WEBVTT

NOTE Jane Jacobs (1916–2006)

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.680
The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

2
00:00:09.680 --> 00:00:12.920
Jeff Rigenbach.

3
00:00:12.920 --> 00:00:19.880
When Jane Jacobs died five years ago, the exact date was April 25, 2006, there was a

4
00:00:19.880 --> 00:00:24.520
brief flurry of interest in a couple of libertarian publications.

5
00:00:24.520 --> 00:00:27.840
One brief obit ran on this website, for example.

6
00:00:27.840 --> 00:00:30.480
But the flurry died down pretty quickly.

7
00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:37.160
And since then, apart from a perceptive short article about a year ago on lewrockwell.com

8
00:00:37.160 --> 00:00:42.320
and an extremely intelligent review essay of a recent biography of Jacobs in the Journal

9
00:00:42.320 --> 00:00:48.420
of Libertarian Studies back in 2007, I've seen no reference anywhere in the movement

10
00:00:48.420 --> 00:00:54.760
media to one of the most important English-speaking intellectuals of the 20th century, who, whether

11
00:00:54.760 --> 00:00:58.460
Whether she knew it or not was also a libertarian.

12
00:00:58.460 --> 00:01:03.880
It isn't that the authors of those two lonely pieces on Jacobs weren't properly respectful

13
00:01:03.880 --> 00:01:05.180
of their subject.

14
00:01:05.180 --> 00:01:06.180
They were.

15
00:01:06.180 --> 00:01:11.520
Pierre de Rocher, the Canadian geographer who wrote The Death and Life of a Reluctant

16
00:01:11.520 --> 00:01:17.080
Urban Icon for the Journal of Libertarian Studies, called Jacobs the most influential

17
00:01:17.080 --> 00:01:20.240
writer on cities in the last half century.

18
00:01:20.240 --> 00:01:26.780
And Thomas Schmidt, who wrote Ludwig von Mises, Meet Your Leibniz, for LewRockwell.com late

19
00:01:26.780 --> 00:01:33.440
in April of 2010, called Jacobs an original thinker and urban theorist, whose corpus of

20
00:01:33.440 --> 00:01:39.040
seven books shows few, if any, Austrian sources in her bibliographies.

21
00:01:39.040 --> 00:01:44.480
And yet, the conclusions she draws often seem merely a different way of stating the same

22
00:01:44.480 --> 00:01:47.240
descriptions as Mises.

23
00:01:47.240 --> 00:01:53.040
Witt notes in the opening paragraph of his piece that if a scientific theory provides

24
00:01:53.040 --> 00:01:58.840
a true description of reality, it will manifest itself in several ways.

25
00:01:58.840 --> 00:02:05.200
For one, different approaches to the truth will all converge upon the same underlying

26
00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:06.200
reality.

27
00:02:06.200 --> 00:02:12.520
For another, a theory congruent with reality will reveal its truth in more areas than the

28
00:02:12.520 --> 00:02:17.600
and the area of empirical observation that originally gave rise to it.

29
00:02:17.600 --> 00:02:23.640
Thus Newton's development of the calculus coincided with Leibniz's, both working toward

30
00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:29.760
the same fundamentally correct method of mathematical analysis of the existing world.

31
00:02:29.760 --> 00:02:36.440
If Austrian economics also reflects an underlying reality, it must likewise be approachable

32
00:02:36.440 --> 00:02:43.560
by different methods, and be true outside pure economics, as Mises intended praxeology

33
00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:47.280
to be applicable throughout the social sciences.

34
00:02:47.280 --> 00:02:54.440
In Schmidt's view, Jane Jacobs stood in relation to Mises as Leibniz stood in relation to Newton.

35
00:02:54.440 --> 00:03:00.140
They both independently discovered the same truth, by coming at it from different points

36
00:03:00.140 --> 00:03:05.000
of view and employing somewhat different methodologies.

37
00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:08.880
Pierre de Rocher sees Jacobs in a very similar way.

38
00:03:08.880 --> 00:03:15.140
He first read her around 1990, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Montreal,

39
00:03:15.140 --> 00:03:20.720
and he declared 17 years later in the Journal of Libertarian Studies that her compelling

40
00:03:20.720 --> 00:03:27.660
writings on markets as complex adaptive systems had turned this once left-of-the-center writer

41
00:03:27.660 --> 00:03:34.960
into a spontaneous order devotee, long before I had heard of Austrian economics and libertarian

42
00:03:34.960 --> 00:03:36.480
and Humanism.

