ABSTRACT
Georg Simmel’s influential essay ‘The Stranger’ (1908) describes the position of the stranger in social life. For Simmel, people are habit-forming by nature and individuals give their experiences meaning by creating categories and boundaries. One of the psychological consequences of rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth century was a form of disaffection that encouraged estrangement rather than sociability. To protect themselves against this, many metropoles developed a blasé attitude; a new form of subjectivity better suited to the demands of the metropolitan environment. The argument developed in this chapter is that human beings produce social forms and strangeness is the product of practice leading to a form of social exclusion. The link that Simmel identified between the stranger, the city and boundaries still shapes current debates about the stranger.
