Georg Simmel

THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE
1903
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual 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. This
antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on
with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation
from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in
order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without
inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man’s freedom, his
individuality (which is connected with the division of labour) and his achievements which make
him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more
dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless
struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the
same thing in the suppression of all competition – but in each of these the same fundamental
motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the
social-technological mechanism. […]
The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the
intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal
stimuli. Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on difference, i.e. his mind is stimulated
by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded. Lasting
impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and
contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of
changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the
unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological
conditions – with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplication of economic,
occupational and social life – it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the
degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a
deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensorymental phase of small town and rural existence. Thereby the essentially intellectualistic character
of the mental life of the metropolis becomes intelligible as over against that of the small town
which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships. The latter are rooted in the
unconscious levels of the mind and develop most readily in the steady equilibrium of unbroken
customs. The locus of reason, on the other hand, is in the lucid, conscious upper strata of the
mind and it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to adjust itself to the shifts and
contradictions in events, it does not require the disturbances and inner upheavals which are the
only means whereby more conservative personalities are able to adapt themselves to the same
rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type [of person] – which naturally takes on a thousand
individual modifications – creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption

with which the fluctuation and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it. Instead of
reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a
mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by it.
[…]
This intellectualistic quality which is thus recognized as a protection of the inner life against the
domination of the metropolis, becomes ramified into numerous specific phenomena. The
metropolis has always been the seat of money economy because the many-sidedness and
concentration of commercial activity have given the medium of exchange an importance which it
could not have acquired in the commercial aspects of rural life. But money economy and the
domination of the intellect stand in the closest relationship to one another. they have in common
a purely matter-of-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things in which a formal justice is
often combined with an unrelenting hardness. The purely intellectualistic person is indifferent to
all things personal because, out of them, relationships and reactions develop which are not to be
completely understood by purely rational methods – just as the unique element in events never
enters into the principle of money. Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e. with
the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. All
emotional relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is, as with elements which, in
themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something
objectively perceivable. It is in this manner that the inhabitant of the metropolis reckons with his
merchant, his customer and with his servant, and frequently with the persons with whom he is
thrown into obligatory association. These relationships stand in distinct contrast with the nature
of the smaller circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individual characteristics produces, with
an equal inevitability, an emotional tone in conduct, a sphere which is beyond the mere objective
weighting of tasks performed and payments made. What is essential here as regards the
economic-psychological aspect of the problem is that in less advanced cultures production was for
the customer who ordered the product so that the producer and the purchaser knew one
another. The modern city, however, is supplied almost exclusively by production for the market,
that is, for entirely unknown purchasers […]. Thereby, the interests of each party acquire a
relentless matter-of-factness, and its rationally calculated economic egoism need not fear any
divergence from its set path because of the imponderability of personal relationships. […]
The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The calculating exactness of
practical life which has resulted from a money economy corresponds to the ideal of natural
science, namely that of transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every
one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been money economy which has thus filled the
daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of
qualitative values to quantitative terms. Because of the character of calculability which money has
there has come into the relationships of the elements of life a precision and a degree of certainty
in the definition of the equalities and inequalities and an unambiguousness in agreements and
arrangements, just as externally this precision has been brought about through the general
diffusion of pocket watches. It is, however, the conditions of the metropolis which are cause as
well as effect for this essential characteristic. The relationships and concerns of the typical
metropolitan resident are so manifold and complex that, especially as a result of the
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agglomeration of so many persons with such differentiated interests, their relationships and
activities intertwine with one another into a many-membered organism. In view of this fact, the
lack of the most exact punctuality in promises and performances would cause the whole to break
down into an inextricable 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 some
time. […] [T]he magnitude of distances results in making all waiting and the breaking of
appointments an ill-afforded waste of time. For this reason the technique of metropolitan life in
general is not conceivable without all of its activities and reciprocal relationships being organized
and coordinated in the most punctual way into a firmly fixed framework of time which transcends
all subjective elements. But here too there emerge those conclusions which are in general the
whole task of this discussion, namely, that every event […] comes immediately into contact with
the depth of the soul, and that the most banal externalities are, in the last analysis, bound up with
the final decisions concerning the meaning and the style of life. Punctuality, calculability and
exactness, which are required by the complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life, are
not only most intimately connected with its capitalist and intellectualistic character but also
colour the content of life and are conductive to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive,
sovereign human traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life from
within instead of receiving it from the outside in a general, schematically precise form. Even
though those lives which are autonomous and characterized by these vital impulses are not
entirely impossible in the city, they are, none the less, opposed to it in abstracto.
The same factors which, in the exactness and the minute precision of the form of life, have
coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality, have on the other hand, an influence in a
highly personal direction. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally
reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting
stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it
seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived. […] This
incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact
that blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of
the more peaceful and more stable milieu.
