Our present over-developed centralism goes back to a bureaucratic style perfected in the 18th century for taxation and policing; a military style developed with the emergence of the nation-states for logistics and to wage war; an economic style dominated by abstract money-profits rather than specific uses and work-processes; and — to a lesser degree — a style of industry determined by large concentrations of machinery around steam prime-movers, cash-cropping, and enclosures.

These have produced over-capitalized and often inappropriate technology, an inflexible and insecure tightly interlocking economy, ignorant mass-consumption with a complicated standard of living of inferior quality, the development of sprawling urban areas rather than towns and cities, brain-washing mass communications, mass-democracy without real content, and mass-education that is both wasteful and regimenting.

With these, there is a prevalent superstition that no other method of organization could be more efficient or is even possible, and that in all functions the reasonable mode of operation is by "rationalization" (subdivision, standardization, cash-accounting). Because of the superstition and the inflexible organization, these beliefs are self-proving. No other kind of operation or administration is paid attention or subsidized; no research is done into possibilities of decentralizing. Breakdowns in the centralizing system are handled not by examining the system but by patchwork or imposing new levels of control according to the same administrative style. Meantime the hidden costs involved in centralization are omitted from the cash-accounting. . . .

The grave threat in modern urbanization is anomie, the rootlessness and helplessness of individuals, the loss of citizenry. When it tries at all to cope with this, centralized administration tries to encourage "participation", but participation is empty unless it involves the possibility of initiating and deciding, that is decentralized administration. It is interesting to contrast the dull formality of a PTA meeting at which nothing important can be decided, with the liveliness of the public meeting of a local school board to which important authority has been delegated.

"Association" and "participation" are not mere interpersonal relations; they are sharing an objective enterprise.

Paul Goodman, Notes on Decentralization
Notes for the writing of People or Personnel, first published in Dissent, Autumn 1964
Copyright © 1977 by the Estate of Paul Goodman. All rights reserved.

Posted 20 July 1996

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