cost less in terms of delivering government services but shifts control to these new professions. Brint has characterized this shift as that from ‘social trustee professionals’ to ‘expert professionals’ (Brint, 1994). In short, in advanced liberalism, while the agents of power undergo alteration and begin to deploy new technologies of power, the exercise of power shifts from government as an authority to governance practices that operate throughout the social body—hence governance without government.

What role does municipal government assume under advanced liberalism? How does advanced liberalism constitute local government? Amidst much debate over liberty, markets and consumerism, there is an increasing and parallel emphasis on communities as means of government: Rose argues that, consonant with the emphasis of neo-liberalism on conceiving individuals as active participants in their own government, the relations of obligation shifted from citizens and society mediated and regulated by the state to relations between active individuals and their immediate communities of allegiance and care. The interesting thing about the increasing emphasis on community in the neo-liberal grammar of government and politics is that the term itself originated as a critique of bureaucratic and rational government. Nonetheless, it has been now incorporated into a neo-liberalism that constitutes various communities such as moral (religious, ecological, feminist), lifestyle (taste, style and modes of life), and activist. Such communities are construed as heterogeneous, overlapping and multiple, commanding unstable and ephemeral allegiance and existing ‘only to the extent that their constituents are linked together through identifications constructed in the non-geographic spaces of activist discourses, cultural products and media images’ (Rose, 1996a). From the point of view of this new conception of community, the subject is addressed as a moral individual with bonds of obligation and responsibilities for conducts that are assembled in a way that traverses and crisscrosses fixed territorial boundaries, including those of cities. Thus, rights are not only given today to municipal governments but to groups that define their own moral and geographic boundaries, ones that do not match the fixed boundaries of municipal governments (see also Frazer, 1996).

Modern municipal government does not fit the image of de-territorialized communities that are spread across boundaries and interconnected via a variety of geographic and non-geographic links. Municipal governments with fixed boundaries and self-enclosed spaces of regulation are unable to meet the new specification of the subject and its government. In other words, municipal government becomes one agent among other technologies of power. As we have seen, many of the functions of modern municipal government, such as housing, hospitals, prisons, schools and correctional institutions have either already shifted to the senior levels of government or have been privatized. Modern city government is increasingly like an empty shell whose territory marks out the once-meaningful boundaries of the political. Elsewhere the rise of this new urban space was called the ‘cosmopolis’ (Isin, 1996a; 1996b; 1997). All those who argue for local democracy and seeking political and institutional arrangements are perhaps trying to impose a solution to a problem that has already disappeared from neo-liberal thought.

In the last two decades, in Anglo-American states, municipal government reforms converged on a few elements: forcing reduction in municipal expenditures via a combination of controls on municipal budgets and reduction in transfers; downloading and decentralizing services via enabling municipal governments to privatize or forcing them to establish partnerships with private companies; reforming and consolidating property tax by centralizing its control; radical education reforms introducing central control and abolishing local control; radical public health reforms to centralize control; forcing municipal governments to abandon services such as housing and sell local authority owned dwellings; the formation of a plethora of special purpose bodies or quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental bodies); forcing local governments toward user fees as a resource of revenue; and, centralizing and/or privatizing correctional and punitive institutions. Admittedly, each of these elements worked out rather differently in each jurisdiction. Nevertheless, to varying degrees each neo-liberal regime sought to implement these, and in a very quick manner (Loughlin, 1996). In the debate over local government in Anglo-American states, it has become a custom to describe this shift as a transformation from local government to local governance (Andrew and Goldsmith, 1998; Johnston and Pattie, 1996; Wilson, 1998). What is meant by this is that local government is now merely an agent of government in a multiplicity of agents and quangos that are vested with various governmental authorities and powers. While some are skeptical about whether this shift is from local government to local governance or merely a deepening of local government, the general trend of more direct central engagement with the local and the proliferation of local bodies is agreed upon (Imrie and Raco, 1999). Another debate is over whether this shift from local government to local governance increases the possibilities of local democracy or circumvents its established procedures and whether this shifts expands the boundaries of the political or eradicates them (Beetham, 1996; Jones, 1998). Adequately resolving these issues, however, requires placing the transformations in local government within broader transformations in rationalities of government (advanced liberalism) and economy (advanced capitalism) because, taken together or in any combination, these transformations go far beyond ‘municipal restructuring’, as they constitute a radical restructuring of government.