43
00:03:36.480 --> 00:03:42.240
Spontaneous order, of course, is a concept more closely associated with Friedrich Hayek

44
00:03:42.240 --> 00:03:47.440
than with Ludwig von Mises, and there has been no shortage of commentators who have compared

45
00:03:47.440 --> 00:03:49.840
Jane Jacobs to Hayek.

46
00:03:49.840 --> 00:03:55.120
Management professor David Emanuel Anderson says, for example, that Jacob's first and

47
00:03:55.120 --> 00:04:01.200
most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Hayek's well-known essay

48
00:04:01.200 --> 00:04:06.440
say, on the use of knowledge in society, tell essentially the same story.

49
00:04:06.440 --> 00:04:13.440
One could almost say that Hayek's 1945 paper is a generalized and more abstract summary

50
00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:17.860
of the central arguments in Jacob's 1961 book.

51
00:04:17.860 --> 00:04:19.900
Or consider another example.

52
00:04:19.900 --> 00:04:26.120
Jean Callahan and Sanford Ikeda, in a valuable article on Jacob's published eight years ago

53
00:04:26.120 --> 00:04:41.120
A few weeks ago, on this website, wrote that her works are full of arguments and insights on the economic nature of communities, on central planning, and on ethics that libertarians would find original and enlightening.

54
00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:59.120
They note, also, her argument against what they call heavy-handed local planning, namely, that such planning fails to take into account the subtleties of the knowledge possessed only by money.

55
00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:23.120
by the individuals on the scene for which she coined the term locality knowledge and that it inappropriately imitates the techniques of 19th century physical sciences.

56
00:05:23.120 --> 00:05:33.120
Callahan and Ikeda congratulate Jacobs on what they call her innate grasp of the power of voluntary exchange and spontaneous order

57
00:05:33.120 --> 00:05:39.120
and her methodologically individualist and subjectivist approach to her subject matter

58
00:05:39.120 --> 00:05:56.120
And they comment that the parallels between the ideas she formulates in her first book and Hayek's conceptions of spontaneous order, local knowledge and scientism are striking, especially since she was unfamiliar with Hayek's work at the time.

59
00:05:56.120 --> 00:06:04.120
At the time Jacob's first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, she was 45 years old.

60
00:06:04.120 --> 00:06:16.120
She had been born Jane Isabel Butzner on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a prosperous physician and his wife, a nurse.

61
00:06:16.120 --> 00:06:26.120
Young Jane grew up in Scranton, graduated from high school there, and took a job at the local paper, the Scranton Tribune, as a writer and editor for the women's pages.

62
00:06:26.120 --> 00:06:31.120
A year later, at the age of 19, she moved to New York to seek her fortune.

63
00:06:31.120 --> 00:06:32.120
Fortune.

64
00:06:32.120 --> 00:06:36.400
It was 1935, the depths of the Great Depression.

65
00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:41.320
Before leaving Scranton, she had taken a course in typing and shorthand so that she could

66
00:06:41.320 --> 00:06:45.740
qualify for an office job if she couldn't find work in journalism.

67
00:06:45.740 --> 00:06:51.000
And she did work as a stenographer off and on during her early years in New York.

68
00:06:51.000 --> 00:06:56.440
But it wasn't long before she began selling articles to newspapers and magazines, first

69
00:06:56.440 --> 00:07:03.280
to the magazines Q and Vogue, then to the feature pages of the Sunday New York Herald Tribune

70
00:07:03.280 --> 00:07:06.820
during Isabel Patterson's heyday on that paper.

71
00:07:06.820 --> 00:07:13.080
In 1937, at the age of 21, using money her parents had set aside for the purpose, she

72
00:07:13.080 --> 00:07:14.980
enrolled in college.

73
00:07:14.980 --> 00:07:20.720
As her biographer, Alice Sparburg Alexiou, tells the story, Jane Butzner enrolled at

74
00:07:20.720 --> 00:07:27.080
Columbia University's School of General Studies as a non-matriculating student, which meant

75
00:07:27.080 --> 00:07:29.520
she could study whatever she wanted.

76
00:07:29.520 --> 00:07:35.160
For the first time in her life, Jane found, to her surprise, that she enjoyed school.

77
00:07:35.160 --> 00:07:37.520
She even received good grades.

78
00:07:37.520 --> 00:07:42.840
In high school, in Scranton, bored by the curriculum, she had sat in class reading books

79
00:07:42.840 --> 00:07:48.000
on subjects she found interesting, paying little or no attention to what she was supposed

80
00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:52.200
to be studying and earning mediocre grades as a result.

81
00:07:52.200 --> 00:07:59.200
Now she was studying anything she liked, geology, zoology, economics, geography, constitutional

82
00:07:59.200 --> 00:08:02.560
law and was an honor student.

