Why did Thomas love this book?
Even if you’re not a professional academic or a tuition-paying student, sometimes it’s worth making the effort to read a book that is genuinely challenging without being merely frustrating.
Mele’s proficiency in Italian, German, English, and French, along with his erudition in 19th and early 20th-century philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, are abundantly on display here. And yet he guides us through the fascinating labyrinth of the massive works of these cutting-edge thinkers of "the pre-history of postmodernity" with ease and without ever overwhelming us.
You’ll leave this book wanting to read everything Simmel or Benjamin ever wrote or at least to return to the dazzling passages Mele quotes from and comments on.
1 author picked City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This book reconstructs and compares the social theories of modernity of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, two classic thinkers in German social thought. The author focuses on five main topics: the historical-sociological method through which they investigate modernity; how are the concepts of history and society possible; the consequences of modern metropolis on the construction of individual subjectivity; the aestheticization of everyday life caused by the expansion of commodity culture; and the female culture as a counter-power to the domination of masculine objective culture. In the decades since Simmel and Benjamin, urban reality has undergone profound changes and we may…