More recently, these rationalities were at work in various governments in Canada, notably the conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario and the ‘left’ governments in Quebec and British Columbia. In Ontario, these rationalities found their expression in a remarkable small document that was initially ridiculed by many on the left but that became the campaign platform for the Progressive Conservative Party in the 1995 provincial election: the Common Sense Revolution (CSR). Although arguments were made that the CSR had not made promises for restructuring municipal government or even amalgamation, an examination of its premises reveals that the massive legislation the Harris government introduced in the first two years of its mandate (1995-97) stems from its determination to implement the CSR, a neo-liberal programme.

It is against this background of these broad transformations of liberal regimes of government and the rise of advanced liberalism that the creation of the new city of Toronto must be understood. The amalgamation of the constituent municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto has sharpened and brought to the fore the main political faultlines in the city. The inner city constituency of public sector professional-managerial classes reacted defensively, invoking a language of democracy and citizenship. By contrast, the immigrant groups, visible minorities and working classes largely watched all of this with indifference, perhaps corroborating my earlier suggestion that modern city government is increasingly like an empty shell whose territory marks out the once-meaningful boundaries of the political. These groups remained on the sidelines during the fight against amalgamation, and during the subsequent election in November 1997, they actively forged ahead with an agenda—new voices for the new city—which saw amalgamation as an opportunity to secure rights for immigrant groups. This was a major defeat for the public sector professional-managerial classes that coalesced under the banner of Citizens for Local Democracy—affectionately known as C4LD—coming at the end of an arduous fight to stop amalgamation.

At first, C4LD appeared to be heading for success. There were two reasons for this. First, when the proposed amalgamation of the constituent municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto was announced in October 1996, the opposition against the Harris government had been building in Ontario for more than 16 months. Beginning with the swearing-in ceremony on June 26, 1995, the Harris government had been greeted with protests by various social justice groups such as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Metro Network for Social Justice. These protests were widened by the labour movement via a series of ‘days of action’ in which London, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Peterborough and finally, Toronto had become the site of massive demonstrations and strikes. Although downplayed by the government, as expected, the impact of these demonstrations was beyond doubt, at least in raising the profile of opposition in the media. Although organized labour remained skeptical of municipal politics and kept its distance from C4LD, when C4LD began its agitation to organize, it was addressing already-politicized Torontonians.

Second was the class composition of C4LD. Like its counterparts in other Anglo-American states, particularly in Britain, the Harris government was conceived right from the beginning as a movement against public-sector professionals, social-interest groups, public-sector unions who staffed provincial and municipal bureaucracies, and professionals in education, the arts, media and government, essentially groups that are concentrated in large cities of the province. Toronto is the largest and the most concentrated city of the new class. The Harris government targeted the public-sector segment of the new class from the day it gained power. Not only did it pass legislation to dramatically reduce the provincial government workforce, which led to the first-ever strike by the union of provincial employees in February-March 1996, but it also systematically targeted lawyers and doctors, though with limited success. While the government opened these fronts all at once, these groups had not coalesced until the very city in which they lived became the target. The proposed amalgamation of the city with its post-war suburbs would potentially unleash an intellectual assault that probably few governments have ever endured. More than 500 deputants of the hearings on Bill 103 (the City of Toronto Act) included the critical voices of prominent urbanists such as Jane Jacobs as well as artists, historians, constitutional experts, economists, political scientists, sociologists, planners, journalists and very eloquent, not-so-ordinary citizens. Although expecting, in fact almost revelling in, opposition, there is no doubt that the Harris government was still startled by the depth, sophistication, and strength of all this uproar.

A ‘rebellion’ march, as well as the referendum and its incredible skills in commanding symbolic capital throughout February and March made it look like perhaps the Harris government was about to suffer its first loss and humiliation at the hands of the very class that it targeted. The Harris government had looked quite powerful until that moment, when even its officials complained that they were unable to get their message across. To counteract the symbolic domination of the public-sector professionals, the Harris government embarked upon an embarrassing and desperate media campaign itself. The downloading, the privatization, and the contempt of the Harris government for democratic process was suddenly clearly and forcefully exposed.

Yet, C4LD lost the battle. As much as C4LD achieved a certain political mobilization in the city of Toronto, its grammar of politics based upon liberal citizenship and democracy and its tactics also failed as a movement. At one level, its failure was obvious: despite all the activities of C4LD, the Harris government pressed on with its agenda with little alteration and little concern for the resistance and opposition. The City of Toronto Act passed in April 1997 with little change and the government continued its ‘downloading’ of services to the municipalities across the province. It also moved ahead with its other policies, including the centralization of the property taxation system and the takeover of the education system. Finally, in April 1999, it won a second majority in the provincial legislature. Meanwhile, C4LD not only became tangled up in a futile Citizens’ legal challenge to Bill 103 (led by a smaller group), but it shrank back to a handful of citizens, who became increasingly despondent.

