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Modernity and Urban History

Steve Duncan

History 202 B
Professor Dana Simmons
March 22, 2010
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INTRODUCTION

Modernity has been and is a richly productive conceptual field for urban
historians, as can be seen in the widely-cited works of scholars like David Harvey,
Schorske, Spector, Benjamin, Marcus, and others. These works examine such disparate
facets of human and urban experience as the geographies of capitol and economic
relations (Harvey); culture and arts as expressed in the arenas that Jurgen Habermas,
speaking of an earlier era, called the “literary sphere” and the “public sphere”
(Schorske); literary and emotional experiences of the city and space (Spector); wide-
ranging cultural critique (Benjamin); and the built environment and domesticity
(Marcus). These fields are examples only; none of these writers limit their attention to the
particular field of inquiry mentioned above. All recognize that any one field within the
arena of urban modernity is merely one facet of the whole, and some approach one field
through another; Marcus, for example, uses literature to examine representations of
domesticity in order to gain insight into the built environment indirectly.
The concept of modernity has been tremendously useful in particular because it
has been able to open a window of intellectual insight into the particular relations
between the individual and the larger networks or entities that make up the world. This is
particularly useful for the cultural historians who have played a large role in urban
historical work as the field has grown during the second half the twentieth century and
the first decade of the twenty-first. As a recent historiographical review pointed out,
cultural historians see cities as “ideal objects via which to study ‘high culture’, popular
culture, as well as everyday culture;”1 the field has received also attention from historians
“who want to avoid the problems and limitations of national historiographies.” The
conceptual field of modernity, with its ability to give insight into issues of identity
formation, cultural representation, and the complex inter-relationships between the
individual and society, is well-suited for both of these sorts of historical projects.
European modernity, moreover, has long been conceptualized as being intimately linked
to the major European metropolises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; this

1
Klautke, Egbert. “Urban History And Modernity In Central Europe.” The Historical Journal, 53, 2010: 177-195
(doi:10.1017/S0018246X09990409), 1
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can be seen, for example, in Georg Simmel’s suggestion that it was the urban experience
itself that led to the development of rationality, intellectualism, and capitalism. For both
of these reasons, the conceptual package of modernity has rightfully been seen as an
appropriate tool for urban historians, especially those studying modern European history.
As with all approaches, it is possible to use modernity badly, and this paper will
demonstrate some possible weaknesses in approach—and because it is a complex set of
concepts, it is perhaps all too easy to use modernity badly. However, in general, the
concepts provide a very valuable set of approaches, and the work discussed here also
demonstrates that.

Three foundational writers—Simmel, Baudelaire, and Benjamin—have served to

articulate the basic ideas behind the most useful concepts of modernity for urban
historians. An examination of these writers will help to explicate the tradition of
conceptual modernity as it has been used by more recent scholars. Georg Simmel
succinctly articulates the three core elements of urban modernity with an intellectual
approach, and a brief examination of Baudelaire and Benjamin help unpack these ideas.
The issues can then be applied to five major works from recent decades to help
understand how the conceptual package of modernity can indeed be of tremendous utility
to historians working today, as long as the historical project is undertaken with a high
degree of intellectual rigor, an attention to specificity and particularity in research and
analysis, a recognition of the need to accept pluralistic perspectives within the conceptual
framework, and an attention to the three central and interrelated concepts of urban
modernity, which are introduced below through Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and
Mental Life.”

SIMMEL

Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” articulate the core
concepts of modernity, as it is played out within the urban experience, that have been
usefully applied by urban historians ever since. The three central conceptual elements he
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describes are all dynamic processes, all interrelated to each other and, in his view,
fundamentally integral to the experience of the “metropolis.”
He sees the first of these as the foundation for the rest: “the deepest problems of
modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and
individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society.” This is the process
of individuation, or resistance to being “swallowed up in the social-technological
mechanism” of the city.2 This is not a direct conflict between two self-interested entities;
the complex aspect of the situation is that the individual who is struggling against the
“sovereign powers of society” is also a member of and participant in that society. The
problem for the individual will ultimately be not that modern life is anti-individual but
that it is extra-individual, which is most easily seen in commoditization and
industrialization processes. “[T]he success of the growing division of labour,” Simmel
warns later in the essay, “requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of
achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall
into neglect.”3
With this initial paradigm, therefore, Simmel already asserts the necessity for an
analytical framework that accepts a simultenaity of differently-scaled perspectives,
recognizing, for example, both the motivations of the individual worker as well as the
motivations of the larger class of workers as a collective group, as well as the areas in
which these interests might overlap or conflict. Attempting to understand the historical
experience of those who live within modernity “will require the investigation of the
relationship which such a social structure promotes between the individual aspects of life
and those which transcend the existence of single individuals.”4
Modernity itself, for Simmel, is essentially an epiphenomenon of the urban
experience, and this leads to the second foundational process or concept in his
articulation of urban modernity: it is experienced as a situation of crisis or overload. For
historians, this can actually be a useful way of judging when modernity is effectively
applied to a particular moment in urban history; each of the scholars discussed below, in

2
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Edited
and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971), 11
3
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 18
4
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 11
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fact, will structure the context of their argument so as to address themselves to just such a
moment of crisis. (I call this “a situation of crisis or overload;” in point of fact, the static
situation is somewhat irrelevant, and doesn’t really exist outside of the individual who is
experiencing it; it is really dynamic response of the individual to the crisis is the
important reality.)
For Simmel, it is in this individual response to the sensory overload of city life
that rationality is formed, serving as a mental screen or a “protection of the inner life
against the domination of the metropolis.”5 Experience that would overwhelm if
experienced at a direct emotional level is thus removed “to a sphere of mental activity
which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality.” 6
This intellectual distancing and subsequent quantitative assessment provides the
basis for all forms of representation, the third and final core process examined by
historians of urban modernity or modern urbanity. This intellectual removal eventually
allows the urban resident to assign quantitative assessments of value rather than make
emotional or qualitative judgments of the unique qualities of a thing. Thus is created not
only rationalism but also the basis for a money economy. Though clearly a celebrator of
cities and modernity (he asserts, for example, that “the city dweller who is placed in a
small town feels a type of narrowness which is very familiar” and that “the modern
person could not even breathe” under the conditions of antiquity), Simmel nonetheless
expresses the individual’s deeply ambiguous relationship with modernity and money
economies when he explains that money functions as a “common denominator” that
“hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their
uniqueness…in a way which is beyond repair.”7
This is not unique to money relations, but is a part of all aspects of modernity’s
totalizing influences. Pointing to the temporal structuring of modern industrial and
economic relations, for example, Simmel again suggests that “it is…the conditions of the
metropolis which are cause as well as effect for this essential characteristic,” inasmuch as
interactions are so “manifold and complex” for the modern urbanite that the only solution
is a “fixed framework of time which transcends all subjective elements.” Although this

