The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Collective military aggression, I submit, is as much a special invention of civilization as is the collective expression of curiosity through systematic scientific investigation. The fact that human beings are naturally curious did not lead inevitably to organized science; and the fact that they are given to anger and pugnacity was not sufficient in itself to create the institution of war.

The ancient Greeks thought that their own respect for custom and common law, as against tyrannous caprice, was a unique product of their culture. But actually it was a witness to their continuity with an older village democracy we first meet in Mesopotamia: an institution that seems to precede all more sophisticated exercise of control by dominant minority, imposing their alien traditions or their equally alien upper-class innovations upon a subjugated if acquiescent population.

For all that, the embryonic structure of the city already existed in the village. House, shrine, cistern, public way, agora - not yet a specialized market - all first took form in the village: inventions and organic differentiations waiting to be carried further in the more complex structure of the city.