Money and Modern Life

Money and Modern Life

Daniel Lopez, Aeon

Sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the character of modern city life: finance, fashion and becoming strangers to one another.

Georg Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin in 1858. That city epitomised the tensions of Germany’s special path to modernity. Rapid urbanisation and financial speculation propelled Berlin to the world stage. An avant-garde cultural elite flourished uneasily alongside central Europe’s aristocracy while a young proletariat fought the state and the bourgeoisie for rights, political and economic. A proliferation of modern technologies generated power and wealth while eroding the landed Prussian Junker nobility, the foundation of Bismarck’s united German Reich. The Hohenzollern dynasty – one of the oldest in Europe – reigned over a volatile empire, intoxicated by the most modern ideas./.../

Daniel Lopez is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine and an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, with the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. He is the author of Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (2019). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

4,200 words

Edited by Sam Dresser