5
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 12
6
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 12
7
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 14, 16
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framework of time is used by individuals to save themselves from overload, nonetheless

it also becomes a hegemonic structure that is ultimately anti-individuation, and thus
opposed to “those lives which are autonomous and characterized by these vital
impulses.”8

BAUDELAIRE & BENJAMIN

The simplest form of representation is simple categorization, and an early

example of this in the modern urban world were the Physiologies of nineteenth-century
Paris, which, as Benjamin puts it, “assured people that everyone could—unencumbered
by any factual knowledge—make out the profession, character, background, and lifestyle
of passers-by.”9 Simmel hints at the ways that self-representation is more complex than
these early physiologies suggest in his essay Money in Modern Culture when he
discusses style and taste as ways of offering, even at brief encounter, a distanced and
chosen view of oneself to the outside world. In a broader sense, however, the very act of
filtering experience through rationality is a form of representation, and in this sense
Simmel’s analysis of the psychology of the modern metropolis resident opened the door
to all forms of representation that are inherent in our understanding of the city in
modernity.
As modern period this typological approach was applied not just by flâneurs and
other casual members of the metropolitan constituency, but in a broader sense also by
social scientists and social observers of all kinds, and in particular by urban historians. In
the pre-modern period, for example, histories of cities were not unusual, but “to write an
urban history was an act of local piety and an expression of identity.” The typological
approach, however, “represented an important step in moving beyond studies of
particular places” in “pursuit of the general pattern rather than the particular
experience.”10

8
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 13
9
Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Ed. by Michael Jennings, translated by
Howard Eiland. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 70
10
“Making History: Urban History” by Dr. Rosemary Sweet, Director of the Centre for Urban History at Leicester,
online at http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/urban_history.html
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This distinction between the “particular” and the “general” is a tremendously

important one, though inevitably somewhat ambiguous. In some cases it is very easy to
see a distinction; between the unique distinctiveness of autobiography, for example, as
opposed to statistically-based social science forms of history. Ambiguity creeps in,
however, around terms like “collective” or “plural” versus “universal.” Victor Hugo,
Walter Banjamin notes, “was the first great writer whose works have collective titles:
Les Miserables….To him the crowd meant, almost in the ancient sense, the crowd of his
constituents…Hugo was, in a word, no flâneur.” Or “the crowd really is a spectacle of
nature,” or an expression of the spirit world.”11 For Simmel, on the other hand, the
definite pronoun he uses talking about “the individual” within the metropolis is clearly
referring to the universal experience of a single member of a homogeneous (at least in
this particular quality) class of individuals.
Like Hugo, Charles Baudelaire stood at the edge of modernity; he was
characterized by Benjamin as “the writer of modern life.” However, his perspective was
quite different from Hugo and different as well from, for example, the class-based
perspective of Engels, who could look at a London slum crowd and see only that “these
Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their inhuman nature, in
order to bring about all the marvel of civilization that crowd their city.”12 But for
Baudelaire, there was clearly enjoyment of the crowd, though this enjoyment, as
Benjamin puts it, came “not only from the viewpoint of a person but also from that of a
commodity.” Baudelaire can be intoxicated by the crowd without being blinded to the
“horrible social reality.”13 At the same time, the “urban masses” for Baudelaire are not
like Hugo’s apotheosized Parisian spirit; while providing the shock and sensory overload
that Simmel articulates, they nonetheless “do not stand for classes or any sort of
collective; rather they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people on
the street.”14
Baudelaire has “the gaze of the flâneur,” says Benjamin, and explains that “the
flâneur still stands on the threshold—of the metropolis as of the middle class;” moreover,

11
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 92, 95
12
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 88 (Quote by Engels, from 1848)
13
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 88, 89
14
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 180
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“in the flâneur, the intellegentsia sets foot in the marketplace—ostensibly to look around,
but in truth to find a buyer.” 15 It is a characteristic of modernity that the individual is
subsumed into the capitalist system and becomes simultaneously a consumer, a producer
or an objectified component of production processes, and also a product; thus becoming
what for both Baudelaire and Benjamin is a deeply ambiguous figure, one who is “seller
and sold in one,” implying a prostitute.16 For Baudelaire, whose natively proto-
modernistic outlook included a deep conviction in the physiognomic differentiation
between social classes and a self-definition built upon his own taken-for-granted role as a
privileged consumer, this implication of prostitution would hardly be a welcome
metaphor; and yet his writing shows a constant awareness of it. No only was he clearly
self-conscious of his privilege and even tongue-in-cheek about his self-consciousness of
it—as when he declares that a dandy has absolutely no need of money; he would be quite
happy to live on credit—but he was also clearly conscious his very attempts to
individuate himself within the world of urban modernity (through his poetry, for
example) also involved presenting himself as a commodity, and this reinforcing the
homogenizing processes of that modernity.
This dialectic is both evident in the tone and in the content of Baudelaire’s
writing. Speaking of what would later be articulated by Simmel as the need to individuate
against the totality, he writes that heroic dandys “all represent the best element in human
pride—that need, which nowadays is too uncommon, to combat and destroy triviality.” In
this description of dandyism, many levels of meaning and tone are conveyed. Dandyism,
he reports, “arises especially in periods of transition,” something that could also be said
of modernity itself; and he complains that the rising tide of democracy, like Simmel’s
ocean of money, is “leveling everything” and drowning these heroes. However, at the
same time, “the characteristic beauty of the dandy consists, above all, in his air of
reserve, which in turn, arises from his unshakable resolve not to feel any emotion.”17
These many levels of consciousness are present in his writing. They express, in
compact form, the almost inarticulable facts of modernity: that there is no end to the