The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things. Not
in the sense that they are not perceived, as is the case of mental dullness, but rather that the
meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things
themselves, are experienced as meaningless. They appear to the blasé person in a homogeneous,
flat and grey colour with no one of them worthy of being preferred to another. this psychic mood
is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy to the extent that money takes
the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between hem
in the distinction of how much. To the extent that money, with its colourlessness and its
indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful
leveller – it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their
uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same
specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and are
distinguished only by their amounts. […] Through the mere quantitative intensification […] this
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achievement is transformed into […] this peculiar adaptive phenomenon – the blasé attitude – in
which the nerves reveal their final possibility of adjusting themselves to the content and the form
of metropolitan life by renouncing the response to them. We see that the self-preservation of
certain types of personalities is obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world,
ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness.
The mental attitude of the people of the metropolis to one another may be designated
formally as one of reserve. If the unceasing external contact of numbers of persons in the city
should be met by the same number of inner reactions as in the small town, in which one knows
almost every person he meets and to each of whom he has a positive relationship, one would be
completely atomized internally ad would fall into an unthinkable mental condition. Partly this
psychological circumstance and partly the privilege of suspicion which we have in the face of the
elements of metropolitan life […] necessitates in us that reserve, in consequence of which we do
not know by sight neighbours of years standing and which permits us to appear to small-town folk
so often as cold and uncongenial. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, the inner side of this external
reserve is not only indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a
mutual strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact which has arisen any way whatever,
can break out into hatred and conflict. […] From these two typical dangers [indifference and
aversion] we are saved by antipathy which […] brings about the sort of distantiation and
deflection without which this type of life could not be carried on at all. […] What appears here
directly as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialization.
This reserve with its overtone of concealed aversion appears once more, however, as the form
or the wrappings of a much more general psychic trait of the metropolis. It assures the individual
of a type and degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstance. It
has its roots in one of the great developmental tendencies of social life as a whole […]. The most
elementary stage of social organization which is to be found historically, as well as in the present,
is this: a relatively small circle almost entirely closed against neighbouring foreign or otherwise
antagonistic groups but which has however within itself such a narrow cohesion that the
individual member has only a very slight area for the development of his own qualities and for
free activity for which he himself is responsible. Political and familial groups began in this way as
do political and religious communities; the self-preservation of very young associations requires a
rigorous setting of boundaries and a centripetal unity and for that reason it cannot give room to
freedom and the peculiarities of inner and external development of the individual. From this stage
social evolution proceeds simultaneously in two divergent but none the less corresponding
directions. In the measure that the group grows numerically, spatially, and in the meaningful
content of life, its immediate inner unity and the definiteness of its original demarcation against
other are weakened and rendered mild by reciprocal interactions and interconnections. And at
the same time the individual gain a freedom of movement far beyond the first jealous
delimitation, and gains also a peculiarity and individuality to which the division of labour in
groups, which have become larger, gives both occasion and necessity. However much the
particular conditions and forces of the individual situation might modify the general scheme, the
state and Christianity, guilds and political parties and innumerable other groups have developed
in accord with this formula. This tendency seems to me, however, to be quite clearly recognizable
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also in the development of individuality within the framework of city life. Small town life in
antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages imposed such limits upon the movements of the individual
in his relationships with the outside world and on his inner independence and differentiation that
the modern person could not even breathe under such conditions. Even today the city dweller
who is placed in a small town feels a type of narrowness which is very similar. The smaller the
circle which forms our environment and the more limited the relationships which have the
possibility of transcending the boundaries, the more anxiously the narrow community watches
over the deeds, the conduct of life and the attitudes of the individual […].
The mutual reserve and indifference, and the intellectual conditions of life in large social units
are never more sharply appreciated in their significance for the independence of the individual
than in the dense crowds of the metropolis, because the bodily closeness and lack of space make
intellectual distance really perceivable for the first time. It is obviously only the observe of this
freedom that, under certain circumstances, one never eels as lonely and as deserted as in this
metropolitan crush of persons. For here, as elsewhere, it is by no means necessary that the
freedom of man reflect itself in his emotional life only as a pleasant experience.
It is not only the immediate size of the area and population which […] makes the metropolis
[the seat of cosmopolitanism. Comparable with the form of development of wealth […] the
individual’s horizon is enlarged. In the same way, economic, personal and intellectual relations in
the city (which are its ideal reflection) grow in a geometrical progression as soon as, for the first
time, a certain limit has been passed. […] At this point the quantitative aspects of life are
transformed qualitatively. The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, enclosed within
itself. For the metropolis it is decisive that its inner life is extended in a wave-like motion over a
broader national or international area […] characterized by its essential independence even of the
most significant individual personalities […]. A person does not end with the limits of his physical
body or with the area to which his physical activity is immediately confined but embraces, rather,
the totality of meaningful effects which emanates from him temporally and spatially. In the same
way the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere. […]
This is already expressed in the fact that individual freedom, which is the logical historical
complement of such extension, is not only to be understood in the negative sense as mere
freedom of movement and emancipation from prejudices and philistinism. Its essential
characteristic is rather to be found in the fact that the peculiarity and incomparability which
ultimately every person possesses in some way is actually expressed, giving form to life. That we
follow the laws of our inner nature – and this is what freedom is – becomes perceptible and
convincing to us and to others only when the expressions of this nature distinguish themselves
from others; it is our irreplaceability by others which shows that our mode of existence is not
imposed upon us from the outside.
