Fashion as Form and Field: Simmel and Bourdieu in Conversation

“Fashion… leads the individual on the road to equality, but... also the need for differentiation.” — Georg Simmel

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” — Pierre Bourdieu

 

Two Lenses on the Same Outfit

Fashion is often treated as a lightweight subject—frivolous, feminine, fleeting. But for both Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, fashion was a powerful social signal. Not just about what we wear, but why, for whom, and with what consequences.

Though writing in different eras—Simmel in turn-of-the-century Berlin, Bourdieu in postwar France—both theorists saw fashion as a central way that modern societies organize difference. Yet they approached it through distinct frames: Simmel as a theorist of form and rhythm, Bourdieu as an analyst of social reproduction.

Their differences help illuminate fashion not only as a system of style, but as a map of power.

Simmel: The Dance of Differentiation and Imitation

In his 1904 essay “Fashion,” Simmel frames fashion as a social form that mediates two contradictory desires: the need to belong and the need to stand out. Fashion is inherently dynamic—it spreads through imitation (social adaptation) but depends on differentiation (novelty) to remain meaningful. The moment a fashion becomes universal, it dies.

This cycle, for Simmel, is particularly visible in class dynamics: elites innovate, lower classes imitate, elites abandon. But his emphasis is not on domination—it’s on the structure of movement, the push and pull of identity in flux. Fashion is a cultural technology for negotiating social proximity and distinction.

It is, in his terms, a form of life.

Bourdieu: Fashion as Distinction and Domination

In contrast, Pierre Bourdieu, especially in Distinction (1979), treats fashion less as a pattern and more as a field—a space structured by power, capital, and competition. For Bourdieu, fashion is one expression of taste, which is never innocent. Taste, he argues, is socially conditioned and used to mark and maintain class boundaries.

Where Simmel sees fluidity, Bourdieu sees reproduction. Fashion choices aren't just aesthetic—they are acts of classification. To wear the right style is to assert cultural capital, to signal belonging to a class fraction (not necessarily the wealthiest, but often the most “cultured”). The working class may reject fashion as superficial or impractical, while the dominant class aestheticizes the mundane and encodes it as taste.

In this model, fashion isn’t just a game of change. It’s a mechanism of exclusion.

Micro-Rhythms vs. Macro-Structures

The difference is not just analytical, but metaphysical. Simmel’s theory is rhythmic, attentive to motion, flow, and ambivalence. Bourdieu’s is structural, focused on accumulation, positioning, and stability. Simmel is interested in the form fashion takes; Bourdieu, in the functions it performs.

To put it simply: Simmel asks how fashion lives. Bourdieu asks what fashion does.

Yet there’s value in reading them together. Simmel helps us understand how fashion seduces, evolves, and adapts—its emotional, performative appeal. Bourdieu grounds that understanding in a system of inequality. The movement Simmel celebrates is not free-floating—it’s structured by race, class, gender, and institutional power, all of which Bourdieu maps with precision.

When Culture Outgrows Us: Simmel’s Tragedy of the Modern Mind

“The individual has become a mere cog... while culture gains an autonomous momentum beyond his control.” — Georg Simmel, “The Conflict in Modern Culture” (1911)

 

The Triumph of Things Over Souls

In a world of infinite content, ceaseless innovation, and sprawling archives, what does it mean to be cultured? Do we own culture, or does it now own us?

In his late essay “The Conflict in Modern Culture” (1911), Georg Simmel diagnosed a tension that still haunts us: the tragedy of culture. At its core is a deceptively simple idea: the very success of human creativity threatens to overwhelm the individuals who produce it.

Simmel distinguishes between subjective culture—the individual’s capacity to absorb, create, and cultivate meaning—and objective culture—the externalized products of that creativity: art, science, technologies, institutions, knowledge. In early societies, these two move in tandem. But in modernity, they drift apart. Culture accumulates faster than any one person can absorb. The world becomes saturated with works, systems, innovations—while the individual becomes increasingly dwarfed.

This is the tragedy: the more we produce, the less we possess.

