country town, was the "locale of freedom." Modern men guarded their freedom, to be sure, by means of a studied "reserve, with its overtone of hidden aversion." This reserve made city people seem "cold and heartless" to small-town people. The city could not match the intimacy of the "small circle," where "the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior." Urban sociability was predicated on a "mere objective balancing of service and return." At the same time, however, the metropolis offered "heightened awareness, a predominance of intelligence." ^*

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Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938), an essay extravagantly praised by American sociologists, drew heavily on Simmel's essay, right down to key phrases like the "blasé outlook." In an interesting discussion of this essay, Thomas Bender argues that the classical sociologists intended gemeinschaft and gesellschaft to refer not to historical stages but to contrasting tendencies always present in any given society. It was only after World War II, according to Bender, that American sociologists began to use these concepts in a sequential fashion, thanks largely to the example of Wirth's influential essay. "With the dualistic perspective of Tönnies largely submerged in Wirth's evolutionary formulation, a complex theory with rich possibilities for historical research was transformed into a simplistic typology of social change." The "evolutionary" interpretation, however, did not originate with Louis Wirth. There is no indication in Simmel's essay that "communalism survives, and even thrives, in the heart of the modern metropolis," as Bender puts it. Nor does it give an accurate impression of Tönnies's work to say that he "anticipated that both these forms of interaction were likely to be permanent aspects of all social life." To argue that gemeinschaft would return in the form of socialism was quite different from arguing that "folk and urban ways coexist in the same society," unless we could agree to regard labor unions (on which socialism would be based, according to Tönnies), as quaint expressions of rural folkways. Naturally residual folkways take a long time to die out, but this does not mean that Tönnies advanced a "dualistic" thesis or that his typologies referred to the "character of a whole society in a particular historical period" as well as to contrasting "patterns of human relationships within that society." It is not clear, in any case, how his typology could carry such radically conflicting meanings at the same time, and it does no credit to Tönnies to suppose that he held such an incoherent view of the matter.

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