A full summary of all literature and lectures of the subject Urban Places and Social Problems in the second year of the sociology study at the University of Amsterdam
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The Metropolis and Mental Life
G. Simmel
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. In addition to more liberty,
the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this
specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them
indispensable to the highest possible extent. Nietzsche sees the full development of the
individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the
suppression of all competition for the same reason. The person resists being leveled down
and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. Such an inquiry must answer the
question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the
intensification of nervous stimulation that results from the swift and uninterrupted change of
outer and inner stimuli. Thus, the metropolitan type of man - which, of course, exists in a
thousand individual variants - develops an organ protecting him against the threatening
currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. Metropolitan
life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in
metropolitan man. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the
overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions
and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena.
The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Money economy
and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. The intellectually sophisticated
person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result
from it that cannot be exhausted with logical operations. All intimate emotional relations
between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is
reckoned with like a number, like an element that is in itself indifferent. Only the objective
measurable achievement is of interest. In the sphere of the economic psychology of the
small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions production serves the
customer who orders the goods, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. The
money economy dominates the metropolis: it has displaced the last survivals of domestic
production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes, from day to day, the amount of work
ordered by customers. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this
reciprocity. Throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as
England's heart but often as England's intellect and always as her moneybag!
The calculative exactness of practical life that the money economy has brought about
corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic
problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. The relationships and
affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest
punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an
inextricable chaos. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most
punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time
schedule. Punctuality, calculability and exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and
extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its
money economy and intellectualist character. The passionate hatred of men like Ruskin and
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