Table Of ContentMARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
City and Modernity
in Georg Simmel and
Walter Benjamin
Fragments of Metropolis
Vincenzo Mele
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
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Vincenzo Mele
City and Modernity
in Georg Simmel and
Walter Benjamin
Fragments of Metropolis
Vincenzo Mele
Political Science
University of Pisa
Pisa, Italy
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-18183-2 ISBN 978-3-031-18184-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9
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A
cknowledgments
This book is the culmination of years of research, during which some por-
tions of its text have appeared, either verbatim or in similar form, in vari-
ous publications. Said portions are integral to the reasoning laid out in the
book and could hardly be omitted or substantially modified without
undermining its coherence. The following represent the most significant
publications:
– Walter Benjamin e l’esperienza della metropoli, Plus, Pisa 2003.
– George Simmel’s Sociology of Sociability: Contemporary and Historical
Remarks, in The Present and Future of Symbolic Interactionism.
Proceedings of the International Symposium, Pisa 2010, Vol. II,
edited by Andrea Salvini, David Altheide, Carolina Nuti, Franco
Angeli, 2010, pp. 113–132.
– Metropolis. Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin e la modernità, Belforte,
Livorno 2011.
– Origin, Meaning and Relevance of Georg Simmel’s Sociological
Aesthetics, in Sociology, Aesthetics & the City (ed. by V. Mele), Pisa
University Press, 2011, pp. 29–54.
– ‘At the Crossroad of Magic and Positivism’. Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm through Benjamin and Adorno, Journal of Classical
Sociology 2015, Vol. 15(2) (Special Issue ed. by V. Mele on What Is
Living and What Is Dead of the Positivist Dispute? Fifty Years Later,
A Debate), pp. 139–153.
– Before and Beyond the Masses. Simmel, Benjamin, and the Sociology of
Crowds, The Tocqueville Review, 2018, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 119–140.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
– The Blasé and the Flâneur. Simmel and Benjamin on Modern and
Postmodern Forms of Individualization, in Simmel Studies, 2019,
Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 37–70.
– Georg Simmel and the Metropolization of Social Life, in The Cambridge
Handbook of Social Theory, ed. by P. Kivisto, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. 161–178.
– Georg Simmel and Critical Theory, in Routledge International
Handbook of Simmel Studies, ed. by G. Fitzi, Routledge, 2020,
New York/London, pp. 261–275.
I am very grateful to a great number of individuals with whom I discussed
some of the arguments contained in this book over the years. I had the
pleasure to talk them over with Otthein Rammstedt, who firstly intro-
duced me to Simmel’s work. I am grateful to Klaus Lichtblau (and his
Forschungs Kolloquium in Frankfurt am Main) and Gregor Fitzi for their
thoughtful comments, suggestions, and ideas. Some topics of this book
have been presented at the wonderful Simmel Conference in Portbou in
October 2018: the inspiring location favored a beautiful discussion, for
which I am thankful to Natàlia Cantó-Milà, Swen Seebach, and all the
participants. Finally, I must thank the participants of the first Italo Franco-
German trilateral conference at Villa Vigoni for their timely comments on
the paper I gave at the colloquium on “Simmel. Aspects of Transdisciplinary
Research in the Social and Cultural Sciences” on October 28, 2022. I am
especially grateful to Denis Thouard for his critical remarks that stimulated
me to clarify some of the theses in this book. All errors, omissions, and
oversights are of course mine.
I need to thank Anthony Cafazzo and Suzanne Kirkbright for patiently
reading and reviewing my writing. Thanks are also due to Vinoth Kuppan,
Mary Al-Sayed, Elisabeth Graber, and the staff at Palgrave for their
patience and help.
I would especially like to thank Prof. Marcello Musto for his warm
encouragement to publish the book in the series under his direction and
Babak Amini and for his kind support. Above all, I wish to thank my family
for all their understanding, patience, and assistance: my mother Adele, my
daughters Bianca and Carmen, and my son Mario, who happened to be
born during the final months of work.
The metropolis at the core of this book is named Paulina Sabugal “after
her who as an engineer cut it through the author” (W. Benjamin to Asja
Lacis, One Way Street, 1928).
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Investigating Postmodernity Through
Modernity 1
2 Metropolis and Modernity 33
Part I City and Modernity in Georg Simmel 61
3 Deconstructing History, Morality, and Society: Simmel’s
Theory of Knowledge 63
4 The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity 101
5 Monetary Culture and the Intensification of Nervous Life 133
6 The Metropolization of Social Life 173
Part II City and Modernity in Walter Benjamin 215
7 What Is The Arcades Project? 217
8 Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge 247
vii
viii CONTENTS
9 The Phantasmagoria of Modernity: On Commodity
Fetishism 285
10 Baudelaire as the Lyric Poet in the Age of Mature
Capitalism 309
11 Conclusions: Metropolis as Tragedy, Metropolis as
Trauerspiel 347
Index 383
A t
bbreviAtions And rAnslAtions
The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes:
GS I–VII Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiede-
mann and Herman Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995.
GSG 1–24 Simmel, Georg. Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Otthein Rammstedt.
24 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015.
When no bibliographical source in English is given, the translations
are my own.
ix
