EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

History of Sociology I

GRETA MACKONYTĖ
III year student

GEORG SIMMEL: THE METROPOLITAN WAY OF LIFE

IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Budapest, January 9, 2010

1
 Contents

Introduction: Georg Simmel and the Chicago School 3

Simmel‘s concept of modernity 5

What is a city? 7

The increase of rationality and the loss of authenticity8

About the blasé outlook, individualization and theatricality 10

Simmel’s theory in the Sea Change Movement 13

Conclusions 15

References 16

2
 Introduction: Georg Simmel and the Chicago School

According to David Frisby, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) can be named as “the unfairly
neglected founding father of sociology”1. It is a true that Simmel stands in the unusual position: he
is the only European – German – scholar who has had an apparent and solid influence on sociology
in the United States during the 20 th century. Simmel together with Herbert Spencer and Gabriel
Tarde are those European authors who were influential in American sociology in the late 1920s:
they were like the “sources” of inspiration and legitimation for those American scholars who sought
to establish the social sciences in American universities. On the other hand, although literate
American sociologists today could produce a coherent statement of the theoretical frameworks and
principal themes of Marx, Durkheim or Weber, just few would be able to do the same for Simmel.
This situation perfectly reflects the character of Simmel’s intellectual productions which consists of
the bewildering variety of topics he wrote, and the disorganized manner in which Simmel presented
his main ideas and principles. The picture of Simmel’s sociology is thought to be very fragmentary,
disjointed and over-concerned with the ephemeral and mundane.2
It is worth mentioning that although Simmel is classically labeled as sociologist, the depth and
breadth if his interests (philosophy, sociology, social psychology, aesthetics, cultural analysis,
literature and art) simply cannot be limited to any one discipline. Rather, it is best to approach
Simmel as a cultural philosopher, one who used the essay format to address a number of subjects,
issues, and problems.3 A distinctive feature of Simmel’s analysis is a focus upon the everyday
world, where different phenomena are interrelated (interwoven nature of the assembled parts of the
diversity of the world). Interestingly, Simmel in his essays did not privilege any part (as in contrast
to social theories, which, for example, take the economy as a foundation).4
Starting in the 1890s, American sociologists read the major European sociological works and
incorporated them into their own writings. European sociologists investigated the development of a
modern urban society; the contrast between a social life in agricultural villages and in industrialized
cities was central to their writings. For example, Ferdinand Tönnies writings about Gemeinschaft
(„community“) and Gesellschaft („society“) became very influential. Relationships in the
Gemeinschaft are charactersitc to the rural village which can be described as natural, organic and
long-lasting, based on mutual trust, shared understanding and communal values. Relationships in
1
David Frisby, Georg Simmel. London; New York: Routledge, 2002, VIII.
2
Donald N. Levine, Ellwood B. Carter, Eleanor Miller Gorman, “Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology”. The
American Journal of Sociology, 81(4), 1976, 813-815.
3
Aram A. Yengoyan, „Simmel, Modernity, and Germanisms“. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44(3), 2002,
620.
4
David Frisby, XXVI.
3
the Gesellschaft are inherent in the urban setting which are fleeting, mechanical, superficial,
instrumental. Regulated by contract/monetary exchange, and usually exploitative. During the
process of modernization, Gesellschaft replaced Gemeinschaft.5
Another famous European sociologist - Émile Durkheim – was concerned about the
pathologies of modern society and drew attention to the weakened moral and social solidarity. He
also researched the social causes of suicide and ingeniously related sociological variables to the
mental state of individuals by stating that suicide rates are determined by the level of social
integration. According to Durkheim, the modern society created a state of anomie in people, which
means that the ties to the social order, for example, family or religious institutions, became weaker.
The increasing number of suicides were the consequence of processes of individuation and social
disintegration. As a result, suicide could be called as a „more urban than rural“.6
Sociologists in America with Charles Horton Cooley integrated the concept of the primary
group (a small community engaged in face-to-face interactions in stable and permanent associations
between individuals intimately involved with each other). This conception inspired to formulate a
contrasting concept of the secondary group, where the relations are superficial, fleeting and
instrumental. All these influences contributed to the formation of a so-called urban hypothesis:
small, rural communities and large cities provide different and mutually exclusive types of social
experience. Social life in a primary group is associated with mental health, while secondary group is
related to social disintegration, cultural fragmentation and personality disorganization.7
All these mentioned contributions by Tönnies, Durkheim and Cooley helped to develop the
American sociology, which in the hands of the protagonists of the Chicago School, almost
exclusively investigated urban phenomena. Simmel‘s recognition that the city is “not a spatial entity
with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially” can be seen to
prefigure much of the later Chicago “ecological” theory of urban society.8
In this work it will be tried to analyze a type of personality, living in the metropolis, basically
according to Simmel‘s essay „The Metropolis and Mental Life“, to present other authors‘ attitudes
related to this theme, and to find a practical example which would demonstrate, how Simmel‘s
„metropolitan“ theory can be applied in the age of late modernity.

