The sociology of individuality and the history of urban society

Moritz Föllmer

doi:10.1017/s0963926819000877

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, non-humans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

Highlights

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel proposed an analysis of how individuality and the urban condition are intertwined in modern times
The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, nonhumans such as material objects, animals and natural elements
In his famous article ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, he argued that the big city enabled an unprecedented degree of personal freedom by providing an anonymous environment that freed individuals from social control

Summary

Cultural preferences and fluid spaces

At sites of social and cultural life, communities, classes and crowds encounter each other and are sustained or constituted in the first place. Lahire argues that Bourdieu’s class-based interpretation of cultural consumption is less apt for the 1960s and 1970s, when he conducted his research, but overlooked the fact that dissonant profiles already existed, than for the more rigidly structured, pre-mass-media society of the late nineteenth century.23 At other points, he seems to suggest that even in ‘periods of greater separation of genres, arts and publics’ there has always been the homo pluralis hiding in the shadow.. Italian restaurant chefs or the Jewish proprietors of costumier shops, theatres and jazz clubs demonstrated self-reliance and rose to individual affluence while maintaining their ethnic identity, a pattern that could entail starkly different political stances.30 One can take this further and view large parts of European cities as sites of individual boundary-crossing. Demands for better street lighting show how this claim translated into new expectations of municipal authorities. It is to the relationship between the sociology of individuality and the history of urban governance that we turn

Political expectations and subjective liberations

Conclusion