15
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 40
16
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 41
17
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” in My Heart Laid Bare, and Other Prose Writings (New York:
Vanguard Press, 1951), 54-58
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search for order and meaning; there is perhaps not even any such thing as a static order or
meaning. Understanding the constantly-changing urban environment through formal
dividing and categorizing can have no final, ultimate end until we have a separate
category for each individual—and even then, each moment and each fraction of a
moment produces a new category, cleaving into infinities.
Though this task is ultimately futile when structured as an attempt to pin down a
static “present moment” and dissect it, however, Baudelaire quite eloquently argues in
“The Painter of Modern Life” that it is nonetheless a worthwhile pursuit that can have
excellent results even without that final achievement of absolute perfection. First, he
suggests, the ordering mind itself need not be too concerned with categorization; too
formal a concern with complexity only occludes, rather than clarifies. In an encomium to
his friend the painter, he writes of a particular painting:
All the stuffs with which memory is encumbered are classified and
arranged in order, are harmonized and subjected to that compulsory
formalization which results from a childish perceptiveness – that is to say,
a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its simplicity!18
Pre-voicing Simmel, he asserts that “every sublime thought is accompanied by a nervous
shock, of greater or less violence, which reaches even the brain,” suggesting that the artist
is like a “child” whose buffering, rational mind, according to the Simmelian model, has
not yet had a chance to develop.19
This allows the artist to directly experience what Baudelaire labels modernity: the
“poetry within history” or the “eternal from the ephemeral.”20 His call is for the
painter—or the poet, or the historian—to focus on the particular, and from the particular
find the universal and eternal. It is when his friend Mr. G. has focused on the “rough
edges of life” that he has been able to find “in the ephemeral and filleting beauty of
present-day life, the stamp of what, by the reader’s leave, we have called modernity.
Often strange, violent, and extravagant, he has known how to concentrate…the wine of
life.”21

18
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life, 36
19
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life, 32; passage referenced in Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 24, in
introduction by Michael Jennings.
20
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life, 37
21
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life, 72
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There are two particularly important issues that this foundational work from
Baudelaire illustrates in regard to the urban historians of modernity that have followed
him, and particularly to the culturally-oriented historians of urban modernity discussed
here.
The first is the issue of particularity and uniqueness. As suggested above, the
development of modernity and social science saw a progression away from the pure study
of particular places, in pursuit of general patterns rather then in the assumption of
uniqueness. Good urban histories of modernity, however, almost invariably DO celebrate
uniqueness. David Harvey’s Paris, for example, is cast as the “capital of modernity;” the
same city is named by Benjamin as “capital of the nineteenth century.” Fin-de-Siecle
Prague is called “exceptional” by Spector. Each city, quite reasonably, must be given the
focus it deserves for its unique and exceptional history in order to be understood
correctly, and this assertion of particularity can possibly be true for each sub-set of the
city down to the level of the individual resident. (Although it is only true to the extent
that such a degree of specificity provides some degree of valuable information.)
Statistical data and social-science methodology are quite valuable and even vital tools,
therefore, but they are valuable tools as representational structures—not as scientific
datasets that can be quantitatively compared between one city and another. Although
modernity provides the conceptual field upon which cultural urban histories can be
structured, cities themselves are entities that are not within the homogenizing totality of
modernity. (In fact, suggest one critic of Benjamin’s urban theory, because they are
unique, “cities cannot be incorporated easily into [Benjamin’s] account of mechanical
reproducibility, and this fact explains his fascination for their distinct properties and
qualities.”22)
As contradictory as this sounds, in fact it is entirely prefigured by both
Baudelaire’s narrative characters as well as Benjamin’s flanéur; in all cases, these are
individual entities that are simultaneous within modernity and participating in it to an
extent, ambivalent about it, outside of it and observing it, and sometimes even actively

22
Savage, Mike (2000). “Walter Benjamin's Urban Thought: A Critical Analysis” in Crang, Mike and Nigel Thrift,
Eds. Thinking Space. (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 47
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fighting it as well—and all of this, the conflict and its resolution included, are all within
the conceptual field called modernity.
Second, as Simmel pointed out, within the metropolis it is necessary for the
historian or analyst to pay attention to the individuating actions of the individuals within
the city. However, as suggested by the fact that in Baudelaire’s version of the city we see
only the upper-class of society and the laboring classes are dismissed as faceless
categories, it is only a small sector of the population that has the opportunity for
individuating action. Describing his friend’s paintings in The Painter of Modern Life, he
tells us:
The servants are stiff and perpendicular, motionless and all alike —
always the same unrelieved and monotonous effigies of servitude; their
characteristic feature is to have no characteristic feature.23
This conclusion—essentially, that the great mass of men and women will
necessarily be occluded from any histories uses the precepts of traditional
modernity—seems inescapable. However, while deeply limiting, this does not in any way
invalidate the utility of the approach. On the contrary, it makes the tool more appropriate
to know more clearly where and when it should be applied.

SCHORSKE & SEIGEL

The tradition of modernity within the study of urban history, as expressed by

Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin, and carried forth by urban historians since, suggests
that it can be a useful set of concepts to apply when these following conditions are true
about the subject: first, that the context is one of crisis or change; second, that the task
involves examining the drive for individuation against the totalizing forces of modern
society, played out in the domain of a city; and third, that the historian recognizes the
very ambiguous dynamic between historical “realities” of lived experience and the
representations that have been used to understand those experiences over time.