5
Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957.
6
Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1951, 353.
7
Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Transaction Publishers: New Jersey, 1983.
8
David Frisby, VIII.
4
 Simmel‘s concept of modernity

Simmel can be kept as the first sociologist of modernity who was concerned with the social
effects of modern, cosmopolitan, and predominantly urban life. 9 It is worth mentioning that even
though one of the finest and most critical understandings of modernity and its totality can be found
in the writings of Simmel, he is barely referred to in most recent analyses. But it is both helpful and
important to look deeper in his writings about modernity before reading and analyzing one of the
best-known Simmel’s essays “The Metropolis and Mental Life”.
Modernity is the “core-concept” which Simmel explored in the different ways. For Simmel,
culture emerges as the fundamental expression of sociability which totally involves all humans.
Culture is a symbolic entity which renders and transforms the social nexus and also creates all of
the crystallization and condensation of patterns on the local, regional, and national levels.10
In order to understand further Simmel’s readings about modernity, it is important to refer to
the distinction between objective culture and subjective culture. Shortly, objectified contents of
culture are the total material and immaterial goods and institutions in a society. Objective culture is
the totality of the material and spiritual context in which we live. On the other hand, the other side
of understanding how culture works requires the extent to which objectified culture is internalized
by actors. Namely subjective culture is what individuals internalize. Moreover, the quantity and
quality of subjective culture would vary by age, gender, class, race and vocation. As a result,
subjective culture is the personality of the individual, of the life-form, which constitutes the so-
called “geist” of each person, or what it means to be human in any social context.11
Writings on modernity encompass the changes which were created by the emergence of the
metropolitan and advanced capitalist money economy. Modernity is an all-embracing transformation
which totally changes society at all levels. The relations between individuals are mediated by
cultural creations such as money, urban life, ideas of spatial demarcations such as proximity and
distance, ideas of fashion, commodification, travel, leisure, style, religion and new expressions of
spiritualism.12
Modernity creates new forms of mediation which reconstruct basic forms of society. Fads,
fashions, adornments and style create differences from one individual to another, but they all can be
comprehended as expressions of hierarchy and the extent to which new experiences must be re-cast