The Overproduction of Meaning

Simmel’s diagnosis eerily anticipates our cultural moment. The internet offers infinite access to literature, theory, fashion, music, code—yet many feel alienated, fragmented, adrift in cultural excess. Algorithms recommend, but they also flatten. Playlists replace albums; tweets replace essays; aesthetics replace critique.

We are surrounded by culture, yet struggle to feel cultured. The self becomes a curator, scrolling endlessly through what others have made.

This isn’t just information overload—it’s a structural imbalance. Objective culture now multiplies independently of individual development. It doesn't need us to grow. We just try to keep up.

Freedom or Fragmentation?

Simmel didn’t mourn this loss in the way a conservative might. He wasn’t nostalgic for a return to unity or simplicity. He understood that fragmentation is part of modern freedom. The modern individual, freed from tradition, is able to pick, remix, experiment. But the price of this freedom is often disorientation.

The tragedy of culture is not necessarily its abundance—but our estrangement from it. Culture, once a field of self-realization, now risks becoming a system of external demands. A pressure to consume. To know everything, be everywhere, master every form.

Why It Still Matters

Today’s cultural landscape is not only vast—it’s accelerating. Simmel helps us see the cost of this acceleration not in moral or aesthetic terms, but in existential ones. What does it mean to make meaning in a world where meaning is endlessly made?

To engage with Simmel is not to seek escape from the modern condition—but to name its structure. To see that the tragedy of culture isn’t collapse. It’s overflow.

To Stand Out and Fit In: Simmel on Fashion’s Double Game

“Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation; it leads the individual on the road to equality, but... also the need for differentiation, the tendency toward dissimilarity.” — Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904)

 

The Paradox of the Trend

Why do we follow trends we know will disappear? Why does fashion, of all things, provoke such intense cultural anxiety—and such deep personal investment?

In his 1904 essay “Fashion,” Georg Simmel treats the question seriously—not as a matter of taste or industry, but of social form. For Simmel, fashion is not superficial. It is the stage on which two opposing modern impulses play out: the desire to belong and the desire to be distinct.

Fashion emerges, he argues, precisely at the intersection of these forces. It spreads by imitation—making the wearer feel connected to a group—but it must also promise differentiation. If everyone adopts the style, it becomes passé. Fashion dies when it succeeds too well.

Thus, fashion is inherently unstable, always reaching for its own obsolescence.

Class, Copying, and Revolt

Simmel’s analysis is also a subtle theory of class and aspiration. Fashion often flows from elite to mass—from the innovator to the imitator. As lower classes adopt a style, the upper classes move on, seeking distinction once again. This trickle-down logic anticipates Bourdieu’s later work on taste and distinction.

But Simmel doesn’t view fashion as simply reinforcing hierarchy. It can also subvert it. Youth cultures, subcultures, and marginalized groups often use fashion as inversion—turning the codes of respectability inside out. Punk, drag, Afrofuturism, goth: these are not just styles, but statements. Fashion can be resistance—until, of course, it’s commodified again.

From the Street to the Feed

What Simmel grasped is that fashion is not about clothes. It’s about visibility. And in our hyper-mediated age, fashion’s logic has become algorithmic.

Online, fashion moves at dizzying speeds. Micro-trends rise and fall weekly; aesthetics are curated, collapsed, and recycled in real time. Platforms like TikTok or Pinterest have turned personal style into data: remixable, trackable, monetizable. Yet the social function remains the same—fashion marks identity, aspiration, affiliation.

We don’t just dress to express ourselves. We dress to be seen—by the right people, in the right moment, with just enough difference to matter.

Why It Still Matters

Simmel’s theory of fashion reveals a deep truth about modern identity: that our performances of individuality are always entangled with social scripts. We want to stand out—but never too much. We want to belong—but not anonymously.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the structure of modern life.

To study fashion, then, is to study the drama of modern selfhood—anxious, performative, fluid. Simmel gives us a lens to see not just what we wear, but why we wear it, and what it costs to keep up.