23
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life, 71
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This third condition is often interrelated to the first two because in many cases the
crisis or change at hand can actually be primarily a crisis of identity or a period of change
in the nature of representation, rather than any more concretely identifiable change.
Moreover, the individuating actions that are involved in the second condition can also
take place in a representational sphere as well as a spatial, political, or economic sphere.
Both Carl Schorske in Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture and Jerrold Seigel in
Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life look at periods
of crisis and change in which the drive for individuation for many of their primary
subjects was expressed through art and other cultural products that exist as
representational forms, and both authors recognize the importance of such representations
to both articulate and influence lived realities.
Both writers also consciously use the traditional tools of conceptual modernity as
an historical analytical construct. In both cases they also recognize that modernity was set
of native categories that was used contemporaneously by those who lived through the
periods to self-consciously understand their own experience,
However, the two works are also very different in essential aspects such as the
time period addressed and the overall categorical modeling applied to the individual
subjects. Schorske’s book focuses on the fin-de-siecle, or a narrow historical moment
defined around a transitional instant that is at its center or end point; the French term
implies a compression of time as the end time draws near (and perhaps a multiplication of
what Simmel calls differentiation and emotional overload, or what Baudelaire calls
sublime experience). Schorske goes into his task, as he explains in his introduction, with
a conscious recognition of disunity and multiplicity of focus. Recognizing the intellectual
models provided by Simmel and Benjamin and the emotional truths provided by
Baudelaire, his work is presented as a set of pluralities existing together within the
temporal and academic space of the particular book, with each life or cultural artifact
given space to oppose, interact, and even self-consciously reflect upon its own role within
the totality. Schorske uses modernity as a vigorously-applied and tightly constructed
conceptual model, and his book has rightly become a model for cultural urban historians
since.
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Seigel’s book, however, while providing such excellent historical scholarship that
it is impossible to discount its value, does not apply intellectual rigor to its conceptual
modeling in the same way. Seigel’s book is clearly good history writing; it also does
indeed explain the Bohemian Parisian experience in terms of modernity. However, it is
true that it fails to say anything particularly interesting vis-á-vis modernity and Bohemian
Paris. In its weaknesses, it points to the ways in which modernity, when poorly applied,
becomes nothing more than a diffuse and vague idea that actually cuts off lines of inquiry
instead of opening them up. When that happens, modernity is ultimately useless for
developing answers to any real historical questions; it becomes instead a reason not to
answer, comparable, for example, to the paradigm of German history’s exceptionalism,
which becomes an excuse for the inexplicability of the Holocaust by historians.

In both of these books, Schorske and Seigel are looking at particular times of
crisis or change. In Vienna, Schorske tells us, there were “acutely felt tremors of social
and political disintegration.”24 This was a crisis of political power, identity, and of
historicism and aesthetism, and “in one professional academic field after another, the
cord of consciousneness that linked the present pursuits of each to its past concerns was
either cut or fraying.”25 He shows specific examples of crises of socio-historical
continuity from one generation to another; the same sort of particularity will be also seen
in later vigorous applications of modernity to urban history, such as David Harvey’s
example of fathers in Paris unsure if they would be able to provide pass on homes to their
heirs.
Rather more vaguely, Seigel explains that in Paris there “was a dilemma about the
nature of modern individuality,” ultimately part of a set of “fundamental changes brought
by the French Revolution and amplified by economic transformation.”26 His own
dilemma is that he ultimately cannot be more specific; with his overall field of focus
stretching across a century, there is simply too much going on. In taking this perspective,
it seems likely that he is falling into an easy trap for any historian, which is to see history
AS history. At the time, for any individual, it is simply lived experience, and the attempts

24
Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. (New York: Knopf, 1979), xviii
25
Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Vienna, xx
26
Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 9
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at any moment to classify lived experience (i.e. to see oneself as Bohemian, for example)
are simply part of a vast spread of such momentary self-classifications.27 To begin
speaking of “the nature of individuality” it is necessary to selectively focus on a narrow-
enough group such that a statement about the group as a whole can make sense.
In fact, any categorical statement made about a time or a group must be narrow
and specific enough to say something usefully descriptive or analytical. Echoing
Baudelaire’s message that the universal is found through the particular, Schorske warns
specifically:
What the historian must now abjure, and nowhere more so than in
confronting the problem of modernity, is the positing in advance of an
abstract categorical common denominator… Where such an intuitive
discernment of unities once served, we must now be willing to undertake
the empirical pursuit of pluralities as a precondition to finding unitary
patterns in culture.28
Schorske’s own mission, he explains, will be to “reconstruct the course of change
in the sperate branches of cultural production according to their own modes” so as to
better understand the “shared concerns” and the “shared ways of confronting experience”
that “bind men together as culture-makers in a common social and temporal space.”29
Seigel however falls into the trap that Schorske warns against. From the
beginning, he assumes the a priori existence of not only a class called Bohemians, but
even a sociocultural space called Bohemia. He declares that it was a place that drew
together “artists, the young, shady but inventive characters” who shared “with the gypsies
whose name they bore—a marginal existence based on the refusal or inability to take on a
stable and limited social identity.”30 Seigel’s implication here is both that participation in
Bohemia was a conscious choice, and that Bohemia itself was monolithic (through he
qualifies this second aspect later in numerous ways over the course of his history), with

27
This is why Baudelaire’s edgy stance of being “within himself and beside himself at the same time,” “sounding the
depths of psychic mysteries,” is so useful to theorists of modernity; especially as he has been interpreted by Benjamin
and Berman, the poet provides a way to reference these infinities of individual subjectivities, without getting bogged
down in them. (As opposed, for example, to the intensive and overwhelming subjectivity of the feuilleton writer that
Schorske describes, page 9; or the assumed objectivity of physiologist.)
28
Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Vienna, xxii
29
Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Vienna, xxii
30
Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 11
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all of its participants sharing to some degree or another the quality of being Bohomian. At
the same time, however, he has already, by accepting the connotations of the term
“gypsy” as carrying connotations for the label “Bohemian” as well, applied pre-
determined judgments about the qualities of those he labels as Bohemians.
And yet at the same time he defines the concept “Bohemian” as the opposing pole
of a binary construct, the other half of which is bourgeois; they two terms “were—and
are—parts of a single field; they imply, require, and attract each other.”31 But
“bourgeois” itself is a constructed concept, an “abstract categorical common
denominator.” As Seigel himself shows in his introduction, the bourgeois developed
during the time to which his study refers, and the term was applied to was clearly a
pluralistic and disunited set. Its binary was also not necessarily the sort of liminal
urbanite represented by the bohemian; it was also, for example, Simmel’s small-town
resident, driven by habit and emotion, who was the predecessor to his intellectualized
urbanite.
This is not to say that “Bohemian” or “Bohomia” are meaningless terms. If
nothing else they were native terms, useful to our understanding of how the society
understood itself contemporaneously, as Seigel shows us in quoting Félix Pyat’s 1834
account in which he explains that certain young people are dressing themselves in
“outlandish costumes,” calling themselves artists to disguise their criminality, or using it
as a way to distinguish themselves from society when they actually have nothing
distinguishing. The result is that they come across as “…alien and bizarre…outside the
law, beyond the reaches of society. They are the Bohemians of today.”32
Within a representational space, therefore, Bohemians clearly did exist, as
Parisian Bohomia itself soon would. Artists and others also clearly existed who self-
identified as Bohemians—like Jules Vallés, of the Paris Commune, or Arthur
Rimbaud—as well as those who were famously conflicted about considering themselves
Bohemians, but who are inextricably linked with Bohemia by history, like
Baudelaire—as well as those who never self-identified as such but are still considered to
have been Bohemians, as in the case of Alfred Jarry. Nonetheless, the following passage