9
David Frisby, IX.
10
Aram A. Yengoyan, 620.
11
Jorge Arditi, “Simmel’s Theory of Alienation and the Decline of the Nonrational”. Sociological Theory, 14(2), 1996,
93.
12
Aram A. Yengoyan, 621.
5
in totally new forms such as spheres of circulation, exchange and consumption within monetary
developments. Modernity has a unique and different impact on what Simmel calls “the mental life”.
Individuals move towards one another in the metropolis and the engagement is sensory (sight,
hearing, smell), which is critical in all social interactions, but within the metropolis new forms of
cultural differentiation emerge in accordance with class, gender, locations and forms of
embodiment.13
According to Frisby, the essence of modernity could be described as psychologism, the
experiencing and interpretation of the world that is in terms of the reactions of our inner life and as
an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents in the fluid element of the soul, from which all that
is substantive is filtered and whose forms are merely forms of motion. Modernity is conceived as
being experienced as an inner world that is in flux and whose substantive contents are themselves
dissolved in motion. What is constitutive for modernity is the transformation of experience (from
concrete, historical to inner, lived experience). It must be understood that the strongest impact is
made not only by the physical confrontations and shocks of metropolitan modernity but more by
their recurring immediacy and presentness in everyday interactions.14
A sense of tragedy is central to Simmel while developing a modernity project. Remembering
the contrast between objective culture and subjective culture, Simmel accentuates that in advanced
modern capitalism the sheer abundance of items, good, cultural products and choices is
overwhelming and no single individual is able to internalize even a particle of these commodities.
Objective culture grows at the same time when subjective culture lies in the atrophy, and thus the
individual is alienated, impoverished and eventually estranged. This is how the tragedy of modern
culture appears.15 The disharmony of modernity and modern life reveals the emergence of the mass
and a crisis in individuality that is associated with increasing abstraction.16
To Simmel modernity is a cultural system based on an advanced, capitalist monetary economy
which creates a false consciousness of stability, security, order and a serenity of mind and action.
However, there is a still greater and more damaging impact: if what modernity creates is an illusion,
it also means that collective forces retreat and new borders and boundaries are set which
increasingly confine and eventually cripple the spirit. It is apparent that a stranger is a condition
that will emerge and rest within all individuals and psyches in modernity. If the social is the basis of

13
Ibidem, 621.
14
David Frisby, XXIV.
15
Aram A. Yengoyan, 622.
16
David Frisby, XXIII.
6
belonging, under modernity the all-embracing sense of fragmentation creates and enhances
isolation and strangeness.17

What is a city?

Before starting an analysis of the metropolis, it is important to define a term “city”. A city at
least can be understood in two different ways: firstly, as a physical phenomenon in the landscape;
secondly, as a cultural and mental (arte)fact. Traditional approaches to the city include the
investigations in architectural criticism and theory, urban planning, geography, history, and
sociology. However, cultural reflections and representations of the city are also the constituent parts
of the urban condition, as well as psychological realities fostered or accentuated by urban
surroundings.18
According to Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis, Simmel was the first who discovered
a new aspect of the city by stating that a city is the form of psychic rather than physical life. Simmel
was the first theorist who proved that the essence of the city does not lie in the abundance of the
buildings and architectural constructions. On the contrary, Simmel stressed prima facie invisible
fact that a city forms human mentality, imagination and thinking. As a result, those who study a city,
lose the right to ignore an “invisible” city side and to reduce a conception of city to a collection of
streets, buildings, squares and architectural constructions.19
It is both important and interesting to explore not only Simmel’s but also other sociologists’
attitudes towards a city, the metropolis and urbanism.
Already in 1937, one of the founding fathers of urban studies, Lewis Mumford, answered the
question “What is a City?” by arguing: “The city is a related collection of primary groups and
purposive associations: the first, like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities,
while the second are especially characteristic of city life.”20
In 1938 Louis Wirth explicitly announced that “urbanization no longer denotes merely the
process by which persons are attracted to a place called the city and incorporated into its system of
life. It refers also to that cumulative accentuation of the characteristics distinctive of the mode of
life which is associated with the growth of cities. It is also related with the changes in the direction