On another level, the failure has been even deeper. From the beginning, C4LD appealed to and was led by the new class, which was, compared to Toronto’s ethnic, racial and class profile, strikingly homogenous. Although it was not expected that C4LD would appeal to organized labour—which remained skeptical of not only C4LD but also other social movements—there was a real expectation or hope that it would appeal to the ‘new social movements’. Instead, the movement for local democracy and citizenship failed to appeal to the mass of ethnic, immigrant, low-income service workers and tradesmen and other political groups that are spread around Metropolitan Toronto. Moreover, C4LD and its grammar of politics was increasingly interpreted as the voice of the self-interested professional class in the inner city of Toronto with little regard for its ‘suburban’ counterparts. As well, while it attempted somewhat to align with other groups on issues of social welfare and social justice, their interests were often too far apart. The supporters of the government used this to their advantage.

To declare C4LD as a failure may be considered a harsh judgement. The movement against the Harris government that was accelerated by the amalgamation of Toronto and joined by the province’s teachers and unions against Bill 136 (which attempted to roll back the right to strike) would appear to have won certain concessions from the government, at least in making it pause even if only for publicity and re-election reasons. The role of C4LD in this broader movement should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, the grammar of politics that revolved around local democracy and citizenship literally fell upon deaf ears and failed to achieve either concrete results or concessions from the government or to attract broader groups to it. The liberal interpellation of subjects into enacting as ‘citizens’ failed because the majority of Torontonians were caught between enacting themselves as either as clients and consumers or variety of other identities such as youth, homeless, workers, squeegees or immigrants that the universal category of citizenship did not capture. This lesson was painfully brought home during the municipal elections in which the ‘suburban’ vote brought Mel Lastman into power, a politician held in contempt and ridiculed by the city elite. Yet, his message, ‘freeze the taxes’, was heard loud and clear by the groups that surround the city. Not because these groups were well-off suburbanites ‘who liked their lawns’, as the city elite would like to think of them, but because they were the groups, made up of immigrants, refugees, the working poor, non-unionized and low income service workers and tradesmen, who felt the most adverse impacts of the declining real wages in Ontario in the last decade. It is these groups that perhaps the old City of Toronto’s new class never understood.

Although there are several specific and contingent reasons behind the amalgamation of Toronto, it must, nevertheless, be understood against the background of a shift toward advanced liberalism. The Harris government felt very little affinity for local democracy or local government not because it is ‘anti-democratic’ but because the rationalities it represents are those of advanced liberalism with its emphasis on rationalization, privatization, marketization and centralization. There is no doubt that the Harris government reached its conclusion to amalgamate Toronto as a result of its broader policies to centralize property taxation, restructure and centralize education, rationalize and download services, and force municipalities to reduce expenditures and privatize (Isin & Wolfson, 1999). Much has been said about the fact that the introduction of the amalgamation of municipalities was inconsistent with the traditional Tory philosophy. This view misses the fact that local government has a very limited role in neo-liberal programmes. The new city of Toronto has so few powers that it is really nothing other than a board of the provincial government. But should seeking new powers for municipal government be the aim of progressive politics?

Under advanced liberalism, the focus of urban politics has shifted from local government as a locus of power to diverse sites of power such as private and non-governmental provision and delivery of services. The new subjects of government—clients, customers, consumers, users—govern themselves everyday in the face of growing complexity and uncertainty, seeking the best possible alternatives and choices. This has resulted in a growing polarization in the distribution of not only economic capital but also of social and cultural capital. While there are those who are increasingly at liberty to create options in terms of where they live, work, play and seek health and educational services for themselves and their children, there are those for whom such choices are becoming ever more limited. To participate in the game of ‘conduct of conduct’ and self-constitution requires not only economic capital but also social and cultural capital in the form of linguistic ability, educational resources and social competence. In fact, the lack of cultural and social capital often blocks access to economic capital. The aim of progressive politics must be, while questioning the formation of subjects as merely customers, clients and consumers, to seek new group rights for those unable to compete in the market due to lack of economic, social and cultural capital, and who increasingly find themselves under oppressive conditions. If the city is the space of the struggles for these rights, the state still remains as the source and grantor of them.

