ABSTRACT
The moment of high modernity produced its own finest critical voices - not just after the event, and not just in later academic, theoretical writing. A triad of near-contemporaries, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and the somewhat younger Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), were first-hand witnesses to and profound critical commentators on that cultural-historical moment of radical innovation, destruction and transformation we call modernity. They were simultaneously the hypersensitive cultural seismographs and shapers of the fundamental cultural changes they lived through: that accelerating process of technological, economic and social revolution, which in Europe and America culminated in the international commodity capitalism of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century.