See also: Distinction, Taste, and Class Today: Revisiting Bourdieu’s Classic Insight

Nervous in the City: Simmel on the Metropolis and Mental Life

“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.” — Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)

 

Life in the Nervous System

When Georg Simmel turned his gaze to the city in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), he wasn’t writing urban policy or romanticizing concrete jungles. He was trying to describe a new kind of consciousness—what it feels like to live in the city. And what he found was not just noise and speed, but a radical transformation of subjectivity.

Modern urban life, Simmel argued, is defined by intensification. The city bombards the senses: flashing advertisements, crowded streets, economic calculations, fleeting interactions. In contrast to the slower, more rhythmic life of the small town, the metropolis forces individuals into a constant state of adaptation. To survive this onslaught, the urban subject develops what Simmel calls the blasé attitude—a kind of emotional detachment or indifference born not of apathy, but of necessity.

The blasé person is not shallow, but saturated. Their distance is a defense.

Money, Measurement, and Mentality

At the heart of Simmel’s analysis is the idea that the urban condition is shaped by the money economy. Money, as the universal measure of value, levels qualitative difference into quantitative comparison. It makes things interchangeable, and by extension, people interchangeable too.

This creates a paradox. The city promises freedom—freedom from tradition, freedom to be yourself—but it also flattens uniqueness. In a world where everything has a price, how does one maintain authenticity?

Simmel saw the city as both liberating and alienating. Its anonymity allows for self-fashioning, but also isolation. Its stimulation fuels creativity, but also exhaustion.

The City Today: Overstimulated and Overconnected

Simmel’s diagnosis of urban life feels eerily prescient in the age of smartphones, push notifications, and gig economies. The city has gone digital—but the mental effects remain. We curate personas to stand out in crowded social networks, we scroll past endless stimuli, and we steel ourselves against emotional overload. The blasé attitude has migrated online.

Even the paradox of freedom and flattening persists. Platforms promise self-expression, yet funnel us into trends, metrics, and performance. We are more “individualized” than ever—and more standardized too.

Why Simmel Still Matters

Simmel didn’t offer a solution to the urban condition. Instead, he gave us a mirror: a way to see how modern environments shape interior life. He refused to reduce the city to pathology or utopia. What he captured was its ambivalence - its simultaneous capacity to exhilarate and deaden.

To read Simmel now is to recognize that the conditions of modern urban life didn’t disappear. They multiplied, pixelated, and embedded themselves in our nervous systems. We are still trying to be human in the noise.

Georg Simmel’s Stranger: Neither Here Nor There, But Always Central

“The stranger is near and far at the same time... he is in the group but not of the group.” — Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” (1908)

The One Who Comes Today and Stays Tomorrow

In his 1908 essay “The Stranger”, Georg Simmel introduces a paradoxical figure: someone who is physically present in a group, yet symbolically distant. Not a wanderer passing through, and not a full member of the community, the stranger is defined by their position, not their personality. They are close, but not intimate; inside, but never fully integrated.

This stranger is not necessarily exotic or antagonistic. Rather, they occupy a unique sociological role: they see the group from a distance, and the group sees itself reflected through them. They bring what Simmel calls “objectivity,” but also projection. The stranger becomes a screen for collective fantasies, fears, and desires.

It’s no coincidence that Simmel’s stranger is often associated with figures like the trader, the foreigner, or the Jew in European modernity—those whose movement or difference unsettles the boundaries of belonging.

Social Distance in an Age of Proximity

Simmel’s insight is strikingly applicable to contemporary life, especially in digital and diasporic contexts. In a globalized world, we are surrounded by strangers who are geographically close but culturally distant—and vice versa. The stranger is no longer only the immigrant or the outsider, but the person across the Zoom screen, the voice on your feed, the neighbor you never meet.

Social media intensifies the stranger-effect: we see fragments of lives—curated, legible, performative—without ever bridging real intimacy. We’re always scrolling past strangers who feel oddly familiar. Proximity without closeness. Presence without belonging.

The Stranger Within

Importantly, Simmel’s stranger isn’t just “out there.” The figure also speaks to an internal condition. Modern life, for Simmel, produces estrangement even within the self. In societies driven by individualism, mobility, and abstraction, we often feel like strangers to each other—and to ourselves.

