Dublin experienced a marked stagnation in population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by decaying infrastructure and poor public health. Historians have emphasized that this crisis was coupled with poor governance of the city of Dublin—manifested by eroding public services together with increasing tax burdens to counteract growing debt. This paper studies the municipal boundary expansion of Dublin in 1901, which occurred as a way to alleviate the city’s financial distress. It saw multiple relatively wealthy townships annexed by the city via royal order to increase Dublin’s tax base. Using a sample of census records matched to city streets, we show that wealthy residents and Protestant residents were more likely to leave annexed areas compared to areas that remained independent. Moreover, we offer anecdotal evidence that at least some of the wealthy Protestant households departing annexed townships sorted into jurisdictions that remained independent. Our findings offer support to arguments that the municipal annexation by the city of Dublin may have accelerated the decline of annexed areas in the early twentieth century and contributed to municipal fragmentation in metropolitan Dublin.

From the beginning the American republic conceived of itself as a great experiment in the realization of liberty. This experiment has come to be conjoined, serendipitously, with another fact about America—its peculiar relationship to the process of modernization. Talcott Parsons has called America“the lead society.” This is not an expression of nationalist megalomania, but rather a descriptive (if you will, a “value-free”) statement to the effect that a number of modernizing forces have gone further in this country than anywhere else. It is in this double sense that I am prepared to use the term chosen for America. For better or for worse, we are the most modernized society in the contemporary world. And, audaciously, we continue to carry on the experiment of free institutions in this not necessarily enviable condition. Liberty is on the retreat today all over the world. I cannot pursue here the far-reaching, and sinister, implications of this for America's role on the international scene. But the institutions that embody liberty are also under great pressure domestically. My observations in what follows pertain to this domestic crisis. They are animated by the hope that, if we can resolve this crisis without abandoning the experiment, we may still serve as a lesson for the human race. Perhaps we are “chosen”to do this.

It may well be a tendency rooted in human nature that both individuals and larger collectivities, when faced with an intractable problem, like to think that someone, somewhere, must have the definitive solution. This tendency has certainly been visible in the area of Third World development. When this area was first brought into public consciousness in the years following World War II, there was the widespread assumption (by no means limited to North Americans and Europeans) that the advanced industrial societies of the West had discovered the secret of development. They constituted the model; the problem for other societies was how to follow this model as rapidly and painlessly as possible. This was the time when Talcott Parsons, for example, could refer to the United States as the "lead society," sincerely believing that this designation reflected sober social-scientific analysis rather than messianic nationalism. Then came the great ideological upheaval of the late 1960s and early '70s. The success of the Western model was either challenged in toto—as was done by Marxists of various denominations—or at least deemed to be negative in its effects on non-Western societies— as in the perspective of the more moderate versions of "dependency theory." The American "lead society" model was replaced by miscellaneous "vanguard societies," ranging from China to Tanzania, that had little in common except a commitment to a socialist development strategy.

A specter is haunting the Western world— the specter of the New Class. The apparition is new, as yet not clearly perceived; even the language by which it is to be described is only beginning to be constructed. This is not surprising. Whenever a class makes its debut on the societal stage it is at first not recognized as such, either by outside observers or by those- who are themselves part of it. Instead, society continues for a while to be perceived and interpreted in terms that were appropriate to the class system that is already passing away. This was very much so during the last great transformation of the Western class system, as the bourgeoisie rose to power under the facade of the ancien regime and, until the very moment of its victory, continued to be seen as the "third estate" of a feudal order. Then as now it is the hard facticity of power rather than the play of ideas that finally must shatter the old perceptions. Then as now it is the antagonists of the rising class who have the clearer vision of what is going on.

In commenting on the Hartford Appeal Gregory Baum made some very thoughtful observations on some of my own work. I shall limit myself here to replying to these observations, though, by implication, my reply touches on several points made by other commentators. I would also like to say that I am very grateful to Baum: Few things are as gratifying to an author as having a critic who understands him.

Baum very ably puts his finger on two persisting tensions in my work—the tension between transcendence and humanism on the one hand, and the tension between a radically debunking perspective on society and a distrust of revolutionary ideologies on the other. These tensions, I believe, are not just personal idiosyncractes of mine, but rather are inherent in the phenomena at issue. The same tensions are to be found in the Hartford Appeal.