31
Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 5
32
Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 17
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 16 of 30

from Simmel explains both why, although “Bohemians” or “Bohemia” clearly DID exist
within the representational discourse about Parisian modernity, we should still be
skeptical of accepting them—as Seigel does—as an a priori “real” category. Modern life,
Simmel says:
…is composed more and more of [the] impersonal cultural elements and
existing goods and values which seek to suppress peculiar personal
interests and incomparabilities. As a result, in order that this most personal
element be saved, extremities and peculiarities and individualizations must
be produced and they must be over-exaggerated merely to be brought into
the awareness even of the individual himself.
[N.B.: thus the costumes, outlandish behavior noted by Pyat, etc.]
…The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective
culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most
extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the
metropolis. But it is also the explanation of why indeed they are so
passionately loved in the metropolis and indeed appear to its residents as
the saviors of their unsatisfied yearnings.
It is exactly because they appear as “the saviors of [the citizens] unsatisfied
yearnings” that categorical creations of “extreme individualism” such as the Bohemians
do indeed take on such a high degree of vitality within representational spheres and such
a seemingly “real” and sustained existence. However, it must be remembered that the
sources Seigel uses are indeed representations, either produced by the hegemonic culture
that wanted to invent Bohemians as “saviours of their unsatisfied yearnings,” or by
certain of the participants themselves. These representation might or might not have
something to do with “real” history; as Seigel points out, there is no way to measure
Bohemia; it “cannot be charted, graphed, and counted, because it was never wholly an
objective condition.”33 However, representations of it, without any clear connection to
reality, are myth-making; and while myth-making is an important cultural work, it is very
different from concrete history.

33
Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 12
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 17 of 30

With this background on the assumptive categorizations underlying Seigel’s

conceptual structures, it is possible as well to question the applicability of some of what
he does say about Bohemia’s relation to “real” history. He suggests, for example, that “in
fact there was a Bohemian side to the Commune [of 1871],” and that, as suggested by
Elme-Marie Caro’s 1871 article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the politics of Bohemia
over the prior years had helped lead to the death and destruction of that year. However,
the hegemonic nature of the category “Bohemian” within the public discourse once again
makes it difficult or impossible to discern if the category is valid. Once that category is
imposed, either by contemporaries or by historians, upon a particular set of people that
includes Communard activists, then of course there will be a Communard aspect to the
Bohemians; but that does not in fact mean that we lean from that any actual new details
about the processes or dynamics that led to either the Paris Commune, or to the art and
literature produced by those who Seigel classifies as first and foremost Bohemians—but
who actually remain important figures in history because of their creation of
commoditized art and literature products.
By way of very brief comparison, Schorske’s treatment of Freud is particularly
interesting in part because it takes place, seemingly, almost entirely in Freud’s own head
and within a short time period of his career. Certainly it would seem that the doctor’s
strange dreams could not be any more relevant to “real” history than Seigel’s poets. In
fact, though, Seigel’s poets were very relevant to history, and it is in his treatment of
them that he succeeds; only his categorization of them is suspect. Schorske, however,
treats Freud entirely as an individual, acting within a broader context of an urban and
social totality. Schorske is willing to accept pluralism and even disunity and
fragmentation, and this allows him to achieve the true benefits of applying the conceptual
package of modernity as he examines Freud’s struggle for individuation against and
within society.
Modernity provides the field for Schorske to understand both the conflict and its
resolution, just as it provided Freud a space in which to act out the conflict and the final
resolution. Individuation came, in the end, not by Freud positing himself as oppositional
to a social totality or antagonistic to it in the sense of the classic Bohemian mode; rather,
he expressed himself as archetype: “he gave this struggle, both outer and inner, its fullest,
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 18 of 30

most personal statement — and at the same time overcame it by devising an epoch-
making interpretation of human experience in which politics could be reduced to an
epiphenomenal manifestation of psychic forces.”34
In passing, because so many urban histories of modernity are, like Schorske’s or
Seigel’s work, primarily cultural histories, it might be worthwhile to note a contrast
between Schorske’s work and that of a scholar with more material concerns in regard to
Vienna. A recent historiography paper by Egbert Klautke (“Urban History And
Modernity In Central Europe,” 2010) referenced one of these, a history of WWI Vienna
by Maureen Healy. Healy took issue with the “implicit elitism” of Schorske’s approach,
noting that “Vienna was a city of two million residents” at the fin-de-siecle, of whom
“the vast majority” did not consume the literature, art, or scholarship that is Schorske’s
primary focus. Instead of culture, Healy’s study focuses on wartime staples like food in
order to give insight into a numerically more significant portion of the population.
However, even though Healy’s study approaches the city from the opposite direction as
Schorske’s, she too uses many of the same concepts of modernity to make her case. She
argues, for example, that propaganda and information were “produced, traded, and
regulated like a commodity,” and analyzes the important roles of mass media, its
manipulation by the state, and the eventual collapse of normal social relations as internal
factors in the collapse of the Habsburg empire.35 The tools of modernity, therefore, can
be widely applied to concrete facts of life as well as identity categories; as a discussion of
Harvey’s work below will also show, modernity can also be effectively applied over a
long as with any sort of intellectual methodology, however, they are useful only when
used carefully and with precision.

