ABSTRACT
The lessons from the metropolitan areas governance investigations cut deep into the intellectual core of political sciences, challenging both major traditions that divided it. On the one hand, there is the tradition defined by Adam Smith’s theory of social order. Adam Smith and his intellectual descendents focused on the pattern of order and the positive consequences emerging out of the independent actions of individuals pursuing their own interests and trying to maximize their own welfare within a given system of rules. This was the “spontaneous order” school within which the study of the markets – the competition among producers and consumers of pure private goods leading to a better allocation of resources – occupied a preeminent place. On the other hand, there was the tradition rooted in Thomas Hobbes’s theory of social order. As per this perspective, individual actors pursuing their own interests and trying to maximize their welfare led inevitably to chaos and conflict. From there the necessity of a single center of power imposing order is derived. Social order is thus the creation of the socially and politically unique “Leviathan,” a monopoly over the authority to make law and the legitimate use of coercion, and not the outcome of the actions of self-organized and independent individuals. Most modern theories of “the State” have their origins in Hobbes’s vision of Leviathan.