17
Aram A. Yengoyan, 622.
18
Written and Edited by Ghent Urban Studies Team. Project Directors: Dirk De Meyer and Kristiaan Verluys. The
Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis. 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1999, 8.
19
Leonidas Donskis, “Lewis Mumfordas: diskursyvinis miesto idėjos žemėlapis“. Miestelėnai: Miestas ir
postmodernioji kultūra: Kultūrologinis almanachas. Vilnius: Taura, 1995.
20
Lewis Mumford (1937). “What is a City?” Reprinted in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader,
London: Rouledge, 1996, 184.
7
of modes of life recognized as urban which are apparent among people, wherever they may be, who
have come under the spell of the influences which the city exerts by virtue of the power of its
institutions and personalities operating through the means of communication and transportation”. 21
Urbanism becomes detached from numerically strong and densely populated geographical units.
A many-sided definition is needed in order to analyze the contemporary city, as well as the
metropolis, comprehensively. Even though Wirth was influenced by Simmel, his understanding of
the urbanism perfectly applies in the examination of the metropolis. First of all, urbanism is a
characteristic mode of life. It can be approached empirically from three different but interrelated
perspectives: 1) as a physical structure comprising a population base, a technology, and an
ecological order; 2) as a system of social organization involving a characteristic social structure, a
series of social institutions, and a typical pattern of social relationships; 3) as a set of attitudes and
ideas, and a constellation of personalities engaging in typical forms of collective behavior and
subject to characteristic mechanisms of social control.22
According to Wirth’s classification, three main sections become visible: space, community
and self. The section on space is related to the changing urban functions and programs – how they
disperse and transform traditional cities and their peripheries. In the section of community – the
tension between the increasing autonomization of the individual on the one hand and the growth of
new lifestyles and subcultures on the other – leads to the contemporary social landscape and recent
transformations of urban public space. The section on self is related with the classical perspectives
on the urban mind to deal with contemporary forms of urban arousal as well as with constructions
of the symbolic metropolis.23

The increase of rationality and the loss of authenticity

In his article „Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben“ (which was translated by Edward A. Shils
and named as „The Metropolis and Mental Life“) Simmel writes that life in the metropolis requires
more mental energy than ever before. Tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social
life demonstrate a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smootly slowing rhythm in a
small town and rural existence. Essentially intellectualistic character of mental life of the metropolis
distinguishes it from the life in a small, rural town where interactions of people are based on more
feelings and emotional relationships. What is important to stress is the fact that instead of emotional
21
Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”. In: Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life. Selected Papers. Edited by
Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1964, 64.
22
Ibidem, 78.
23
The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis, 9-10.
8
reactions the metropolitans react primarily in a rational way. As a concequence, the mental
predominance is created through the intensification of consciousness. Simmel also notices that
mental activity is a least sensitive and furthest removed from the depths of the personality.24
Due to the fact that an object now attains a meaning only by virtue of its association with
other objects, people’s perception of things depends on principles for which the objective and the
rational play the most important part. The mind itself becomes rational and the calculating
character of rationality becomes the form of human consciousness. It follows logically that together
with a growing rationalization, the nonrational becomes weaker and weaker. To be more precise,
Simmel associates a faith, love, aesthetics, other various emotions with the nonrational. If people’s
nonrational capabilities are lost, the idea of alienation arrives. According to Simmel, exactly he
nonrational is a primary and essential element of “life”, an integral aspect of all humanity.
Moreover, its gradual eclipse in the expanses of a modern, highly rationalized world implies an
unquestionable impoverishment of being. The objectivization of exchange provokes an irreversible
expansion of social distance in society. The intensity of stimuli helps to form the psychological
structures of the rational. The fragmentation, rapidity, diversity of life in the city demand an
adaptation that, paradoxically, helps to develop one’s intellectual capacities, not one’s potential for
nonrational involvement. People are deprived of their specificity, of their subjective concreteness,
and therefore become “objects”, impersonal entities without individual meaning. They start to
perceive one another primarily in utilitarian terms and lose their capacity to create direct, authentic
relationships with others. This new form of being in the world becomes ingrained in people’s
personalities. People isolate their innermost being from the oscillations of the external world, inhibit
their feelings, and come to touch everything from a distance, invest more and more of the
nonrational with the rational, create and recreate an essentially rational mode of being in the world.
To sum up, in becoming rational people lose the most meaningful of their human attributes: their
authenticity, as well as the wholeness of their ego. It is like a paradoxical rule: when the world
becomes more complex and in some sense even richer, when it opens to us in the ways unknown
before, our inner experiential scope nonetheless decreases. Even though the variety of our emotions
increases, their intensity weakens, and the meaning of being human consequently changes,
unfortunately, for the worse.25
Interestingly, Simmel was not totally pessimistic – he believed that we always retain a certain
amount of nonrationality within ourselves. Not counting our most formalized activities, we continue
in our routines to act nonrationally to a certain degree. To continue, the modern person is not
24
“The Metropolis and Mental Life” in Donald N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms. The
University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1972, 325-326.
25
Jorge Arditi, 94-95, 102-104.
9
perfectly congruent with the rational, economic person, as most sociologists assume. According to
Simmel, the modern person attains the ideal of pure rationalism and intellectualism, it at all, only in
specific structural settings, those intentionally constructed for the fulfillment of economic goals. On
all other occasions, the nonrational and the intellectual merge to engender action that still retains a
significant, though weakened, emotional component.26

