Edward C. Banfield Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Edward C. Banfield (1916–1999) was a political scientist who is best known for three books: The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), The Unheavenly City (1970), and The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974).

Banfield grew up on a farm in Bloomfield, Connecticut. He attended the Connecticut State College at Storrs (now the University of Connecticut) and received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1938. Following graduation, Banfield held a variety of government jobs. He began with the U.S. Forest Service, then moved to the New Hampshire Farm Bureau in 1939. From 1940 to 1947, Banfield worked in public relations for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal era agency.

During his time at the FSA, Banfield was admitted to the University of Chicago, where he studied planning and cities. He received his PhD in political science in 1952 from the University of Chicago and then joined its faculty. He remained there until 1959, when he moved to Harvard University. Banfield remained at Harvard until his retirement, except for a four-year stint (1972–1976) at the University of Pennsylvania.

While initially a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Banfield increasingly became skeptical of government’s growing social welfare role. Reviewing his experience with the FSA, he concluded that assistance to the poor had not improved the lives of the recipients, and in some cases had made their lives worse.

He was critical of liberal ideas, especially the use of federal aid to relieve urban poverty. He argued that culture was the cause of urban poverty, and that federal aid would ultimately fail because it targeted the wrong problem. Indeed, he suggested that federal assistance could make the problems of urban poverty worse. His work was often criticized as “blaming the victim” for their situation.

With scholar Martin Meyerson, Banfield challenged the proliferation of high-rise public housing projects in Chicago and other cities around the country, warning that they would have the unintended consequence of racially isolating the urban poor. His point of view would be vindicated during the 1990s, as public housing authorities around the country began demolishing these high-rises, replacing them with less dense packed garden apartments and town houses.

Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society is about a poor village of Chiramonte in southern Italy. In explaining why the village was poor, Banfield coined the term, amoral familism, a phenomenon that he described as families in the village distrusting one another to the point where they could not cooperate. He compared this town with Gunlock, Utah, a small Mor mon town he had studied in the early 1950s. In contrast to Chiramonte, Gunlock prospered because the farmers of the town cooperated with one another. This led Banfield to conclude that culture, not the absence of financial support, explained why the Italian town did not prosper.

In The Unheavenly City, he contended that the so-called urban crisis of the time was misunderstood. He suggested that many aspects of the crisis were not problems, and that some problems (traffic congestion) could be managed easily, while others (crime and racism) would be difficult to manage. While acknowledging that racism was a problem, he contended that urban poverty was more a case of class prejudice than race prejudice.

Banfield’s influence was extensive, with several future leading conservative scholars among his students: Christopher DeMuth, Bruce Kovner, Thomas Sowell, and James Q.Wilson. Banfield also served as an advisor to President Richard M. Nixon, heading the Presidential Task Force on Model Cities.

Bibliography:

Banfield, Edward C. The Unheavenly City. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
The Unheavenly City Revisited: A Revision of the Unheavenly City. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
Banfield, Edward C., and Laura Fasano. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958.
Banfield, Edward C., and Martin Meyerson. Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.
Banfield, Edward C., and James Q.Wilson. City Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/MIT Press, 1963.
Kesler, Charles R., ed. Edward C. Banfield: An Appreciation. Claremont, Calif.: Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, 2002.
Meyerson, Martin, and Edward C. Banfield. Boston:The Job Ahead. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.