Simmel shows us that the stranger is not a marginal anomaly, but a structural role at the heart of modern social life. They remind us that community is not built on sameness, but on negotiated distance.

Introduction to Georg Simmel's Sociology

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was never quite at the center of the sociological canon—but that may be exactly why he remains so vital today. A philosopher by training and a sociologist by necessity, Simmel wrote in fragments, essays, and digressions rather than systems. He studied what other thinkers overlooked: the everyday rhythms of city life, the emotional undercurrents of money, the strange sociology of fashion. His subjects seem fleeting—style, flirtation, strangers, group size—but his insight was always structural. Beneath the ephemeral, he revealed the form.

Simmel's Contribution to Sociology

Simmel’s great contribution to sociology was not a grand theory but a way of seeing. He asked how modern life feels—how individuals experience being both more free and more alienated, more connected and more anonymous. Where Marx emphasized material structures and Durkheim looked to social facts, Simmel honed in on interaction: the forms, tensions, and contradictions that shape social life from the inside out. He pioneered what would become microsociology, and influenced generations of thinkers from the Frankfurt School to Erving Goffman.

In our present moment—defined by fractured attention, rapid circulation, and shifting identities—Simmel’s fragmented method seems prophetic. He understood that modern life couldn’t be captured in one theory because it wasn’t one thing. It was a mosaic, a blur, a series of partial views.

Georg Simmel’s Stranger: Neither Here Nor There, But Always Central

Nervous in the City: Simmel on the Metropolis and Mental Life

To Stand Out and Fit In: Simmel on Fashion’s Double Game

When Culture Outgrows Us: Simmel’s Tragedy of the Modern Mind

Text Summaries

 The Stranger
The Metropolis and Mental Life Revisted
The Problem of Sociology

Georg Simmel on society and the individual

There are two central ideas that form Simmel’s perspective: social forms and the relationship between the subjective experience of the individual and objective culture.  Simmel always begins and ends with the individual.  He assumes that the individual is born with certain ways of thinking and feeling and most social interactions are motivated by individual needs and desires.  Encounters with others are molded to social forms in order to facilitate reciprocal exchanges.  These forms constitute society for Simmel.  Objective culture is that culture that is universal yet not alive to the individual’s subjective experience.  Thus the person is unable to fully grasp, comprehend, or intimately know objective culture.  The tension between the individual on the one hand and social forms and objective culture on the other is Simmel’s focus of study.

There are a variety of social forms; among them are sociability, exchange, conflict, and group size.  Sociability occurs in interactions that have no other goal than chit-chat.  Though the goal appears of no consequence, the functions of such interactions are important for the well-being of society and the person—they socially connect us to others, provide cultural and emotional capital, affirm social reality, and solve the problem of association.  Reciprocal exchange is the foundation of society.  Exchange is ordered by value and value is ordered by sacrifice and scarcity.  Conflict is a social form that provides such functions as group solidarity, normative regulation, centralization of power, and coalition formation.  The kind of function that conflict provides depends on whether the collective is a social system or group.  Group size also functions as a social form.  Triads, for example, involve power relations, whereas dyads do not.  On the other hand, dyads are much more uncertain and thus perceived as unique due to their size. 

Urbanization increases the division of labor, the use of money, and changes the configuration of social networks.  All of these have direct and indirect effects on the level of objective culture and its effects on the individual.  The use of money increases personal freedom for the individual yet at the same time it intensifies the possibility of anomie, diminishes the individual’s attachment to objects, and increases goal displacement.  People join groups for either rational or organic motivations.  Rational motivations are prevalent in urban settings and imply greater personal freedom coupled with less emotional investment, and possible anomie and role conflict; organic motivations imply less personal freedom and greater social conformity coupled with increased personal and social certainty.

