The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a film by William H. Whyte, was originally released in 1980. This past January, it was screened at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village and Low Cinema in Ridgewood, Queens.
Can the people rule? This is the thought that drives Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s late tragedy about the mythical Roman general whose inability to manage the city’s class conflicts dooms him to exile and eventual death. Shakespeare, as usual, does not pick a side but concentrates on dramatizing the tangles of power and politics. What motivates elites—service to an abstract ideal, a desire for renown, the pleasures of domination, luxury itself? How, from the antagonisms of minority rule, are they able to sustain the fantasy of a unified polity, be it “Rome” or “New York”? What could democracy look like in practice? Is it desirable that every cook should govern, as a phrase of the Marxist writer C. L. R. James has it, or is majority rule merely an exercise in the extortion of the greater by the lesser, who in their disorganization …
