"EDWARD BANFIELD's two books perform a service for the government official that none other has: They cut down his agenda. In place of a long list of troubles that are described as typically urban, Banfield reduces the prototypical urban problems to one. That's the persistent existence of a group of people whom he categorizes as "low-class." All the other difficulties of urban life--the bad housing, the obsolescent street pattern, the conflicts between metropolitan-wide necessities and the desires of communities and neighborhoods within the metropolis--are problems that urban governments and private economies are solving; indeed they are much nearer solution than ever before, as well as considerably less dangerous to life and health. By comparison, the "low-class" problem is not better, but worse."
The URL for this review is: HERE.
It did seem Banfield was initially focused on urban planning. Incidentally, Murray coined the term "underclass" which while still having a pejorative connotation is less likely to provoke outrage than "low-class" (Banfield) or "poverty class" (Payne). A psychiatrist writes about this regulary in City Pages. His real name is Anthony Daniels but he is also known as "Dalyrmple" (sp?).
I was assigned to read the original version of Banfield’s work in an undergraduate municipal government course in 1972, shortly after it was written. At that time, I lived in a slum ridden eastern city and Banfield’s observations about the philosophical shortcomings leading to poverty and urban blight, as well as the cynicism of many of the recipients and brokers of governmental largess, seemed sensible, if not obvious from my empirical observations. Unfortunately, Banfield’s observations, and more importantly his prescriptions for ending the embryonic “victim” culture, received more results in the form of threats to the author than in sounder urban governance. At the same time, more of the middle classes and productive members of the working classes fled that city as well as others around the country and those cities continued to decline. And that is the key importance of reading Banfield in 2001. Time has proven him correct, every bit as much as it has demonstrated the carnival barker’s fraud that encompassed every portion of the so-called “great society.” These debates exist today as well and the education debate is one of the best examples. Similarly, our national and local city politics are replete with countless snake oil salesmen promising a new Jerusalem if we can just redistribute more wealth from the productive to the grasping victims. This does work very well for the redistributors, but a review of Banfield’s text 30 years later demonstrates beyond reasonable dispute that it does not for the cities or their slum dwellers. A generation was wasted ignoring these realities; hopefully another one won’t have to be.
As Sociology (as a field of study) continues to mature, we find that his view on the players is as on target today as it was 30 years ago - one only need look to the mess in N.O today.