The Fourth of July is an opportunity to reflect on the long, difficult path to liberty. The organized uprisings, like t he American Revolution, that toppled tyrants were often urban affairs that started with surreptitious meetings in crowded pubs and guildhalls. They were led by creatures of the city: merchants, lawyers, weavers, butchers, and brewers. As we celebrate our freedom at spacious suburban barbecues, we should remember that the road to freedom started on far more crowded city streets.
In the fight for freedom between dictatorship and democracy, dictatorship starts with a big edge.
Dictatorships have a small number of insiders who have strong incentives to fight for their regime. Because the benefits of democracy are so widely shared, no one has particularly strong incentives to fight to create or preserve representative government.
Democracies have a massive free-rider problem where all of us have a natural tendency to let someone else die for our liberty. Solving this free rider problem requires coordination and this is what urban density has done for millennia. Urban density connects citizens and enables them to meet and plan and talk. With enough talking, groups like the Sons of Liberty may even convince themselves that it is worth dying for a common cause. Monarchies flourished in our agricultural past, because effective democratic opposition was far more difficult to organize in a dispersed rural setting.
Two and a half millennia ago, democracy rose in Athens. The Athenian polis, with its constant convocations, could not have existed in a rural setting where farmers had to travel miles to meet. In that agrarian age, democracy didn't survive the onslaught of Macedonian, Roman, and Gothic conquerors. Slowly, the stirrings of democracy reappeared as cities revived a millennium ago.
The most serene republic of Venice was neither all that serene nor all that democratic, but it represented a step toward representative government.
But the true birthplace of modern democracy was the wool-trading towns of the Low Countries. In Bruges's market square, there is a statue of a butcher and a weaver, who are far more important in the history of freedom than their contemporary, the rural warlord William Wallace. In 1302, more than 450 years before our Tea Party, these two urban artisans coordinated their fellow guild members' surreptitious destruction of the French king's army occupying their town. Two months later, they led the urban militias from Bruges and Ghent that destroyed the elegantly armored French cavalry in the Battle of the Golden Spurs.
The Bruges revolt of 1302 was only one of a string of urban uprisings that bedeviled the autocratic overlords who tried to control the wealthy but troublesome cities of the Low Countries. In 1566, a great revolt began 40 miles from Bruges. For 80 years, urban rebels fought against their Hapsburg overlords, and eventually turned Europe's most urbanized area into the independent republic of the Netherlands. In 1581, the Dutch enacted an Act of Abjuration declaring that the King of Spain was unfit to lead them. It is the most direct ancestor of our own Declaration of Independence.
Our revolution had its origins in the urban connections between John Hancock, the two Adams cousins, and assorted other enemies of British colonial policy. Brought together by Boston, a merchant-prince could help finance riots led by a brewer. The lawyers could argue cases and the writers could push pamphlets. David Hackett Fischer's account of Paul Revere taught us that this silversmith was not a lone rider, but part of a dense, urban network that collectively fought for independence. The most important urban interactions of all may have occurred in the Second Continental Congress in the days before July 4, 1776. By connecting in a city, the founding fathers hung together instead of hanging separately.
Across countries today, there is a robust correlation between urbanization and democracy. This correlation reflects many things, such as the tendency of more urban places to be richer and better educated, but it also surely reflects the role that cities play in supporting the coordinated action that creates and defends democracies. So enjoy your Fourth of July with as much greenery as you like, but also remember that city air made you free.
Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.
