The modern city is in rough shape. From Paris to San Francisco, the inhabitants of the West’s most iconic metropoleis must endure runaway costs of living, unaffordable housing, rising crime, and unusable public spaces. If they attempt to get involved in local politics to change things, they meet powerful political machines that crush heterodox actors. Many cities now look like cancerous tumors, at risk of metastasizing across the whole body politic. Facing this situation, it is tempting to invent an idealized urban past or give up on urban life altogether. In The Political Philosophy of the European City, Ferenc Hörcher succumbs to neither temptation. Through meticulous historical, literary, and philosophical analysis, Hörcher shows how the European city, particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries, helped its citizens achieve a model of human flourishing that remains relevant today. Although the book is inadequate in proposing concrete, future-oriented solutions, it does retrieve a vital strand of localist thinking and practice.

For Hörcher, the European city’s success lies in its continuity with ancient thought. It preserves the tradition of free, republican government inaugurated primarily by Aristotle and Cicero. Aristotle regarded the polis, not the village or empire, as the proper scale for human politics; Cicero showed how the polis was best governed as a free republic. Whereas other thinkers, such as Pierre Manent, argue that modernity sees the proper scale for human politics and republican government shift from the city to the nation-state, Hörcher is critical of the nation-state for its centralizing and potentially totalitarian tendencies. He argues that the proper scale for human politics remains the city. Moreover, Hörcher contends, for most of the history of the European city, the city’s citizens and leaders agreed with him.

Aristotle admired the polis because the polis was the right size for the constitutional government that is conducive to human flourishing. Similarly, the best urban communities of early modern Europe developed constitutions that summoned citizens to lead a life according to virtue and ordered toward the common good. The best urban constitutions allowed everyone to play a part in the city’s operation, but also allowed citizens to hold each other accountable, stopping the spread of moral corruption.

In making these kinds of arguments, Hörcher relies on recent works such as James Hankins’s Virtue Politics, as well as the older tradition of scholarship inaugurated by J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. But Hörcher is more clear-eyed than some of Pocock’s and Skinner’s students about the difference between republicanism and democracy. As ancient and most early modern thinkers argued, a successful constitution had to avoid collapsing into mere participatory government, nothing more than the rule of the many. “Democracy” was, until the 19th century, a description of a bad regime. Hörcher appreciates early modern Florence as a symbol of a free urban community where citizens extensively participated in political affairs. Yet he observes that Florence’s preference for participatory democracy led to instability. The city fluctuated between sometimes “revolutionary” regimes (when Savonarola was influential) and autocracies, with the latter finally winning out. Hörcher is kinder to the Venetian Republic. Venice had a more balanced constitution where “neither the many, nor the few, or the one” could rule alone. Cities such as Venice were more oligarchic than democratic, but they mastered this constitutional balancing act to preserve a functioning republic. Consequently, they survived late into the modern era, keeping the tradition of self-government alive long after the birth of the modern state.

It is easy to think that the development of the modern state rendered cities irrelevant, as practical wisdom and “virtue politics” began to revolve around developing and deploying state power (handbooks of statecraft are written for princes, not for local aldermen). Yet Hörcher is persuasive in showing that cities fostered habits of virtue and prudence during that period. By mediating between private and public interests, city life habituated leaders to an “urban politics of compromise”, helping them create systematic political settlements across larger and more troubled territories, as well as between competing states.

Because, for Aristotle, the polis is more than just the sum of its parts, the polis is supposed to give the citizens a common sense; an ethical and political responsibility, as Hörcher puts it, to “safeguard the eudaimonia” of their compatriots. This demand, Hörcher argues, was taken seriously by the city’s predominant class, the burghers or bourgeoisie. While individual responsibility was crucial to their value system, they inherited a patrician tone that gave them a communal sense of responsibility. The city’s burghers were called to transmit these values from one generation to the next, keeping order and concord by “cherishing the wisdom of their forefathers.” This is how they preserved and developed the Aristotelian and Ciceronian heritage.

Even in the troubled 19th and 20th centuries, Hörcher argues that the bourgeoisie showcases responsible citizenship. Conservative by longstanding disposition—and so not pushed towards conservatism, pace the standard leftist critique of the bourgeoisie—the bourgeois had a peaceful conception of civil society that kept them focused on local rather than state politics. Konrad Adenauer goes unmentioned in the book, but he is a good example of the kind of conservative bourgeois Hörcher alludes to. His cultural and spiritual formation, coupled with his skill in governing a city (Cologne), allowed him to offer a credible alternative to Nazi and leftist totalitarian temptations. Yet it rested on the conservative, even traditionalist bourgeois, virtues. That is why, before and during the war, the Nazis hated him; and that is why, after the war, the left despised him.

Hörcher’s admiration for the bourgeoisie has a parallel in Aristotle. Just as the government through the mean is best, so government by the mean—that is to say, the middle classes—is best. The citizens of the middle are similar, limiting their potential to drift apart into dangerous factional conflicts. The bourgeoisie showed how the urban communities of early modern Europe could achieve high levels of peace and concord, even during the stormy period that gave rise to the modern state.

