Conclusion

At the turn of the twentieth century, sociologist Georg Simmel noted that the explosive rural migration into the modern metropolis demanded a new kind of public self. ¹ The metropolitan individual, Simmel argued, experiences city streets teeming with the rush of strangers, trolleys, and market exchanges as so many jolts and shocks. The individual that adapts to this space does so by forming a protective screen to shield the public self from the assaults of city life. Rationality, wrote Simmel, is that screen. The rational man is the successful urban citizen because rationality will filter out the myriad sensate experiences he encounters as an urban pedestrian. Approaching a walk in the city as getting from point A to point B, the rational self can treat the city's multitudes and activities as so much white noise, so much irrational surplus. Money, that most abstract and rational mediator among the enormous diversity of people, things, and relations in metropolitan life will also bolster the rational self as it adapts to the big city. The more social life can be commodified, the more smoothly social exchanges can function. Rationality, Simmel warned, would be the strongest (albeit restrictive) feature in the mental life of the new public self.