Exactly in the measure of its extension, the city offer to an increasing degree the determining
conditions for the division of labour. It is a unit which, because of its large size, is receptive to a
highly diversified plurality of achievements while at the same time the agglomeration of
individuals and their struggle for the customer forces the individual to a type of specialized
accomplishment in which he cannot be so easily exterminated by the other. The decisive fact here
is that in the life of a city, struggle with nature for the means of life is transformed into a conflict
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with human beings, and the gain which is fought for is granted, not by nature, but by man. For
here we find not only the previously mentioned source of specialization but rather the deeper one
in which the seller must seek to produce in the person to whom he wishes to sell ever new and
unique needs. The necessity to specialize one’s produce in order to find a source of income which
is not yet exhausted and also to specialize a function which cannot be easily supplanted is
conducive to differentiation, refinement and enrichment of the needs of the public which
obviously must lead to increasing personal variation within this public.
All this leads to the narrower type of intellectual individuation of mental qualities to which the
city gives rise in proportion to its size. There is a whole series of causes for this. First of all there is
the difficulty of giving one’s own personality a certain status within the framework of
metropolitan life. Where quantitative increase of value and energy has reached its limits, one
seizes on qualitative distinctions, so that, through taking advantage of the existing sensitivity to
differences, the attention of the social world can, in some way, be won for oneself. This leads
ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances of selfdistantiation, of caprice, of fastidiousness, the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the
content of such activity itself but rather in its being a form of ‘being different’ – of making oneself
noticeable. For many types of persons these are still the only means of saving for oneself, through
the attention gained from others, some sort of self-esteem and the sense of filling a position. In
the same sense there operates […] the brevity and rarity of meetings which are allotted to each
individual as compared with social intercourse in a small city. For here we find the attempt to
appear to-the-point, clearcut and individual with extra-ordinarily greater frequency than where
frequent and long association assures to each person an unambiguous conception of the other’s
personality.
This appears to me to be the most profound cause of the fact that the metropolis places
emphasis on striving for the most individual forms of personal existence – regardless of whether it
is always correct or always successful. The development of modern culture is characterized by the
predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective; that is, in language as
well as in law, in the technique of production as well as in art, in science as well as in the object of
domestic environment, there is embodied a sort of spirit, the daily growth of which is followed
only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual.
[…] This discrepancy is in essence the result of the success of the growing division of labour. For it
is this which requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at
its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. […] He becomes a
single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually
take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value. […] Here in
[metropolitan] buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonder and comforts of spaceconquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State
is to be found such a tremendous richness of crystalizing, de-personalized cultural
accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the fact of it.
From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests, and the
taking up of time and attention, present themselves from all sides and carry it in a stream which
scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing. But from another angle, life is composed
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more and more of these impersonal cultural elements and existing goods and values which seek
to suppress peculiar personal interests and incomparabilities. As a result, in order that this most
personal element be saved, extremities and peculiarities and individualizations must be produced
and they must be over-exaggerated […] and indeed appear to its residents as the saviours of their
unsatisfied yearnings.
When both of these forms of individualism which are nourished by the quantitative
relationships of the metropolis, i.e. individual independence and the elaboration of personal
peculiarities, are examined with reference to their historical position, the metropolis attains an
entirely new value and meaning in the world history of the spirit. The eighteenth century found
the individual in the grip of powerful bonds which had become meaningless – bonds of a political,
agrarian, guild and religious nature – […] which imposed upon the human being at the same time
an unnatural form and for a long time an unjust inequality. In this situation arose […] the belief in
the full freedom of movement of the individual in all his social and intellectual relationships which
would then permit the same noble essence to emerge equally from all individuals as Nature had
placed it in them and as it had been distorted by social life and historical development. Alongside
of this liberalistic ideal there grew up in the nineteenth century from Goethe and the Romantics,
on the one hand, and from the economic division of labour, on the other, the further tendency
[…] that individuals […] distinguish themselves from one another. No longer was it the ‘general
human quality’ in every individual but rather his qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability that
now became the criteria of his value. […] It is the function of the metropolis to make a place for
the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar
conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and the stimulus for the development of
both. Thereby they attain a quite unique place, fruitful with an inexhaustible richness of meaning
in the development of the mental life. They reveal themselves as one of those great historical
structures in which conflicting life-embracing currents find themselves with equal legitimacy.
Because of this, however, regardless of whether we are sympathetic or antipathetic with their
individual expressions, they transcend the sphere in which a just-like attitude on our part is
appropriate. To the extent that such forces have been integrated, with the fleeting existence of a
single cell, into the root as well as the crown of the totality of historical life to which we belong –
it is our task not to complain or to condone but only to understand.

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