About the blasé outlook, individualization and theatricality

The opening thesis of the essay starts with the statement that individuals are under pressure
from leveling objective forces which threaten to suffocate them: the modern life became
problematic because of the individual‘s attempt „to maintain the independence and individuality of
his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage
and the external culture and technique of life”. 27 It is worth mentioning that already in the first
classical writings of urban sociology, the city was described as a kind of social environment that
offered to the individual – or to the self – the best opportunities for freely and autonomously
composing his or her own life. This is a so-called liberating aspect of the city.28
Although Simmel’s concern is primarily with the objectifying as well as liberating influences
which the modern money economy has on the social relations and personality traits of urbanites, he
also situates the modern life of the senses against the excess of shocking and hyper-stimulating
impressions typical of urban experience. The urban way of life resulting from this intensification of
nervous stimulation is characterized by two experiential modes: distance and stress (or autonomy
and threat). Simmel understands urban individuals in part on psychological grounds. 29 Author
proves it by stating that the psychological foundation is the intensification of emotional life due to
the swift and shift of external and internal stimuli. 30 As a consequence, a “sensory-mental pressure”
increases. First of all, it can be explained biologically. The cause for this pressure lies in the fact that
the human mind functions through an ability to observe differences: the quality of a sensory impulse
(internal and external) derives its meaning from the difference it makes with the previous impulse.
When differences become less predictable and when the several impressions within one visual field
stand in marked contrast to each other, or the pace of impressions is speeded up, human

26
Jorge Arditi, 106.
27
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”, 324.
28
The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis, 57.
29
Ibidem, 112.
30
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”, 329.
10
consciousness feels compelled to summon a higher degree of alertness. The supposed result is urban
stress.31
The urbanite, in order to ensure his psychical wellbeing, puts into effect a defense mechanism
against the rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves. This mechanism is devised by human
consciousness with the aim to reduce the superfluity of stimuli to a bare minimum. To this end, the
powers of reason (“metropolitan intellectuality”) are activated, especially the power of abstraction.
Simmel writes about the “calculating” reason that slides like a “protective organ” between
impression and perception – an idea that was ostensibly taken up by Louis Wirth and the Chicago
School. The individual thus acquires the mental attitude towards each other, the so-called external
“reserve” or the famous “blasé“outlook. The jadedness of urbanites becomes one of their most
important personality traits. It can be described as an attitude, according to which the emotional
response to stimuli is continually being avoided, so that „indifference towards the distinction
between things“ and „a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which can break out into
hatred and conflict“ take the upperhand. As it was already mentioned before, a reserve with its
implication of hidden aversion also appears as a form of a much more general psychic trait of the
metropolis: it assures the individual a certain type and degree of personal freedom. This freedom
should not be understood purely in the negative sense as a mere freedom of movement and
emancipation from prejudices and philistinism. The main characteristic lies in the fact that the
particularity and incomparability which ultimately every person possesses in some way is actually
expressed, giving form to life. Of course, according to Simmel, it is obviously only the obverse of
this freedom that an urbanite never feels as lonely and as deserted as in this metropolitan crush of
persons. Moreover, it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man here reflects itself in his
emotional life only as a pleasant experience.32
It could be noticed that a majority of classical authors tend to concentrate on negative aspects
of city life, even though the urban experience can be sometimes euphoric, as well. Those negative
effects are also dominating in the theories and empirical case studies of the Chicago School of
Sociology.
Having adapted many of Simmel‘s ideas to an American context, Louis Wirth simultaneously
tilted the balance in a more negative direction. For Wirth paid less attention to the liberating
character of life in the metropolis. To be more precise, Wirth stated that, whereas the individual
gains a certain degree of emancipation or freedom from the personal and emotional controls of
intimate group, at the same time he loses the spontaneous self-expression, the morale, and the sense

