Download Theme of Georg Simmel`s Essay "The Metropolis

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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
The Lecture Contains:
Theme of Georg Simmel's Essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
Rise of Money
Life in Monetized Economy
Blasé Attitude
References
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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
The metropolis came to represent the ethos of industrial-capitalism where human life was intricately woven with the processes
of commercialization and commodification. How did the social thinkers look at the processes and principles that guided urban
life in the modern industrial capitalist societies? Georg Simmel’s (1858-1918) essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental
Life’ has been a classic exposition on this theme.
Simmel was born in Berlin and lived in the downtown area. He had a doctorate degree from Berlin
University in Philosophy but failed to obtain a permanent job until the last four years of his life because
of his Jewish origin and intellectual radicalism. In his work, Simmel was not towing any wellestablished theoretical approach but was charting new territories. Though an academic outsider, he
was an engaged public intellectual.
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Module3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
The essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) was delivered as a lecture at an exhibition series in 190203 held in Dresden, Germany. The theme of the exhibition was the emergence of the modern metropolis
and it aimed at examining the intellectual, economic, and political dimensions of
German urbanism. It also addressed planning problems and social issues related to public transportation, housing,
employment, health, welfare and cultural institutions.
The organizers wanted Simmel to write about the role of the intellectual on the city but he chose to write on the effect of the city
on the mental life of the individual. Simmel’s essay focused more upon the philosophical and psychological implications of this
emergent urban reality on the metropolitan mind. Simmel was interested in the social construction of the urban self under
unrelenting commercialization which was the fate of the modern world.
He was influenced by Hegel and Kant and as well as by Durkheim (relation between individual and society), Weber (effects of
increasing rationalization of all facets of life), and Marx (alienation). Like Marx he took the political economic factors seriously
but he explored their philosophical and psychological dimensions. For Simmel, the question was: What happens to
the individual due to the rise of money economy and continuous quantification of
all objects?
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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
Simmel offers a micro-sociological analysis that concentrates on minutiae details of everyday life. He was ignored by the
academia during his lifetime but his work attracted attention among later sociologists and especially the Chicago School which
had pioneered the sub-discipline of urban sociology.
Simmel’s preoccupation was with the effect of the city on the individual and the article was not well-received because the mood
of the time was to celebrate the city and not to analyze it critically. Simmel’s perspective was much more ambivalent, if not
skeptical and it is this ambiguity that has given this essay a lasting place in the discourse on the metropolis.
Simmel begins with a quintessentially urban existential dilemma. He recognizes that freed from the obligations of the ties of
gemeinschaft, the urban dweller is faced with a predicament where liberation is accompanied by the agony of
restlessness. The urban subject is embedded in the iron cage of a mass society. The modern conflict that faces humanity is:
how does the individual maintain the independence and individuality of his/her
existence against the sovereign powers of the ‘free’ society?
The essay begins with the following statement: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to
preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of
external culture, and of the technique of life.” 1
1Simmel, Georg ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ from Kurt H. Wolff (ed.) from The Sociology of Georg
Simmel (1950) [1903]
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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
Not to be swallowed up by forces of society used to be a problem of gemeinschaft based societies where
ascriptive identity was of decisive importance. But ever since the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, liberation
was sought from all the ties—in politics, religion, economics and morality to permit the natural original virtue of man to emerge
which is equal in everyone. But the problem with the concept of equality is that if all are equal what happens of individuality?
One does not want to be just one among many. While the eighteenth century Enlightenment gave
us equality, the fate of nineteenth century is the quest for individuality. The process
involves the resistance of the individual to being leveled and swallowed up in the social technological mechanism. So what are
the adaptations that the individual makes to the forces that lie outside it?
Simmel argues that the mental life of the metropolitan person develops an intellectualist character. It goes about making
rational decision—efficiency oriented taking stock of a situation through reason. According to Simmel this intellectualist quality
is best signified by two things: money and the watch.
Money, Simmel points out, is concerned with what is common to all things. In other words,
between two very dissimilar things what is comparable is their price. Exchange of goods gave way to money. The introduction
of a third element of measurement led to the rise of money. So now the value of two commodities in exchange is measured in
terms of some other commodities which is held to be precious—be it gold, silver, shell, leather or money. It is something which
in itself has no value but it assumes a pure function i.e., pure symbol of value.
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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
This is possible only because of the development of state, financial institutions, laws and customs. The rise of money not only
has an economic impact on society but, according to Simmel, it also has a crucial psychological impact.
Divisibility of money leads to limitless quantification of human activity. Therefore, money
reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. It is a context where production is done only for the market—
the one who produces never sees the one who purchases. There is a complete dissociation between
the producer and consumer in the context of mass production.
The life in monetized economy makes the modern mind a calculating mind — weighing,
calculating, enumerating, and thereby reducing qualitative values to quantitative terms. Moreover, the calculability of money
brings a sense of precision in relation to equalities and inequalities.
Simmel points out that the device that had also led to precise calculability is the
diffusion of pocket watches. Lewis Mumford had pointed out that the concept of ordered and routinized time
had come from the routine in the monastery. In the case of the metropolis, it was not the question of coordinating the personal
routine of the few but that of coordinating the personal and professional lives of millions. According to Simmel, it
was the dissemination of the pocket watch that made it possible.
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Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
It is interesting to note that the everyday life of those belonging to a bucolic
setting lacks this obsession with precise time. Simmel describes punctuality as the
other half of the calculative personality. Time is partite and under capitalism it is money. If this chain of
precision and punctuality is broken, the entire metropolitan life will reduce to chaos. If all the watches in Berlin suddenly went
wrong in different ways even only as much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed for sometime.
The attitude that finally comes to dominate the mental landscape of the urbanite is known as the blasé attitude. The
metropolitan type in all its modifications creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the
fluctuations and discontinuities of external world threatens it. So the intellectualist quality provides a protection for the inner life
against the domination of the metropolis.
The irony of the urban existence is that the same factors which have led to a structure of the highest impersonality have on the
other hand an influence in a highly personal direction. Simmel points out that there is no other psychic phenomenon which is
so unconditionally reserved for the city as the blasé attitude. Too many stimuli that stimulate the nerves to their utmost
reactivity lead to this attitude.
file:///D|/NPTL%20WORK/Dr.%20Anindita%20Chakrabarti/UrbanSociology/lecture12/12_7.htm [5/31/2013 10:20:26 AM]
Objectives_template
Module 3: Theories of Urban Sociology
Lecture 12: Freedom and Alienation in the City from Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
References
●
Simmel, Georg. 1950. “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Kurt H. Wolff (ed.).
London: The Free Press. Pp. 409-424.
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