83
00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:09.520
But according to Alexiou, after two years at general studies, Jane was required to matriculate,

84
00:08:09.520 --> 00:08:12.040
which would have meant attending Barnard.

85
00:08:12.040 --> 00:08:17.400
But Barnard rejected her application, despite the good work she had done at Columbia.

86
00:08:17.400 --> 00:08:22.400
The Women's College based its decision on her terrible high school grades.

87
00:08:22.400 --> 00:08:24.520
Jean claimed not to care.

88
00:08:24.520 --> 00:08:30.160
As she told an interviewer years later, once I was the property of Barnard, I had to take,

89
00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:35.040
it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn.

90
00:08:35.040 --> 00:08:40.360
Fortunately, my high school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong

91
00:08:40.360 --> 00:08:46.240
to it, and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education by means of independent

92
00:08:46.240 --> 00:08:47.240
reading.

93
00:08:47.240 --> 00:08:49.880
She also decided to go job hunting.

94
00:08:49.880 --> 00:08:54.880
Maybe several years of successful freelance writing and a couple of years at Columbia

95
00:08:54.880 --> 00:08:57.260
would get her an editorial job?

96
00:08:57.260 --> 00:08:58.320
They did.

97
00:08:58.320 --> 00:09:04.860
She was offered a position on Iron Age, a trade magazine for the iron and steel industries.

98
00:09:04.860 --> 00:09:10.720
From there she moved on to a gig as a feature writer for the U.S. Office of War Information,

99
00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:16.480
which during the three years of its existence was the world's largest magazine publisher.

100
00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:22.200
From there, at war's end, she moved into a reporting job at America, an expensively

101
00:09:22.200 --> 00:09:27.440
produced slick paper magazine published by the U.S. State Department during the early

102
00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:32.040
years of the Cold War, beginning in 1944.

103
00:09:32.040 --> 00:09:37.000
America was published for distribution in the Soviet Union, to inform Soviet citizens

104
00:09:37.000 --> 00:09:39.440
about life in the United States.

105
00:09:39.440 --> 00:09:45.760
It was written in English by American writers like Jane Butzner, then translated into Russian,

106
00:09:45.760 --> 00:09:53.960
Set in type and printed. When it ceased publication in 1952, Jane, now 36 years old, moved on

107
00:09:53.960 --> 00:09:59.900
to an assignment as an associate editor and staff writer at Architectural Forum, a glossy

108
00:09:59.900 --> 00:10:04.520
product of Henry Luce's Time Incorporated.

109
00:10:04.520 --> 00:10:10.840
And it was through this job at Architectural Forum, the last job she ever held in journalism,

110
00:10:10.840 --> 00:10:15.740
But she finally found both fame and fortune in her late 40s.

111
00:10:15.740 --> 00:10:20.860
When she joined the magazine, according to Alice Sparberg Alexiou, she was assigned the

112
00:10:20.860 --> 00:10:25.340
school and hospital beat, subjects about which she knew nothing.

113
00:10:25.340 --> 00:10:30.820
You'll be our school and hospital expert, the editors told her.

114
00:10:30.820 --> 00:10:35.660
Years later she said, So always be suspicious of magazines.

115
00:10:35.660 --> 00:10:38.180
I didn't know beans about this.

116
00:10:38.180 --> 00:10:42.600
Somebody with a printing press tells you you're an expert.

117
00:10:42.600 --> 00:10:49.000
By this time, however, Jane Butzner had acquired a husband, an architect named Robert Jacobs,

118
00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.800
whom she married in 1944.

119
00:10:51.800 --> 00:10:57.000
He taught his wife how to read blueprints and served as her tutor and consultant in

120
00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:02.680
her new campaign to learn enough about school and hospital design to cover it competently

121
00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:04.440
for architectural forum.

122
00:11:04.440 --> 00:11:10.800
Also, of course, he changed his wife's byline at the end of her first decade in journalism.

123
00:11:10.800 --> 00:11:17.200
He made Jane Butzner into Jane Jacobs, the name under which she became famous.

124
00:11:17.200 --> 00:11:22.320
For now, though, she was not yet famous, and she was facing a new problem at work.

125
00:11:22.320 --> 00:11:28.120
Now that she had mastered her new beat, she was reassigned to a different and more challenging

126
00:11:28.120 --> 00:11:30.820
one, the city planning beat.

127
00:11:30.820 --> 00:11:35.900
As always before, she sat systematically about the business of educating herself.

128
00:11:35.900 --> 00:11:39.020
What were the goals of city planners?

