NONFICTION - May 30, 1993

SYSTEMS OF SURVIVAL: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics by Jane Jacobs (Random House: $22; 236 pp.). Jane Jacobs--a writer whose books on the anthropology and economy of cities have become classics--embraces a semi-fictional device in these pages in order to popularize her latest set of singular theories. Much as Owen Barfield did in “Worlds Apart,” she creates a group of characters who meet in a fine old apartment building in Manhattan’s Gramercy Square. While snacking on sushi, sake, mineral water and peanut butter cookies, they decide that there are essentially two “systems of human survival,” two sets of principles that we can choose from in order to make a living. The first, “The Commercial System,” is uniquely human because it involves trading. Shunning force, it values city-building, competition and foresight. The second, “The Guardian System,” is more fatalistic. Assuming that people are “territorial animals,” it extols classic, heroic virtues such as loyalty, discipline, largess and respect for hierarchy.

Jacobs’ characters develop these two paradigms largely by generalizing from news clippings, a method whose glibness is symbolized by a surfeit of “anyways” and “to get back to my points.” A less fiercely free-spirited writer might have been able to develop these ideas more fully by standing on the shoulders of others, from Hobbes to Smith to Mandeville, who have worked on them before. But Jacobs’ strength is as an anti-intellectual intellectual: Distrustful of any ideology-building, she begins finding exceptions to her one-man, one-paradigm rule even before she has fully explained it. She shows us, for instance, how Wall Street traders, who would seem to fall squarely into the Commercial System, actually become Guardians when they conduct leveraged buyouts: Their suits notwithstanding, they are warriors conquering territory, then plundering it to pay for the price of victory.