34
Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Vienna, 183
35
Healy, Maureen. Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Total War and Everyday Life in World War I.
(Cambridge, 2004.) P. 21, 124, 209-210. (Referenced in Klautke, Egbert. “Urban History And Modernity In Central
Europe.” The Historical Journal, 53, 2010: 177-195 [doi:10.1017/S0018246X09990409])
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 19 of 30

SPECTOR

Like many other writers who use modernity effectively in urban cultural histories,
Scott Spector draws our attention to “a moment that can only be described as
exceptional.” The uniqueness of this moment in Prague, he points out, “were even more
idiosyncratic for the small demographic groups that has been [his] focus: the German-
speaking Jews of Franz Kafka’s generation.” Aware of the apparent contradiction
between the transient exceptionality of this focus and the attempted search for underlying
meaning that is the mission of the historian of modernity, he goes on to say that he feels
“compelled to address the question of why an example so unexemplary might be
particularly useful to the general project of the study of European modernity.”36
His answer to this question has to do with identity and “territorial ideology.” He is
elucidating a moment of crisis—or, in point of fact, the reactions to the crisis—where the
writers he discusses “felt themselves to have been in between subject positions or
‘identities.’”37 In Prague, he says, “[Arjun] Appadurai’s description of crisis and reaction
is startlingly apt;” that is, national identity had broken down essentially because of a lack
of ethnohistorical homogeneity with the constructed entity of the nation.38 The unique
and fascinating process of reaction to this identity-crisis that Spector reveals is that the
writers of the “Prague circle” were able to—or were forced to—map out their terrain of
cultural identity onto territorial and linguistic space.
At this moment of transition, the writers of the Prague circle were self-
consciously caught in the space between identities, but were also trapped in these spaces
as “closed” rather than “open” identities. In this framework the “constructedness of
selves was not [just] intuited, but experienced in a literal sense.”39 This has echoes of
Benjamin’s exegesis of Baudelaire, in which the critic sees the poet as being self-
consciously aware of his own identity within modernity even as he rails against it.
Spector also clearly echoes Baudelaire’s reflections in The Painter of Modern Life when
he explains that it is specifically through focusing on the “irreproducible particularity of

36
Spector, Scott. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siécle.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000), ix
37
Spector, Prague Territories, x
38
Spector, Prague Territories, 31
39
Spector, Prague Territories, x
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 20 of 30

the moment” that the deeper meaning can be understood. “Modernity is that which is
ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon the occasion,” and the goal of the historian, as of
Baudelaire’s painter, is to “extract the eternal form the ephemeral.”40
Spector explains in is introduction that it was important for him to find a time and
place in which the fields of identity under question were not open, as they were “at other
critical point of modernity.”41 It seems that this distinction between closed and open
spaces of identity, which Spector stresses, is one of the fundamental differences between
a rigorous and useful application of modernity to cultural urban history, as shown here, as
opposed to the diffuse and less-valuable application of the conceptual package that Seigel
demonstrates. One lesson of Parisian Bohemia is that, as Seigel demonstrates, for many
of the Bohemians, identity was indeed very fluid and open. A young man from a good
family might choose to be “an artist” in Parisian Bohemia, and as such spend a few years
(or a few decades— comme le temps passe vite!) drinking, taking drugs, and sleeping in
Parisian parks, cheap hotels, and friend’s apartments, while always having the option of
reconstructing his identity on some new terrain. It was a different situation, clearly, for
Prague’s Jewish literati in the real Bohemia, who were finding themselves ghettoized
between Czech nationalism and German racism.
At the same time, as in all useful discussions of modernity, Spector’s case deals
not with a static situation but with a dynamic process, and he explains how it was that the
historical context in Prague influenced the ways that the Prague circle could and did
develop their ideas of identities and territories:
The generation of Franz Kafka, Felix Weltsch, Egon Erwin Kisch, and
Max Brod grew into an awareness of the dilemma of culture and nation in
Prague that the generations before them had been able to repress… in
other words, the specific pathology of their very particular condition in
this time and place put them in a privileged position vis-á-vis a set of
issues at the center of the Modern.42

40
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 37.
41
Spector, Prague Territories, x
42
Spector, Prague Territories, 67
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 21 of 30

This awareness and position gave them the tools to think about “the nature of their crisis
and the means of its resolution,” and when they did, Spector asserts, “it seemed to them
that they were thinking about language.”43
At first glance, this topic—modern writers thinking about identity and
language—sounds like comparative literature than urban history. Like studies of myth-
making, comparative literature is fascinating cultural analysis, but as the name implies it
tends towards a focus on representational realms over lived experience. Spector’s
approach, however, takes his work into far more solid and “real” urban-historical territory
with his excellent, deeply detailed, and highly convincing analysis of how “in Kafka's
Prague, ‘language’ and ‘territory’ had come to be mutually inextricable.”44
This issue was mapped out throughout Bohemia, Spector shows, and in its
simplest form, he demonstrates that “linguistic territory” could be seen by the existence
of a “linguistic border” between the “the predominantly German-speaking parts of
Bohemia and all the rest.”45 In its more complex (and more urban) expressions, Spector
explains that for Bergmann, “modern Hebrew represented the inscription of a new and
living Jewish space for a revived Jewish people” and that “in Prague, the creation of a
new language cleared a political space, inscribed a new territory.”46
Applying language so clearly and precisely to spatial and political territory,
Spector shows the value of his work both as cultural history and as real-world urban
history. Cultural history in the realm of comparative literature is fascinating, but working
purely within a representational system leaves open the question of whether or not—or
how directly—that representational system offers genuine insight into real-world
history.47
By clearly connecting representations and realities, however, Spector uses
modernity for exactly the benefits that the conceptual model, as inherited from
Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin, offers. In his work the model provides ways to

43
Spector, Prague Territories, 67
44
Spector, Prague Territories, 70
45
Spector, Prague Territories, 73
46
Spector, Prague Territories, 84
47
Of course all language is a representation system, and following this question leads down a rabbit-hole even more
quickly than following the question of modernity and post-modernity, but at a pragmatic level I will assume here a
distinction between social-science approaches as being essentially linked directly to the real-world, as opposed to
fiction, literature, and popular entertainments as being representations that are one step further removed.
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 22 of 30

understand how individuals acted both as participants in and as antagonists to the

totalities of their time. It lets him, as well as the subjects he writes about, pursue an
ordered understanding of knowledge and a structured comprehension of identity, even
while understanding that no static ordering or static identity might exist; the moments of
history and the natures of culturally identity are dynamically re-written with each
moment.
In particular, Spector’s willingness to read linguistic representations as ways of
understanding how individual human subjects both experienced (and tried to re-recreate
through representation) their own subjective experience of their identities and lived
history gives the advantage of offering a sort of insight into a multiplicity of simultaneous
subjective perspectives on a particular moment or process, while also letting the historian
or reader remain self-conscious of our own role as an observer and analyst. Spector
describes the work of the Prague circle as fitting into Benjamin’s concept of the dialectic
image; ultimately Spector’s work, too, is also a static expression of motion and of
dynamic history, and a successful attempt to find long-term and widely-applicable
meaning in a transient moment of a particular city’s history.