129
00:11:39.020 --> 00:11:40.480
She asked herself.

130
00:11:40.480 --> 00:11:43.040
How did they attempt to achieve these goals?

131
00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:46.480
How successful had their attempts been in the past?

132
00:11:46.480 --> 00:11:49.960
If they had failed, why had they failed?

133
00:11:49.960 --> 00:11:55.520
To get a handle on these questions, she began walking around Manhattan and riding around

134
00:11:55.520 --> 00:11:57.140
it on her bicycle.

135
00:11:57.140 --> 00:11:58.300
She observed.

136
00:11:58.300 --> 00:12:04.220
She asked herself how the city worked, what kept it orderly, what made it a place people

137
00:12:04.220 --> 00:12:09.400
could live happily, benefiting from the neighborhood in which they lived.

138
00:12:09.400 --> 00:12:14.940
The conclusions she reached, as I have indicated, were remarkably similar to those Ludwig von

139
00:12:14.940 --> 00:12:19.760
Mises and Friedrich Hayek had reached earlier by different routes.

140
00:12:19.760 --> 00:12:23.180
A city is, at base, a marketplace.

141
00:12:23.180 --> 00:12:25.680
It is a spontaneous order.

142
00:12:25.680 --> 00:12:27.680
cannot be planned.

143
00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:33.880
The people who try to plan cities have failed above all because they have not comprehended

144
00:12:33.880 --> 00:12:37.800
the way the spontaneous order of cities works.

145
00:12:37.800 --> 00:12:43.680
Jacobs wrote about what she observed and what she inferred from what she observed in Architectural

146
00:12:43.680 --> 00:12:44.680
Forum.

147
00:12:44.680 --> 00:12:50.160
Her work began attracting the attention of influential people, people who knew people,

148
00:12:50.160 --> 00:12:52.120
people who could make things happen.

149
00:12:52.120 --> 00:12:56.440
She was invited to speak at a conference on urban design at Harvard.

150
00:12:56.440 --> 00:13:01.940
Her remarks were heard by influential people, people who knew people, people who could make

151
00:13:01.940 --> 00:13:03.360
things happen.

152
00:13:03.360 --> 00:13:08.580
She was offered a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation to expound on her ideas at book

153
00:13:08.580 --> 00:13:09.580
length.

154
00:13:09.580 --> 00:13:12.520
She was offered a book contract by Random House.

155
00:13:12.520 --> 00:13:16.480
She delivered the manuscript early in 1961.

156
00:13:16.480 --> 00:13:22.960
was published later that same year, half a century ago this year, as The Death and Life

157
00:13:22.960 --> 00:13:28.840
of Great American Cities, and it may fairly be said that it took the world by storm.

158
00:13:28.840 --> 00:13:33.920
The ideas it contained, which flew in the face of everything that was known by the urban

159
00:13:33.920 --> 00:13:39.400
planners and students of urban planning at the time, are now regarded as commonplace

160
00:13:39.400 --> 00:14:02.400
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was one of those books that leaves its reader forever changed, forever unable even to think about the subject matter it discusses, except in the way the reader first learned from its pages.

161
00:14:02.400 --> 00:14:22.400
This first book was a hard act to follow, but follow it Jacobs did, with two more books of comparable originality and comparable importance in the next two decades, The Economy of Cities in 1969 and Cities and the Wealth of Nations in 1984.

162
00:14:22.400 --> 00:14:28.920
By the time the first of these, The Economy of Cities, was published in 1969, Jacobs and

163
00:14:28.920 --> 00:14:34.920
her husband had taken their three children, including their two draft-age sons, and left

164
00:14:34.920 --> 00:14:39.880
New York City for Toronto, where they became Canadian citizens.

165
00:14:39.880 --> 00:14:45.680
They opposed the Vietnam War, they told reporters, and they wanted to make sure their sons weren't

166
00:14:45.680 --> 00:14:47.400
forced to fight in it.

167
00:14:47.400 --> 00:14:53.600
Jane Jacobs spent the last 38 years of her life, a little more than half her adult life,

168
00:14:53.600 --> 00:14:54.800
in Canada.

169
00:14:54.800 --> 00:15:02.800
She died there, in Toronto, on April 25, 2006, and is now often described, with some justice,

170
00:15:02.800 --> 00:15:07.200
as an American-born Canadian writer and activist.

171
00:15:07.200 --> 00:15:13.300
She seems to have first come to any sort of official libertarian notice in 1970, when

172
00:15:13.300 --> 00:15:20.740
And Murray Rothbard reviewed her second book, The Economy of Cities, in his libertarian forum, calling it

173
00:15:20.740 --> 00:15:26.540
a brilliant scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development past

174
00:15:26.540 --> 00:15:29.860
and present of free market cities.