31
The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis, 112.
32
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”, 329-331, 334-335.
11
of participation that comes with living in an integrated society. This constitutes the state of anomie –
the social void – to which Durkheim alludes in attempting to account for the various forms of social
disorganization in the technological society.33
According to Frisby, Simmel’s essay concludes with the possibility for individual freedom
and emancipation in the metropolis. To what extent Simmel‘s sociology can be called
emancipatory? It is a question not about his political stance (although he was associated with
socialist ideas). In contrast to Marx‘s emancipatory intent or Durkheim‘s reformist response to
social problems, the emancipatory potential of his sociology is much more muted.34
Interestingly, the description of the metropolitan way of life (which can be shortly defined by
the problem of a sensory overload and alienation) can be associated with Erving Goffman‘s theory
of the theatricality of everyday life which states that in order to keep up at least some relationship to
the urban stranger, the individual chooses to play certain roles.35
According to Simmel, the human need for difference in a metropolitan environment leads to
„the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances of self-distantiation, of
caprice, of fastidiousness“ whose significance merely lay in „being different – of making oneself
noticeable“.36 As Kristian Versluys interprets, the city comes across as the place where one produces
oneself through theatricality and where self-presentation becomes both an effect and a pose. What
is important to accentuate here, is the fact that the word „person“, in its first meaning, is a mask. It
leads to a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously,
playing a role. Moreover, it is exactly in these roles that we not only know each other, but that we
know ourselves, as well. As a consequence, the self is an „effect“, the result of all this dramaturgical
presentation.37
While talking about this aspect of theatricality, it is worth mentioning Saul Bellow‘s novel
„Mr. Sammler‘s Planet“, which can be also applied to the studies of the metropolis. The main
character Mr. Sammler contemplates that the play-acting of the urbanites is the result of the
historical phenomenon of individuation, which means the gradual dwidling of ascripitive social
roles. While modernity urges man to be original, social forces of collectivization are so strong that it
has become impossible to give a shape to one‘s life. The result is very controversial, when is
compared with the previous urges: it is the creation of a false, inauthentic self, which pretends to be
original but is not, except in the most superficial ways (for example, clothing or styles of speaking).
33
Louis Wirth, 72.
34
David Frisby, XXXI.
35
The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis, 113, 119.
36
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”, 336.
37
Kristiaan Versluys, „The Street as Theater: Self-Presentation and Specularity in Three Literary Texts on New York”.
In: The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis, 377-378.
12
Crushed by outside forces, hollowed out internally, men and women try to hide their inner
emptiness by theatrical self-glorification, a frantic search for means by which to become
conspicious, to stand out. This can be compared to the morbid self-affirmation. One in an artistic
manner tries to present oneself as an individual and has a strange desire for originality, distinction
and interest. As Mr. Sammler referred, people sought originality, yet they were obviously derivative.
As a result, urbanites are incarcerated in a role-playing and hyperreality.38

