In 1951, urbanist Edward C. Banfield wrote a book called Government Project, based on his dissertation at the University of Chicago. Banfield had once been an ardent New Dealer who worked in the Farm Security Administration. He became dismayed with what he saw and channeled his thoughts into a study of a government-sponsored farm co-operative called Casa Grande in Arizona. The book has a predictable message: Government-sponsored communities fail, often badly.

　　By 2024, there have been many writers and researchers who have documented the many limitations of communes, kibbutzim, and worker co-ops. The message is fairly consistent. These organizations suffer from all sorts of problems, ranging from factionalism to poor morale to suboptimal decision-making. Perhaps the best that can be said of such communities is that they might succeed when they are kept small and participants are selected based on a strong commitment to egalitarian principles. Otherwise, failure is the usual outcome.

　　Why bother returning to a seventy-year-old book if the point has been made so well by more recent writers? There are two main reasons. First, books like Government Project allow us to see how American intellectuals understood the problems of New Deal programs. Banfield himself notes that sociologists who studied New Deal-era programs reported the same inefficiencies and conflicts in farmer co-ops, but came to more positive conclusions. We can also think about how New Deal program failures affected the course of American social science. Banfield’s book has fallen into obscurity, but books with similar themes, like Philip Selznick’s 1949 TVA and the Grassroots, changed the course of entire academic fields.

　　Second, the book serves as a fine warning against what I will call “soft socialism.” Throughout the twentieth century, socialism became synonymous with the Marxist-inspired regimes of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. In this version of socialism, a worker’s vanguard topples a corrupt capitalist ruling class and forcefully institutes worker control over production. There is another form of socialism that is much more conducive to the liberal and democratic ethos of Western societies. This second type of socialism does not focus on a revolutionary vanguard. Instead, it encourages people to reject hierarchical institutions and establish egalitarian communities, like the one described in Government Project. Rather than read this book only as a warning against big government, we can also use the book to understand why egalitarian communities don’t function as well as those based on different principles.

　　The Casa Grande Project

　　Government Project is an engaging book about the Casa Grande farmer cooperative, which was established near Coolidge, Arizona in 1937. The larger story is that the Roosevelt administration created the Farm Security Agency to address the problems of farming communities that were disrupted in the Dust Bowl era. One initiative was to encourage uprooted workers to join resettlement communities. As a result, the Farm Security Agency subsidized the creation of dozens of resettlement communities in the United States. In addition to providing work and a new home for workers and their families, many policymakers hoped these communities would illustrate the need for a new form of economic and social organization—the nonprofit cooperative association. The “co-op” would flatten social hierarchies by vastly increasing worker participation in management and encouraging consumers and clients to vote in the organizations affairs. The cooperative movement was a rejection of management as a model of organization.

　　In 1937, Federal officials approved the establishment of a worker-run farm community in Arizona. Banfield deftly recounts its history. It took a year or two to establish the project, but eventually, the Federal government was able to recruit about forty families. Compared to many such enterprises, it did relatively well, considering that most farms need at least a few years to reach annual profitability. At the same time, it was ultimately an actuarial loss. When the settlement was liquidated, it failed to recoup its initial investment. As Banfield notes, the Federal government could simply have purchased land nearby and then sold it a few years later, making a reasonable profit.

　　The main story for Banfield has to do with the internal dynamics of the community. Banfield reports that the community split into contentious factions, floundering over difficult interpersonal conflicts. Furthermore, Banfield notes that the community was in many ways dysfunctional. Children roamed aimlessly, and many facilities were not maintained and deteriorated. Banfield surveys then-current writings that discuss other resettlement communities. Even though other analysts were optimistic about the prospects for this type of resettlement community, they often documented the same problems, which also contributed to the collapse of other resettlement projects.

　　Banfield believed that the dissolution of Casa Grande and other resettlement projects can be ascribed to a few factors. The first was the difficulty of creating a community out of people who had extremely different values and expectations. Some residents were experienced farmhands who were accustomed to agricultural work. Other settlers had owned their own businesses and farmsteads. Not surprisingly, people often disagreed about who should be in charge and how the co-op should be run.

　　Soft socialism appeals to the natural desire to be free from people who wield authority over us, whether it be managers, parents, or the state. But at some point, authority needs to be wielded to get things done.

　　A second factor was factionalism. Perhaps most important for Banfield was the lack of leadership or extremely poor leadership. Personal and factional conflicts prevented leaders from emerging who would guide the community or allow people to cooperate. The rise of factionalism within the community meant that the settlers could not take advantage of opportunities that presented themselves. For example, Casa Grande eventually generated yearly profits, but that did not quell the anger of residents. The dissatisfaction undermined any sense of community.