175
00:15:29.860 --> 00:15:35.260
But it was in the 1980s when laissez-faire books began carrying the death and life of

176
00:15:35.260 --> 00:15:42.500
great American cities and ran a laudatory review, written by me, of Jacob's 1984 book

177
00:15:42.500 --> 00:15:47.860
books Cities and the Wealth of Nations in its monthly catalog that Jacobs and her ideas

178
00:15:47.860 --> 00:15:53.020
really began to penetrate the libertarian mind in an important way.

179
00:15:53.020 --> 00:15:59.020
In 1985, when Cities and the Wealth of Nations won the Mencken Award of the Libertarian Free

180
00:15:59.020 --> 00:16:05.300
Press Association as the best book in support of individual rights published in the preceding

181
00:16:05.300 --> 00:16:11.980
year, public association of Jacobs' ideas with libertarianism was given another boost.

182
00:16:11.980 --> 00:16:18.580
Two years later, in 1987, the anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin, who at times made common

183
00:16:18.580 --> 00:16:24.220
cause with libertarians of our sort, praised cities and the wealth of nations, saying that

184
00:16:24.220 --> 00:16:30.560
it remains a lasting contribution of Jane Jacobs to have demonstrated in a very compelling

185
00:16:30.560 --> 00:16:37.060
way that our economic well-being depends on cities, not on nation-states, and that her

186
00:16:37.060 --> 00:16:43.900
Her argument invites a debate about the superfluity of the state that has been too long neglected.

187
00:16:43.900 --> 00:16:50.160
By then though, Jacobs had already taken steps to distance herself from the libertarian tradition.

188
00:16:50.160 --> 00:16:53.380
An interviewer said to her in 1985,

189
00:16:53.380 --> 00:16:58.580
Increasingly I have seen people starting to identify you with libertarianism.

190
00:16:58.580 --> 00:17:01.240
Would you accept that characterization?

191
00:17:01.240 --> 00:17:02.240
She replied,

192
00:17:02.240 --> 00:17:07.840
I'm highly in favor of helping the poor and of giving everybody as good an education

193
00:17:07.840 --> 00:17:12.080
as they want and can use, not what they can pay for.

194
00:17:12.080 --> 00:17:16.580
I think health care not tied to money is terribly important.

195
00:17:16.580 --> 00:17:21.600
The libertarians would say, look, we shouldn't even have laws about drugs.

196
00:17:21.600 --> 00:17:24.880
That's up to people to be responsible about themselves.

197
00:17:24.880 --> 00:17:28.960
We shouldn't have lots of laws about things that aren't harmful to people.

198
00:17:28.960 --> 00:17:30.800
I'm not so sure about that.

199
00:17:30.800 --> 00:17:37.360
I think people do need help of various kinds. It has to be empirical, pragmatic. You have

200
00:17:37.360 --> 00:17:43.480
to see what happens. You have to try to recognize mistakes, not just keep on doing them because

201
00:17:43.480 --> 00:17:48.700
you don't know what else to do. I don't have a sentimental notion that all human beings

202
00:17:48.700 --> 00:17:54.160
would be marvelous if they weren't deprived. It's not true. But as for not wanting to help

203
00:17:54.160 --> 00:17:59.500
the poor or saying, let everyone stand on their own feet, no, I don't believe that

204
00:17:59.500 --> 00:18:00.500
at All.

205
00:18:00.500 --> 00:18:06.380
So, by her own account, Jane Jacobs was not a libertarian.

206
00:18:06.380 --> 00:18:10.420
By his own account, Ludwig von Mises was not an anarchist.

207
00:18:10.420 --> 00:18:16.300
Yet, as Murray Rothbard and others have argued, the logic of Mises' work leads the reader

208
00:18:16.300 --> 00:18:23.100
inexorably to conclude that there is no legitimate place for coercive government, the state,

209
00:18:23.100 --> 00:18:26.780
in a society of private property and free exchange.

210
00:18:26.780 --> 00:18:36.780
Similarly, the basic logic of Jane Jacobs' work must lead an attentive reader inexorably to a libertarian view of human social relations.

211
00:18:36.780 --> 00:18:42.780
Jane Jacobs never realized that a libertarian was exactly what she was.

212
00:18:42.780 --> 00:18:51.780
However reluctant or half-hearted her commitment to it may have seemed to her, she was perhaps the ultimate libertarian outsider.

213
00:18:51.780 --> 00:18:53.780
This is Jeff Rigenbach.