Both gender and religion are natural states for human beings.  Each person has a religious impulse and a certain degree of religiosity.  Religion, on the other hand, acts like a categorical scheme, and it overextends the valid limits of religiosity.  Religion thus objectifies the world by claiming exclusive right to such impulses as faith, love, and sacrifice, and by conceptualizing all available worlds through its scheme.  Gender is also an essential attribute of humans.  Men naturally objectify themselves as they are motivated to produce.  Women, on the other hand, are naturally integrated with all aspects of their being.  Men operate through a dualistic knowledge system, seeking proofs for knowledge in the empirical world, while women’s way of knowing is non-dualistic and centered.  The problem of gender inequality is that men have dominated the social world and its culture.  Culture, then, for the most part is objective and at odds with women’s nature.  True gendered social change will come as women’s knowledge and way of being are valued as equally as men’s.

Simmel was concerned about the effect of objective culture on the individual’s subjective existence.  Postmodernists have taken that concern to another level.  In times past, most of the culture was produced by people situated in real social groups that interacted over real issues.  This grounded culture created real meanings and morally infused norms, values, and beliefs.  In postmodernity, much of the culture is produced or colonized by capitalists using advertising and mass media.  This historic shift implies that culture has changed from a representation of social reality to representations of commodified images, culture is produced rather than created, and people have changed from culture creators to culture consumers.  In Baudrillard’s words, culture in postmodern society is filled with simulacrum that references hyperreality. 

Further reading on Simmel:

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel - The Stranger

Early German Sociology

German sociology is rooted in the philosopher G.F.W. Hegel's (1770-1831) idea of the dialectic. Like Comte in France, Hegel offered an evolutionary theory of society. The dialectic is a view that the world is made up not of static structures but of processes, relationships, conflicts, and contradictions. He emphasized the importance of changes in consciousness for producing dialectical change. Dialectical thinking is a dynamic way of thinking about the world.

More on Hegel:

Hegel on Religion, Christianity, Morality and Ethic

Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel on Master-Slave Dialectic

Hegel on the History of Philosophy 

Karl Marx (1818-1883) followed Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) in criticizing Hegel for favoring abstract ideas over real people. Marx adopted a materialist orientation that focused on real material entities like wealth and the state. He argued that the problems of modern society could be traced to real material sources like the structures of capitalism. Yet he maintained Hegel's emphasis on the dialectic, forging a position called dialectical materialism that held that material processes, relationships, conflicts, and contradictions are responsible for social problems and social change. (See also: The sociology of Karl Marx)

Marx's materialism led him to posit a labor theory of value, in which he argued that the capitalist's profits were based on the exploitation of the laborer. Under the influence of British political economists, Marx grew to deplore the exploitation of workers and the horrors of the capitalist system. Unlike the political economists, his view was that such problems were the products of an endemic conflict that could be addressed only through radical change. While Marx did not consider himself to be a sociologist, his influence has been strong in Europe. Until recently, American sociologists dismissed Marx as an ideologist.

More on Marx:

Ideology according to Marx

Marx on Class Conflict 

Marx on Capitalism and Exploitation
Karl Marx – The German Ideology
The Communist Manifesto

The theories of Max Weber (1864-1920) can be seen as the fruit of a long debate with the ghost of Marx. While Weber was not familiar with Marx's writings, he viewed the Marxists of his day as economic determinists who offered single-cause theories of social life. Rather than seeing ideas as simple reflections of economic factors, Weber saw them as autonomous forces capable of profoundly affecting the economic world. Weber can also be understood as trying to round out Marx's theoretical perspective; rather than denying the effect of material structures, he was simply pointing out the importance of ideas as well.

Whereas Marx offered a theory of capitalism, Weber's work was fundamentally a theory of the process of rationalization. Rationalization is the process whereby universally applied rules, regulations, and laws come to dominate more and more sectors of society on the model of a bureaucracy. Weber argued that in the Western world rational-legal systems of authority squeezed out traditional authority systems, rooted in beliefs, and charismatic authority, systems based on the extraordinary qualities of a leader. His historical studies of religion are dedicated to showing why rational-legal forms took hold in the West but not elsewhere. Weber's reformist views and academic style were better received than Marx's radicalism in sociology. Sociologists also appreciated Weber's well-rounded approach to the social world.

