Urbanization

MacIver in his, The Modern State, observes that growth of wealth led to emergence of big cities and towns. This, in turn, resulted in trade, commerce, industries and other economic activities. These economic changes also impacted social ties and family bonds. Increasingly, city-based and non-family bonds started getting importance. The city and the urban area emerged as a community in itself requiring intensive and continuous regulation. For MacIver then ‘city implies the concentration of wealth and through it the concentration of power’.⁸⁵ MacIver’s understanding suggests that city and urban centres not only helped in emergence of some type of regulatory and order-maintaining mechanisms and officials but also wider community identity, which transcends family ties. What we encounter in a contemporary urban situation, in the form of prevalent urban anonymity and non-familial and non-kin-based ties, might have its seeds planted long back.

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, traces origin and evolution of the state. He mentions that ‘contrast between town and country’ also marked emergence of advanced stage of ‘division of labour, the resulting exchange between individuals, and commodity production’. What Engels is hinting at is the emergence of profit-based exchange economy and market in urban areas. For Engels, this is the mark of what he calls ‘civilized society’ whose ‘cohesive force … is the state’.⁸⁶

Both MacIver and Engels hint that emergence of market-based, non-familial and economic activities led to the emergence of urban communities that were different from the countryside. These forms of urbanization required concentration of power for regulation of cities and various activities within it. The idea of public power and official based regulation might have put the seed of government or State.