　　Disappointment with the New Deal

　　What did academic writers gain from Banfield’s analysis? Did social scientists and policymakers learn any lessons? At the time of publication, the book was reviewed in highly prestigious outlets such as the American Journal of Sociology and the American Political Science Review. Readers seemed to appreciate the book and its message. Howard J. McMurray compared the decline of Casa Grande to a powerfully recounted Greek tragedy. Eminent sociologist Everett C. Hughes wrote that the book was right to focus on the lack of leadership, and that it was a fine study of conflict between managers and workers.

　　After a few reviews in the early 1950s, Government Project was soon forgotten. The dissertation on which it was based had received zero citations in Google Scholar as of Spring 2024. Google Scholar assigned 64 citations to the 2023 American Enterprise Institute reprint of Government Project, which likely captured its impact during its two editions and seventy-year life. In other words, this book attracted about one citation per year.

　　I am not surprised at this outcome. While Government Project is indeed an engaging book, I can’t imagine that popular or academic audiences were very interested in what this book had to offer. Policy-oriented readers in the 1950s and 1960s were not terribly interested in learning about how a very particular New Deal program collapsed.

　　One might be tempted to say that this fate was inevitable, but this is mistaken. There is another book about the problems of a New Deal social program that became a widely cited social science classic, Phillip Selznick’s TVA and the Grass Roots. In that book, Selznick looked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was intended to be a rural development agency. Selznick’s book explains how the agency’s leadership originally hoped to help poor White and Black farmers, but ultimately ended up implementing the interests of local moneyed elites. TVA popularized the idea that democratic processes could be subverted by local constituencies. This book promoted the idea that organizations could lose their way and be “co-opted” by special interests.

　　Why does TVA have thousands of citations whileGovernment Projectlanguishes? These two books frame the problems of government agencies in different ways. Banfield correctly notes that Casa Grande’s problems can’t be attributed to a lack of expertise or the desire to succeed. Many of the people involved in the resettlement community knew about farming, and one leader even had a college degree in agricultural science. During the Great Depression, people had plenty of motivation to make money and get jobs. So why didn’t the right leadership emerge to manage things?

　　The answer is that leadership in this context is synonymous with building a coalition of people who will struggle over organizational resources. These struggles can be found in any organization, but they have a particularly corrosive character in extremely democratic situations like the Casa Grande cooperative group. In other settings, there are often leaders who have the authority to assert an agenda, such as firm managers or non-profit trustees. By allowing authority to be determined by votes, decisions are settled by factional politics, not managerial expertise, economic calculation, or owner self-interest.

　　In contrast, Selznick’s book deploys a different rhetoric. The book clearly presents a “good guys vs. bad guys” narrative that ends with the corruption of the democratic impulseand the stifling of voter desires. The basic idea of having the Federal government end the Great Depression through large work projects was correct and the problem was resistance by well-moneyed interests. This framing is fairly consistent with progressive views on policymaking.

　　By comparing these two books, we can see a profound difference. Banfield was disappointed with New Deal programs because of their inherent limits. Selznick was disappointed with New Deal programs because of the obstacles they encountered. It shouldn’t then be surprising that thousands of academics have followed up on Selznick’s insights about co-optation, but not Banfield’s insights about community conflict.

　　Soft Socialism is an Illusion

　　The second lesson that I take from Government Project is that one should be wary of “soft socialism.” People are often attracted to proposals for communities based on egalitarian principles. This is understandable, as people don’t enjoy being bossed around, and some forms of inequality are highly damaging. As a result, there is always a demand for organizations that can provide a more equal footing, such as worker-run cooperatives or communes. I call this “soft socialism” in order to distinguish it from the more radical socialism that attempts to remake society instantly through revolution.

　　The attraction of soft socialism is that it appeals to the natural desire to be free from people who wield authority over us, whether it be managers, parents, or the state. The issue, as Government Project amply documents, is that, at some point, authority needs to be wielded to get things done. It might be growing cotton in Arizona, running a hospital, or building a car. Either way, somebody needs to be vested with the power to assign people to distasteful jobs and solve problems. This also must be done in a way that is rational, from both a technical and economic standpoint. Throwing all of this to voting and coalition politics is disastrous.

　　Instead, we should reject soft socialism and focus on pluralism. While some hierarchies are unjust, we should recognize that many organizations need hierarchies to succeed, not the sort of micro-level democracy depicted by Banfield. Communities require pluralism and multiplicity. Very broad governance might be settled by electoral politics, but everyday economic production should be profit-oriented and our neighborhoods should be based on informal social mores. Human beings need choices and options, not relentless electioneering.

　　Government Project deserves more attention than it has received. We live in an age with a strong egalitarian ethos. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, organized itself along democratic lines, throwing all decisions into a democratic free-for-all. Some entrepreneurs have unsuccessfully experimented with flattened hierarchies where all employees are paid the same amount. The ideas that led to Casa Grande are still with us, and Banfield’s book is a well-reasoned critique of this impulse. The book’s deeper lesson is that strict egalitarianism and pure democracy should be avoided.