More on Weber

Max Weber on social stratification

Max Weber on social inequality

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was Weber's contemporary and co-founder of the German Sociological Society. While Marx and Weber were pre-occupied with large-scale issues, Simmel was best known for his work on smaller-scale issues, especially individual action and interaction. He became famous for his thinking on forms of interaction (i.e., conflict) and types of interacts (i.e., the stranger). Simmel saw that understanding interaction among people was one of the major tasks of sociology. His short essays on interesting topics made his work accessible to American sociologists. His most famous long work, The Philosophy of Money, was concerned with the emergence of a money economy in the modern world. This work observed that large-scale social structures like the money economy can become separate from individuals and come to dominate them.

Further reading on Simmel:

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel - The Stranger

Georg Simmel on society and the individual

Summary: Georg Simmel / The Problem of Sociology

Source: Simmel’s major work Soziologie published in 1908.

1.       DEF: society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction.  What is Simmel’s “definition” of society?  What does this tell you about his “ontological” assumptions?  Is society a thing for Simmel or an event?

2.       What does Simmel mean by “unity” (23.7ff) – reciprocity of effects – mutual interaction – Wechselwirkung?

3.       Simmel says that sociation or unity exists to different degrees.  What does he mean?  Can you give some examples?

·         getting together for a walk

·         founding a family

·         citizenship

·         relations “until further notice”

·         being fellow guests in a hotel

4.       An important distinction for Simmel here is between CONTENT and FORM.  He talks about CONTENT being “everything present in individuals” – drives, purposes, inclinations, interests – and says these are not themselves social.  What are they then?  When do they “become” social for Simmel? “when they transform mere aggregation” into “specific forms of being with and for one another”

5.       All social phenomena or processes consist of FORM + CONTENT

6.       DJR: There is something different between a room with four chairs, a room with four cows and a room with four people.

7.       If we were to describe what we might call the “strong Simmelian” perspective about sociology, what would it be?  That the only thing that can be a special science of society is the study of social forms.

8.       What is Simmel’s “test” for whether something ought to be the subject of a society of science? (25.9-26.2) Show that the form can be observed in quite dissimilar contents and that the contents can be realized in dissimilar forms.  Cf. geometric forms and logical forms and their respective contents.

9.       On p. 27.6 Simmel writes of a “hypostatization of a mere abstraction” right after saying that there is no such thing as society.  Explain.

10.    Is Simmel advocating a “geometry of society”?  How do the ideas on p. 28 support or refute such an approach?

11.    List some of the forms that Simmel mentions in this short section:

·         formation of parties

·         imitation

·         competition

·         formation of classes and circles

·         secondary subdivisions

·         superordination and subordination

·         growth and role of hierarchies

·         bearing of common hostility to the inner solidarity of a group

·         joining for common tasks, common feeling, common ways of thinking

·         self adornment for others

·         representation of groups by individuals

·         significance of the nonpartisan

·         role of the poor

·         numerical determinations of group elements

·         first among equals and the third who laughs

·         intersection of circles in individuals

·         significance of the secret for groups

·         the stranger

12.    Don’t worry about whether any given instance matches the form exactly.  That’s not the point (30.3)

13.    Methodological challenge.  Consider his medieval guild master example.  He draws the form out, but points out that this is not an automatic process.  Whereas mathematician can assume forms, sociologist cannot: “isolation of truly pure sociation out of the complex total phenomenon cannot be forced by logical means.”  (31.8)

            DJR: cf. Edmund Husserl’s problem describing the phenomenological reduction

14.    On pp. 32-4 we get a working out of what is the psychological and what is the sociological.  For our purposes the important thing is to appreciate the fact that Simmel allows that there are interesting psychological processes going on, but that the purely sociological questions are those listed on the top of p. 34.  A clear understanding of the last two pages probably means you understand this article.

See also:

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel - The Stranger

 

Georg Simmel - The Stranger - Summary

Georg Simmel's famous and influential essay "The Stranger" introduces the sociological category of the stranger and his social function within groups. According to Simmel's argument the stranger is dissimilar from the wanderer which comes and goes but is rather just one who always has that potential since he doesn't truly and fully belong. The stranger for Simmel is one which is within the bounds of society but wasn't so from the beginning not are there any guarantees that he will to continue to be so. In Margret Mary Wood's words "the stranger is perceived as being in the group but not of the group".