Simmel’s theory in the Sea Change Movement

According to Simmel, the over-growth of objective culture, the domination of the obligatory
associations in the metropolis have become less and less satisfactory for the individuals. Those
personalities who are antipathetic to the metropolis, usually find the value of life in unschematized
individual expressions which cannot be reduced to exact equivalents. They express their negative
attitude towards the money economy and the intellectualism of the existence. 39 Naturally, people
start looking for the ways how to change the current unsatisfactory situation. It follows that the
particular social movements arise.
After having analyzed a social theoretical perspective from Georg Simmel, it is important to
find an answer to the question: to what extent his theory can be applied in the practice and how
much it is useful for examining the movements of late modernity? This question can be raised partly
because of Simmel’s ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries and provide a variety of theoretical
perspectives.
One of the best examples can be found in the Australian Sea Change Movement.
Metaphorically, the term can have a meaning of a radical change in various aspects of lifestyle.
However, popular culture defined Sea Change as a movement away from metropolitan areas to
certain favored non-metropolitan – Arcadian – areas. Most of people who do so also take a
radicalization in their lifestyle, associated with “downshifting” – downgrading of career choice to
perceived less stressful occupations. The Sea Change Movement phenomenon in Australia usually
can be described as a process of retreating away from the city as a consequence of various
psychological factors, such as stress and anxiety. The speed and aesthetically overwhelming
imagery of the city life is directly contrasting to what an individual is able to keep pace with. Thus,
an individual is forced to develop an organ which would protect him from the threatening

38
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking Press, 1970, 145-146, 149, 228-229.
39
„The Metropolis and Mental Life“, 329, 337.
13
currencies and discrepancies of his external environment. Herein lays the crisis of culture, when
man reacts with his head instead of his heart.40
The increased nervous stimulation in the metropolis introduces changes in the psychological
reasoning of the individual. According to Frisby, the constant “bombardment” of the senses, in its
extreme form, produces neurasthenic personality which can no longer cope with a jostling array of
impressions and confrontations. As a result, the distance between ourselves and our social, as well
as physical, environment is created.41
The Sea Change Movement can be better understood by analyzing some qualitative data. For
instance, in describing her observations of “metropolitan individuals” who attempt to make a Sea
Change into smaller rural communities, New South Wales resident Hannah hinds the psychological
reserve about which Simmel was writing. According to Hannah, those who come from urban
environment cannot easily just openly interact with people because they are so fearful people. They
just cannot adapt to the idea that it is normal to be spontaneous and interact with people. They are
horrified by this idea. Hannah later criticizes this urban reserve as being a contributing factor to the
crime, as well. When people are not familiar to each other, the anonymity is dominating and, as a
result, people are more inclined to do crimes. Another respondent told that her removal from the
city was a result of being sick of the “lack of community mindedness”. Moreover, she added quite
sarcastically that one of the risks of the city life is associated with the individualization process –
the lack of concern for other’s welfare. According to her, there is a probable risk of dying in your
own flat and nobody finding you for six months. In addition, the blasé outlook of the people is
associated with consumption and obtaining the individual objects. This is similar to what Simmel
suggests as the craving for individual excitement or self satisfaction which almost immediately
withdraws oneself from the happenings of people around them. 42
In summary, this social movement illustrates people’s attempts to escape the city and create a
new, simpler and less stressful life in an Arcadian setting. People seek to achieve a low-key,
community-based living in an idyllic, built on primary relations setting, far away from the
pernicious metropolitan influences. The Sea Change Movement reflects how the theoretical
Simmel’s insights can be applied in an everyday human life. Moreover, this movement proves the
idea that although Simmel wrote his essay more than one hundred years ago, the metropolitan life
problems discussed in it are still relevant in the modern-day world.

