ABSTRACT
Purveyors of conventional wisdom maintain that local elections Detroit faithfully retain their utilitarian functions, though such functions have been briefly suspended while the city is under emergency manager (EM) control. EM (and their executive orders) is immune to local electoral challenge, and duly elected officials and democratically established policies are rendered moot. Put differently, the appointment of an EM serves to directly diminish the functional instrumentality of local democratic practices. The historical persistence of political rituals in liberal democracies would come as something of a surprise to canonical sociologists such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, who predicted that ritual and symbolism would fade from importance in modern public life, replaced with rational, purposeful action. One way in which the tension between incompatible social paradigms can be reconciled is for the political power of one system to be neutralized through the process of ritualization, or the substitution of symbolic substance for instrumental substance.
