ABSTRACT
Georg Simmel was born in the centre of Berlin in 1858 and lived through its expansion into a great metropolis. The emphasis on the distinction between form and content is the most distinctive feature of Simmers work. ‘Forms are the synthesizing principles which select elements from the raw stuff of experience and shape them into determinate unities’. The modern individual in the metropolis is exposed to various new stimuli and to new forms of social interaction. Cynicism and the blase attitude are seen as ‘almost endemic to the heights of a money culture’. Money, the ‘most terrible leveler’ reduces everything to the common denominator of exchange value, and it is ‘money transactions erect a balirier between persons’. Simmel pursues the theme of ‘the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture’ in his analysis of money. Money as a form of exchange links individuals together and symbolises what holds society together.
