Enlightenment philosophers prioritized an epistemological approach, which allowed a critique of institutions “as historical constructs” (p 227). This made way for a social movement approach which saw institutions as changeable and subject not only to the will of their leadership but so to, through revolution or resistance, the general population. The three primary forms of social movements were constructed on the approaches of anarchy, historical materialism and utopianism.
Utopianism promoted the idea that society could be structured apart from the state around small communities that could co-exist largely outside of the formal economy. Anarchism contributed to this vision by promoting the idea of reciprocal exchange such that these communities could not only co-exist with each other but also trade with each other in a less exploitative manner under a minimalist state infrastructure. Historical materialism, finally, entrenched the idea of a class consciousness – a sense that not only must the populous break free from the oppression of the state (utopian), the exploitation of the formal economy (anarchism) but also from the bonds of their own class oppression.
Central to these notions is the overthrow of the top down, command-control social engineering that was proposed by the likes of Bentham and Saint-Simon. Instead it proposes to replace social engineering with a form of social emancipation that seeks to prioritize the individual as equal and free from domination.
Friedmann, then, provides a detailed summary of the three different approaches and a useful matrix on pages 251-255. Through the working out of these approaches, however, one commonality becomes apparent: that the social movement approach is always conceived as a response from below, from the people, so to speak. Planners that take this approach as the core of their planning philosophy must “walk the thin line that divides licit from subversive action” (p 256) – they must both agitate for a reordering of the state while protecting against revolution.
Before planning can come from below, however, their needs to be a processes of making people conscious. People are either never aware or in denial of the immediacy of their own oppression. In order to promote a social movement, bottom up approach, the bottom needs to realize that it is on the bottom. This realization has led to the critique that each of these social movements presumes a particular ideal of an individual against which it shows that the society of the idea has oppressed and produced a different individual. This presumption of an individual that, for example, wants to live free, without greed and aggression, has come under serious assault in the past seventy or so years. Starting with the Frankfurt school and working its way through Habermas and Althusser, the feminist movement, liberation politics and other post-modern offshoots, Friedmann details the resistances to this predetermined notion of what an ideal individual should be.
Friedmann raises the critiques of social movement theory not only to emphasizes that there are multiple approaches to engaging in a bottom up approach but to remind the planner that all bottom up approaches prioritize one group (as Wiley says, there is never really any bottom) over the other and in this there is always the possibility of worsening the problem planners are trying to address. More importantly, however, planners need to realize that they are could end up being both involved in an emancipatory action and in furthering the entrenchment of oppression.
I agree with Freidmann’s conclusion that social mobilization is an essential component to planning despite its flaws. Nonetheless, I fear Friedmann falls short in that he needs to further emphasise that planners themselves must make themselves answerable to the individuals. How to do this is the question
