measure of all things, the "common denominator of all values," and thus destroyed the sense of particularity, of the "incomparability" of discrete places or people or events. It "hollowed out the core of things." A money economy made for "formal justice," since it undermined distinctions of rank and made everyone equal before the law; but abstract equality was "often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness."

The city overwhelmed the individual and at the same time freed him from prying neighbors, gossip, and the prejudice against anything distinctive or new. The urbanite cultivated an exaggerated individuality, even a certain eccentricity, as a defense against anonymity. Faced with conditions that made him a "mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers," he found it necessary to exaggerate the "personal element" in order to "remain audible even to himself." By means of "mannerism, caprice, and preciousness," he sought more and more extravagant ways of calling attention to himself. He flung himself into the pleasures around him but soon became jaded with pleasure. "A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé," Simmel observed; "it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all." A "blasé attitude" set the tone of city life.

In moments of boredom or loneliness, the city dweller might long for the remembered warmth of his ancestral home. Having left it, however, he could never find his way back, any more than the modern world could find its way back to the "ancient polis." Nor would he like what he found: "pettiness and prejudices," "jealousy of the whole against the individual," "barriers against individual independence and differentiation" under which "modern man could not have breathed." Athens itself was only a glorified village, "self-contained and autarchic." "The earliest phase of social formations found in history as well as in contemporary social structure is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles," "closely coherent," but unwilling to allow individuals more than a "narrow field for the development of unique qualities." The vigor of Athenian culture, Simmel argued, derived not from its narrow tribalism but from the struggle of individualism against it. "Weaker individuals were suppressed," while stronger ones tried "to prove themselves in the most passionate manner."

The modern metropolis, then, not the city-state, much less the average

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