40
Ian Burnley and Peter Murphy, Sea Change: Movement from metropolitan to Arcadian Australia. Sydney: UNSW
Press, 2004. Introduction, 1-18.
41
David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, 73.
42
Cindy Dowling, Seachange – Australians in Pursuit of the Good Life. Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2004, 68-69.
14
 Conclusions

This work was not an attempt to create a comprehensive view about Simmel’s theoretical
perspectives. It was rather an effort to concentrate on one of his essays about the metropolitan way
of life and to accentuate the main ideas from it, to juxtapose with other authors’ writings and to find
an empirical example, how Simmel’s theory “works” in the age of late modernity. En passant, some
ideas were presumed not from the essay about the metropolis but from other Simmel’s works and
other authors’ interpretations.
To resume, what Simmel wanted to emphasize in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”,
is the circulation of individuals, groups and commodities and their forms of interaction, as well as
the modes of representation. A circulation can be described as a movement from the continuity and
immediacy of experience to discontinuity, mediation and abstraction.
Simmel also wanted to emphasize an increasingly indirect relation to things in the money
economy. The metropolitan experience is related by individuals to the movement, the new
experiences of social spaces and the plurality as well as speed of contact with others. To Simmel,
the distance grows as the money economy develops, cities expand and as life moves from being a
whole embedded with emotionality to becoming a system governed by the intellect.
As Jorge Arditi writes, Simmel’s world is not a world of absolutes and transparencies; it is a
world of paradoxes, of shades and ambiguities, both social and moral. A reality is that an individual
experiences both the anguish of alienation and the exhilaration of freedom, the weakening of
emotional life and the multiplication of its connotations.43
An essay could be concluded with Robert Crowley’s poem which was originally created in the
middle of 16th century but is still very well-reflecting the metropolitan way of life nowadays:
„And this is a city
In name, but in deed
It is a pack of people
That seek after meed;
For officers and all
Do seek their own gain,
But for the wealth of the commons
Not one taketh pain.
And hell withhout order,
I may it well call
Where every man is for himself
And no man for all.“44

43
Jorge Arditi, “Simmel’s Theory of Alienation and the Decline of the Nonrational”. Sociological Theory, 14(2), 1996,
103.
44
Robert Crowley, „Of Alleys“ (1550). In: Lawrence Manley (ed.), London in the Age of Shakespeare: an Anthology.
1986, 161.
15
 References

1. Arditi, Jorge, “Simmel’s Theory of Alienation and the Decline of the Nonrational”.
Sociological Theory, 14(2), 1996.
2. Bellow, Saul, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
3. Burnley, Ian and Peter Murphy, Sea Change: Movement from metropolitan to Arcadian
Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004.
4. Cooley, Charles Horton, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Transaction
Publishers: New Jersey, 1983.
5. Crowley, Robert, „Of Alleys“ (1550). In: Lawrence Manley (ed.), London in the Age of
Shakespeare: an Anthology. 1986.
6. De Meyer, Dirk and Kristiaan Verluys. The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self
in the Temporary Metropolis. 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1999.
7. Donskis, Leonidas, “Lewis Mumfordas: diskursyvinis miesto idėjos žemėlapis“.
Miestelėnai: Miestas ir postmodernioji kultūra: Kultūrologinis almanachas. Vilnius: Taura,
1995.
8. Dowling, Cindy, Seachange – Australians in Pursuit of the Good Life. Auckland: Exisle
Publishing, 2004.
9. Durkheim, Émile, Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1951.
10. Frisby, David, Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
11. Frisby, David, Georg Simmel. London; New York: Routledge, 2002.
12. Levine, Donald N. (ed.), Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms. The University
of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1972.
13. Levine, Donald N., Ellwood B. Carter, Eleanor Miller Gorman, “Simmel’s Influence on
American Sociology”. The American Journal of Sociology, 81(4).
14. Mumford, Lewis (1937), “What is a City?” Reprinted in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic
Stout, eds., The City Reader, London: Rouledge, 1996.
15. Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Society. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1957.
16. Versluys, Kristiaan, „The Street as Theater: Self-Presentation and Specularity in Three
Literary Texts on New York”. In: De Meyer, Dirk and Kristiaan Verluys. The Urban
Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Temporary Metropolis. 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam 1999.
17. Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”. In: Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life.
Selected Papers. Edited by Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1964.
18. Yengoyan, Aram A., „Simmel, Modernity, and Germanisms“. Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 44(3), 2002.

16