HARVEY & MARCUS

An advantage of modernity is its flexibility of scope although, as Frederick

Cooper points out in respect to post-colonial studies, “if modernity is everything and
everything is modernity, is the concept helping us to distinguish anything from anything
else?”48 The answer is often still yes, because we can continue to look for the patterns
and categories that are familiar from prior applications of the concept; we can look for
the homogenizing forces of external social realities, or the struggles of participants or
entities within societies to individuate.
As a framework for inquiry into urban history, the three elements from the
Baudelarian/Simmelian/Benjaminian tradition of modernity that I have focused on have

48
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 114
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 23 of 30

involved the related issues of crisis and change, individuation and identity, and
representation. Representation, as a general field, also includes all categorization and
quantitative assessments, including monetization and commoditization.
To a large extent, a primary field of enquiry within modernity in general has
always been the nature of the representational perceptions that underlie commoditization,
and this can be seen as a direct combination of the three elements above: at times of crisis
or overload, as Simmel showed, the overloaded individual’s response involves using
rational categorization to remove the emotional import of the crisis-inducing stimulus.
This is the core of the representational action, as the alien thing is made normal, and put
into an acceptable world-view. Physiologies and commoditization are a version of this.
Similarly, the development of belief in a relatively impermeable separation
between a public sphere and a domestic sphere—despite the fact that, as Marcus shows, it
had little basis in reality—fits equally well into the conceptual framework of modernity
(according to Simmel’s model, at least), as natural reaction to the crisis of life in a
nineteenth-century industrial metropolis experiencing explosive population growth and
severe urban working-class poverty. As both David Harvey (in Paris, Capital of
Modernity) and Sharon Marcus (in Apartment Stories) show, such a crisis was only
exacerbated severely when it collided with the vision—shared, to a large extent, by both
the bourgeois and Haussmann, at least after 1848—of Parisian urbanity as a luxurious
and plutocratic showcase of French “modernity,” or, to put it another way, their desire to
impose order, categorization, and unity onto the streets of their city. Categorization and
classification meant dichotomizations like the public/private spheres. The desire for unity
also meant fragmentation, or serial homogenization, as Harvey calls it, as separate classes
became spatially segregated and the urban working poor were even pushed beyond the
old city limits.
In addressing these and related issues in the physical development of Paris (and,
in Marcus’ case, London), both Harvey’s and Marcus’ books deal with urban modernity
at a larger scale and a higher level of concrete reality than the cultural history works
addressed previously in this paper.
The two books share some similarities, such as the use of literature to provide
representational models. Both authors clearly believe in the important power of
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 24 of 30

representational ideologies to impact the development of the city and its inhabitants.
Harvey declares, for example, that “what really clashed on the boulevards in June 1848”
was not simply the conflicting self-interests of homogeneous social or economic groups
(i.e. poor workers against rich owners), but rather “two radically different perceptions of
modernity.”49 Similarly, in suggesting that Paris developed “along the lines Haussmann
defined” for decades after Haussmann had been officially removed, Harvey suggests
(quoting Van Zanten) that the underlying cause of this was the ascendance of a “new
concept of commercial urbanism” that had become dominant during Haussmann’s
tenure.50
A core difference, however, is that Harvey’s work is based on social scientific
methodologies such as statistical models and cartographic data. He is able to very
convincingly show evidence of quantitative changes so significant as to constitute
qualitative changes in hundreds of facets Parisian life in the period from 1848-187,
supporting his argument that it was during this period that it developed from a pre-
modern to a modern city. These include things like a more than ten-fold increase in
railroad and telegraph mileage; demographic shifts that showed increasing “serial
homogeneity” of neighborhoods; and changes in the location patterns for large factories
and enterprises that showed an increase in the special clustering of similar types of
manufacturing within an overall shift from center-city to peripheral locations.
Not only does Harvey clearly explain and evidence such changes in many
different spheres and arenas, including political structures, social relations, technology,
and the built environment, but he also demonstrates with factual historical evidence that
the changes that took place were fundamentally interrelated and integral to each other. He
also, like Schorske and Spector, illuminates the universal and the general by focusing
with detail and specificity on the particular and the unique. By telling stories like
Hausmann’s seizure of buildings and land from bourgeois property owners in order to
build boulevards in the 1860s, or the rise and fall of the Pereires’ credit-oriented Crédit
Mobilier versus the financially more conservative Rothschilds, he is able to show how
these individual and particular incidents illuminated the increasing hegemony of the

49
Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. (New York City: Routledge, 2003), 85
50
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 100-101
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 25 of 30

credit-dependant capitalist economy that made it possible both for the Pereires to flourish
in the first place and for Haussmann to fund his two-point-five billion francs of municipal
development projects.51
For Harvey, literary representations of the city, such as Balzac’s novels, are useful
in understanding what paradigm shifts took place, and what continuities existed, in the
transition he sees between pre-modern and modern. Looking at how the city was seen by
some of its most perceptive contemporary observers can be helpful, he suggests, and
Balzac in particular—following Marx’s lead— “helps us identify the deep continuities
that underlay the seemingly radical break after 1848.”52 After declaring that “all kinds of
consequences followed from the debacle in 1848,” for example, including a shift to
“radically different” ways of representing the city, Harvey explains that “the difference
can also be traced in the way the city gets represented in the works of Balzac and
Flaubert.”53 For him, this sphere of literary representation sees to do two things: it helps
give illustrations and depth to the world presented by his data, and it provides insight into
conceptual frameworks that might inspire either further research or new ways of
interpreting data.

