Word: banfield
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nation's policy makers are simply too lazy to walk a few blocks beyond their Washington office buildings. But more likely, at least in the case of the Nixon administration, the policy-makers probably stole a glance down the street and then opened up their copies of Edward C. Banfield's Unheavenly City to understand what they...
...Banfield, who will be returning to Harvard after three years at Pennsylvania, is like the professional athlete who is always dubbed "controversial" by the sports writers. He wears the label but few really know how he earned it. He is controversial largely because in Unheavenly City and again in his most recent work, Unheavenly City Revisited, Banfield attempts to define the real issues that make up the urban crisis. The controversy is fanned when he reaches conclusions that those enamored of Great Society philosophies find disturbing and radical groups feel are racist and simply wrong...
What mostly upsets Banfield's critics is that he finds that there is no urban crisis--or at least no crisis that can't be corrected by that conservative weapon of time. And he makes it explicit that he wants time and only time to solve problems--not federally-funded aid programs to the poor, like housing programs under the Housing and Urban Development Department and the Office of Economic Opportunity that President Nixon cut back drastically while Banfield was his urban consultant. In Banfield's book these programs only serve to exacerbate problems of city-dwellers...
...that isn't all. His hardline "pragmatic conservatism" (which has liberals reeling because it scorns their programs aimed at the heart of the poverty cycle) has its roots in principles violently antithetical to the radicals, such as SDS and the Committee Against Racism, two groups that shouted Banfield down during a lecture he gave at the University of Chicago last year. These principles are expressed in Banfield's theory of the class imperative. To Banfield the problems that do exist in the city, although minor ones compared to earlier days, are problems not of economic distribution or political power...
Mansfield said that the Blustein incident "could possibly have something to do" with Banfield's decision