Simmel describes the stranger as one which unites distance and closeness. The stranger's distance renders anything close distant while his closeness renders everything distant close. He is an insider and an outsider at one and the same time and that what makes him so important.

Simmel characterizes a few features of the stranger. To begin with, the stranger is mobile, he has no possessions (both material and social) and therefore has no set position in society. Without property or kinship, the stranger is truely free to move about and connect freely with people from all works of life. Another attribute of the stranger according to Simmel is objectivity which is enabled since the stranger is not bound by the group's conventions and is therefore free to see it without any bias. The stranger's objectivity allows him to be open and free, both intimate and withdrawn, close yet far from the people of the group.

All these features of the stranger make him, Georg Simmel holds, an important function in society like carrying out tasks that no one else can do or hold conversations that cannot be held between two full, non-stranger, members of the group.       

See also:

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel / The Problem of Sociology
Alfred Schutz - The Stranger

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Georg Simmel –The Metropolis and Mental Life Revisited

Georg Simmel's famous article "The Metropolis and Mental Life" was a groundbreaking work in the field of urban studies and sociology of the city. The historical background for Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" was the move from agrarian forms of life the metropolitan ones in the wake of the industrial revolution.

Simmel argues that the move to the metropolis brings about a new form of mental life which are the result of the certain form of human existence and interactions that happen in the city. Simmel is not interested in the metropolis itself and man's mental life themselves, but rather their interaction. "The Metropolis and Mental Life" examines what happens to a man, and humanity at large, upon moving to the big city. Simmel talked about a sense of alienation and indifference that are the result of too much stimuli that the big city hurls at the individual which is too much for his to take. Simmel also talked about the instrumentalization or interpersonal relations under the dominant mode of social relation in the modern metropolis – capitalism.   

But what about this point in time in which most of the people in the west were born in the big metropolis, and did not migrate to it. Are Simmel's observations regarding people's mental lives still relevant for people born 100 years after "The Metropolis and Mental Life". If one was to think that humanity has somehow grown accustomed to massive stimuli he should bear in mind that this urban bombardment of signs and meanings is exponentially growing and we have to filter more, not less. Simmel argued that the other side of the metropolis coin is that indifference makes you in a sense liberated from social constraints and allows you to be who you want to be. Is this still relevant today? Indifference is definitely a trademark of big city life, but is freedom?

See also:
Georg Simmel - The Stranger
Georg Simmel / The Problem of Sociology
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Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life – Summary

Georg Simmel's essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) was originally a part of a series of lectures carried out by Simmel and his associates discussing different aspects of social urban life at the turn of the 19^th century. In it, Simmel illustrates some aspects of modern urban culture. In spite of being written at a time in which cities were very different from contemporary megalopolises with the biggest cities approaching one million inhabitants, Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" remains to a great extent relevant to this day.

"The Metropolis and Mental Life" discusses the individual's position in the big city urban life and his psychological coping with its form of existence. For Simmel, the big city is dominated by objectivism (as opposed of subjectivism, with the individual at the center). Human interactions in the metropolis become short and instrumental, lacking the emotional and personal involvement of small communities. The city's inflation of sensory stimulus coerces man into being rational and instrumental in his social interactions, and he has to screen out much stimulus in order to psychologically be able to cope with its rate. Therefore, the metropolis mental life are essentially intellectual, not emotional. People are enslaved to time, working under the clock. Everything in the city is measurable, qualitative value is reduced to quantitative and this yields what Simmel terms as "blasé" – superficiality, grayness, indifference and alienation.

On the other hand, Simmel describes the metropolis as a place of liberation from the binding mentality of the small community, thus granting the individual more space and freedom to independently define himself.         

Urban indifference is manifested for Simmel in indifference to difference, that is the incapacity to relate to differences between things (object of people). Things have no intrinsic value which would make them more worthy than others, they are only measured by the external objective value of money and time, and are therefore all the same.

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See also:
Georg Simmel - The Stranger
Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life Revisted
Georg Simmel / The Problem of Sociology