By contrast, Sharon Marcus is examining only representations, rather than looking

at historical realities or social science data in any comprehensive way. She explains in her
introduction that her “focus throughout is on discourses about apartment houses, not
apartment houses themselves,” and she runs into a fundamental weakness of using the
field of modernity as her conceptual terrain as she goes on to say “and I assume that those
discourses often produced the facts they claimed to describe.”54
While it is clearly true that discourse plays an important role in the life experience
of individual members of an urban polity, it is not as clearly assumable that public
literary discourse—or any other kind of discourse—plays such a direct role in shaping
buildings, or people’s experience of them. Marcus does point out that literary or public
discourse could influence the direction of commercial investment, such that apartment

51
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 142
52
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 17
53
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 86
54
Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 9
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 26 of 30

buildings “came to occupy an important position in a speculative Parisian real-estate

market and provided opportunities for newly rich bourgeois to invest and generate
income.” As she shows from a contemporary source on Parisian industry, this
practice—supported by continuing population growth—allowed residential construction
to become a standardized industrial commodity by mid-century.55
However, although investment in rental properties was clearly advertised,
articulated, and even perhaps stimulated through representations, it is not clear—and
Marcus fails to convincingly argue—that the representations or discourses about
domesticity or public/private delineations had any real bearing on the actual lived
experience of residents of those buildings.
In fact, Marcus points out, the dominant representations—both those that marked
contemporaneous discourses and those that have characterized historical
perspectives—have often been deeply inadequate or have run counter to the reality. She
suggests, for example, that “scholarly assumptions about domestic space as a separate
sphere have occluded more representative discourses about Paris” or that “the home was
often a masculine domain.”56 More centrally, she points out in her introduction that even
the categorical representations of the Parisian model (apartment buildings) and as being
opposed to the London model (detached homes) were in fact hollow representations for
two reasons. First, although the architectural model in London ostensibly offered a more
impermeable domestic sphere, in fact the subdivision of detached homes resulted in a
higher degree over overlap of private spheres between renters; and second, by the late
1840s, London planners had begun to press for “Parisian style” apartment buildings in
their own city, even as Paris underwent a vast shift toward interiorization, consciously
modeled on the London schema. The representational models that seemed to indicate
opposition between the two, therefore, “were part of a larger dialogue connecting
them.”57 This threatens the basis for the dichotomy at the heart of her own book, as her
central formative question in regard to the concrete reality of the cities-as-built is why the
built environment progressed one way in one city and differently in another.

55
Marcus, Apartment Stories, 27
56
Marcus, Apartment Stories, 18, 3
57
Marcus, Apartment Stories, 5
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 27 of 30

Without any material data to use to compare the two cities, it is hard to know how
seriously to take the representational models, even if they could be accepting as
expressing a valid reality; and as Marcus points out repeatedly, their connection with
reality is indirect and uneasy at best. Popular representations, she suggests—again,
echoing Simmel’s conception of rationality and categorization as reaction to metropolitan
overload or crisis —often formed around urban realities which were difficult to
experience; thus, for example, the problem of the subdivided, multi-tenant London house,
with a physically deteriorated structure and inadequate municipal infrastructure
integration, became represented in the haunted house. In this category it could be
simultaneously feared and dismissed; but, at the same time, this leaves the historian with
little hard data from which to understand the background to the issue.
Basic data that would have helped Marcus’ approach tremendously could have
included comparative housing unity density and population density for comparable
regions of each city over comparable time periods, preferably with some understanding
of the time frame for the construction of each set of housing stock; or, failing that, at least
simple comparisons of rental unit prices in similar apartment buildings in similarly-
desirable neighborhoods in each city in the post-1848 period would have helped
demonstrate how much, if at all, the popularly-expressed prejudices on housing styles in
each city impacted something as real as spending money.
In addition, it must be noted that there are a wide range of other possible factors
that may have been at play that do not come up in Marcus’ history, but are not discounted
by it either. For example, the Thames is a tidally-affected river; until the London sewer
system was installed between the 1860s and the 1880s, along with the Embankment, both
the Thames and its major tributaries through the city rose and fell along with the tidal
cycle by over twenty vertical feet. (The Thames still does, but it does not spill past the
embankments.) I do not know if this could have saturated the ground to the point of
making it prohibitively difficult to install foundations for larger apartment buildings; but
it seems like this could have been an issue for central Londoners, whose relationship with
the Thames was much more physical and dynamic than that of Parisians with the placid
and cooperative Seine. A discussion of the possibility of such factors, or at least the
recognition of them, would have greatly expanded the scope of Marcus’ work. She
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 28 of 30

effectively applies modernity, but she does it essentially just to literature; the city in this
urban history is missing.

Harvey’s excellent work is almost perfect as urban history, in many ways, and
perhaps his only conceptual pitfall is to suggest that modernity itself involves primarly
the shift to a larger scale. He demonstrates this beautifully in his work, showing the
larger-scale aspects of planning and development in Paris. At the same time, his own
pluralities of focus and multiplicity of scales of perspective shows us something else:
modernity involves a not a shift to a larger scale, but a constant multiplication of scales of
perspectives; the smallest scale remains, but new and larger scales are constantly added in
expanding realms of perspective in addition to the old. In Harvey’s work, even as the
scale of Paris-as-a-city expanded, and even as Haussmann clearly developed a vision of
Paris that encompassed a far vaster entirety than had been previously conceptualized as
Paris, individuated activity was still occurring at all levels of scale that had gone on
before, even down to the individual himself.
Modernity, in its contemporary expression, has always (and most likely will
always) express itself as the homogenizing forces of an ever-larger social-technological
totality intent on swallowing up the individual, against which forces the individual entity
must struggle. That individual entity can be a person or, as Harvey begins to imply, it can
even be a city itself, when the scale of perspective and of modernity itself is large enough
that the particular city can be considered to have an individuated identity and
representational life. Whatever the scale, however, applying modernity as a conceptual
package for historical analysis means not only examining the totalizing forces, but also
drawing back from it to provide conceptual terrain for the resistance and individuation of
the entities within it.
Regardless of the scale, what the books discussed here show is that modernity as a
historical perspective is indeed a very useful too with which understand historical
modernity and urbanity—and that, as in Simmel’s formulation, the two terms might very
well be synonymous. In all cases, the more precisely the historian can pinpoint and
analyce the three elements through which modernity is experienced with the framework
of urban culture—the individuated self; the particularities of the crisis that provides the
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 29 of 30

context; and the rationality/representation through which identity and understanding is

formed—the more useful it will be as a conceptual model for understanding history.
Steve Duncan - Modernity and Urban History Page 30 of 30

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” in My Heart Laid Bare, and Other
Prose Writings (First published 1863.) New York: Vanguard Press, 1951.

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. (“Flaneur
and related essays date from approximately 1938.) Ed. by Michael Jennings, translated by
Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

Crang, Mike and Nigel Thrift, Eds. Thinking Space. London; New York: Routledge,
2000.

Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York City: Routledge, 2003.

Klautke, Egbert. “Urban History And Modernity In Central Europe.” The Historical
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