At its core, The Political Philosophy of the European City defends the importance of subsidiarity for conservative political thought. The bourgeoisie exemplify a stable, multi-layered model of political loyalty. The city is their first, most intimate circle of political belonging, followed by the patria, the country. Europe provides their broadest basis of loyalty, loyalty to their common Greco-Roman and Christian cultural and political heritage. All three circles oblige citizens in particular ways. Citizens belong to multiple societies, which provide a distinct set of requirements that must be satisfied to achieve human flourishing. Nevertheless, this view struggles to get a hearing today. The tendency is either to pursue a global model of citizenship, which constructs opaque institutions that do not permit political participation; or, in reaction against this flight into abstraction, to extol the state tout court, which is often hostile to localism. The book is a gentle exhortation to put the circle of the city back in. Any project to realize the common good must involve the city, and Hörcher warns that “if the state does not view cities as its partners, but simply exploits them, Europe cannot preserve its civilized political face.”

The book is Aristotelian, however, in that its aim is not just to understand Europe’s past, but also to provide practical wisdom. It aims “to reconstruct the golden ages of the European city…for its relevance for the here and now,” as the “promise of the future.” This ambition remains unfulfilled, both because Hörcher’s analysis points in a pessimistic direction, and because his conclusion adopts the very thinking that inhibits contemporary efforts to reconstruct the best of European urban political thought.

First, Hörcher ultimately seems to believe that the spirit of the modern age was on the side of the state, not the city. Passages like these are common throughout the book: “Although Kassa remained an influential city for quite some time, it was not possible for the city to resist the major tendency of the age, which was growing royal control over the major cities of the country” (my emphasis). Unable to offer the same military security and economic success as the state, it appears that the city was in the end doomed to become a peripheral institution.

Second, Hörcher’s analysis of the megalopolis, the megacity, makes for gloomy reading. Drawing from history and literature, he describes the birth of the megacity in Paris following the industrial revolution, tracking the megacity’s shockingly rapid growth and its reputation for moral decay and political corruption. If these were problems in the 19th century, it is even more so in the 21st, when Europeans, Americans, and Asians have all inherited a century of urban planning that produced more and larger megacities at the cost of other urban arrangements. The new form of urbanism is devouring the old. Moreover—and Hörcher does not discuss this—there is a good case to make that the burghers, whom Hörcher admires, are dying out. They are being replaced by classes and peoples who deride the task of cultural transmission.

The question is then how to reconstruct the city to ensure that the “promise of the future” is fulfilled. Hörcher is surely right that the reconstruction of local practices and edifices is imperative; his admiration for Sir Roger Scruton’s own architectural efforts against modernism cites the specific practices that need to be honed. This task, however, might require more action on the part of the state than Hörcher may like. Sir Roger, after all, chaired a national committee on architecture, in part because local governments showed little interest in such projects or lacked the prestige to run one that would be taken seriously. The paradox is that if the spirit of the modern age entails the triumph of the state, then at this stage in modern history, the only agent left with the power to defeat the cancerous megacities is the state. To restore localism and the city of the human scale may require aggressive action on the part of the central government, because the other localities have lost the power and authority that once defined them.

Instead of discussing these potential solutions in concrete ways, however, Hörcher closes by affirming what Sir Roger dedicated his life to opposing. The book concludes by urging Europeans to “confess and repent” for the city’s complicity with the history of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism. Hörcher has been seduced by the leftist narrative that contemporary Europe must do some special penance for an allegedly unique set of imperial sins. His call for confession and repentance is not mitigated by the fact that during the period he analyzes, the size of non-European empires and their abuses dwarfed anything going on in Europe’s cities. During the golden age of the European city, Europeans were habitually victims of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. In the 1500s and 1600s, the Ottoman Empire had conquered enough of Europe to threaten Vienna and besiege the city twice. They permanently transformed the population of the Balkans. Several of the Central European cities discussed in the book were under Turkish domination. And the Ottomans themselves presided over a massive slave trade; as far away as Ireland, villagers were at risk of Arab raiders who would capture and sell them into slavery on the African markets. Unlike republican government, neither colonialism, slavery, nor imperialism were invented in Europe.

It is disappointing that Horcher, like so many others trying to defend conservative political thought, thinks he needs to submit to the myopic historical narratives that the left uses to induce guilt and paralysis. Those peddling those narratives are insatiable; no amount of repentance will bring an end to their attacks. While it is true Europeans have the resources to be self-critical, these exercises have been going on for decades. They have crippled the task of transmitting the wisdom of the ancients. Their legacy is cultural illiteracy and ignorance. And that is the point: they demand Europe’s complete self-effacement. What is left of Europe’s burgher culture will only be free to rediscover Europe’s “civilized political face” when it has rejected the culture of repudiation that is killing it.

Editor’s Note: Previously, this review erroneously stated that Konrad Adenauer had been mayor of Munich, rather than Cologne.