hood neurosis," and society could expect to "surmount this neurotic phase." Freud's tone, like Weber's, was wistful but firm: let us put away childish things. "Men cannot remain children for ever.... It is something, at any rate, to know that one is thrown upon one's own resources." ^*

Georg Simmel's widely admired essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"—" perhaps the most evocative and stimulating consideration of the culture of cities ever written," in the words of Thomas Bender—provides a particularly striking illustration of the ambivalence that seems inescapably to surround the subject of "community." A reading of this celebrated set piece confirms the impression that speculation of this kind originated among intellectuals recently uprooted from provincial surroundings and therefore exposed to the city-country contrast in their own lives. The "deep contrast" between the city and "small-town and rural life," according to Simmel, could be seen most clearly in the city's effects on "psychic life." In the provinces, life rested on "deeply felt and emotional relations" that grew "in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations," while the city produced an "intensification of nervous stimulation." The urbanite lived "with his head instead of his heart." A money economy encouraged a "matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things." It transformed attitudes toward time, making a virtue of punctuality and, by extension, exactness in all things. "The passionate hatred of men like Ruskin and Nietzsche for the metropolis," Simmel thought, "is understandable in these terms." Money became the

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The anthropologist Robert Redfield, who shared Freud's appreciation of the attraction of the primitive, resorted to the same rhetoric: "I find it impossible to regret that the human race has tended to grow up." In The Future of an Illusion, incidentally—one of the two books by Freud that contributed most directly to the debate about progress (the other being Civilization and Its Discontents)—Freud stated the problem of progress in its classic form. "While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs." The second part of this sentence contains the usual case for modern "pessimism." But it is Freud's statement of the problem, not his apprehension that human self-control has not kept pace with control over nature, that betrays the influence of the nineteenth-century sociological tradition.

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