It has become the self-fulfilling prophecy of the professional classes that the state is dead. It is said that with globalization of the world economy and the rise of transnational organizations and markets, the state is neither capable of delivering services nor responding to new rights-claims. Not only is there evidence that the state has become larger, stronger and more effective but also, if the above analysis of neo-liberalism is plausible, that it has shifted its emphasis and priorities. The will to govern the conduct of individuals and groups has not disappeared but it has become more widespread. Every government that has been associated with the neo-liberal technologies of power in Britain, America, Europe and Canada has passed more legislation and regulation than its predecessors have. The irony that should not be lost on anyone is that the implementation of neo-liberalism probably required more legislation, regulation and state resources than that of social democracy.

Instead of accepting the ‘death of the state’ as a self-evident and inevitable truth, there is a need to rethink ways in which the state can be invoked as an agent of a new series of social, cultural, political, and group rights (Albo, et al., 1993). Instead of seeking rights for municipal government as territorial polities, de-territorialized group rights must be taken seriously. As Warren Magnusson has recently argued, one of the promising aspects of the new social movements in the last twenty years is to have opened up new political spaces other than the self-enclosed spaces of the municipal government (Magnusson, 1996). Magnusson has illustrated how the municipality has been reclaimed by various social movements (a category which Magnusson retains despite some concerns) such as feminism, environmentalism and that of the First Nations. Magnusson has convincingly argued that the municipality is neither an apparatus of the state nor an autonomous (sovereign) entity. Rather, it is a liminal or marginal space where identities are contested, negotiated and remade through the flow of ideas, practices and struggles. The municipality is thus neither a self-enclosed nor a self-sufficient space but is an open space of flows. As such, it has been the site and incubator of the most critical and progressive movements in the last two decades, ranging from the sanctuary movements to nuclear-free zones, from local socialism to aboriginal claims.

Being narrowly focused on municipal government as a container of politics, C4LD has fashioned an ineffective style of politics for newly emerging realities. While the Harris government simply regarded the current municipal institutions at best irrelevant and at worst an impediment to implementing the CSR, C4LD increasingly relied on a liberal grammar of politics that invoked ‘democracy’, ‘due process’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘public good’. The Harris government realized that it was not simply implementing a revolution that was forged in the backrooms but it was giving a programmatic form to technologies, techniques, mentalities and rationalities that have been emerging in the social body along with the new alignment of groups and classes. The Harris government knew well who its constituency was— the rising new professional and quasi-professional groups in the non-public sectors of the economy, largely in managerial, executive, media, high-technology, technical service industries—whose lives are already ordered in a different way and who accept the technologies of neo-liberal government as rational and necessary. As consumers and customers, they constitute themselves as active purchasers of services in the market. The Harris government presented itself effectively as the voice of a new rationality on the side of history.

For progressive movements, two avenues would be mistaken. The first is to assume that a new provincial government would do things differently. The Harris government has already managed to forge a second term and the revolution it has initiated will by and large remain. This happened in Britain, America, and New Zealand. Moreover, the ‘left’ governments that replaced the radical right governments have continued with neo-liberal programmes even with more success (Schwartz, 1997). The second is to refuse to delineate the new technologies of power in all their precision and exactitude. Governing Toronto without government means that neo-liberal technologies of power are not invented and implemented in a top-down hierarchical way and implemented via government but are rationalizations of emerging practices throughout the social body. The left rhetoric of ‘corporate or global agenda’ is far too simplistic to capture this complex change under way (Gill, 1995).

Neo-liberalism has potentially useful aspects for the new social movements precisely because it has accelerated the acknowledgement that power has shifted from municipal government as a self-enclosed, territorial jurisdiction to manifold sites of power in which municipal government is one actor among others. Its emphasis on breaking dependence on the public professions, and its attack on at least certain fields of professional expertise, can also be turned into advantage for the very groups that it disciplines such as the poor, youth, homeless, welfare recipients and criminals. A new grammar of politics, a new set of tactics and strategies are needed to counteract neo-liberalism. Those who want to effectively resist the policies of the Harris government, which aim to eliminate various labour, gender, ethnic and other group and class rights, must not seek to reconstitute these groups as victims. Instead, a new progressive politics must allow the formation of deterritorialized group identities (youth, students, immigrants, visible minorities, jobless) as active forces by creating platforms and forums for their articulation, proliferation and recognition.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Studies in Political Economy (Summer 1998). I am grateful to Evelyn Ruppert, Greg Albo, Warren Magnusson, Myer Siemiatycki and Frances Frisken for providing critical comments on earlier drafts. I am indebted to Warren Magnusson for pointing out to me the symbolism in Tocqueville’s works. I would also like to acknowledge that the data on social classes used for this chapter are drawn from a large scale research project on urban citizenship and immigration in the Greater Toronto Area. I would like to thank my co-researcher Myer Siemiatycki and the Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) for their support.