"Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered"
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A deceptively sunny line from a thinker best known for diagnosing how modern life quietly deforms us. Simmel’s “Man’s nature, originally good and common to all” borrows the moral sheen of Enlightenment humanism, but the real pressure point is the last phrase: “should develop unhampered.” He’s not offering a bedtime story about innate virtue so much as naming the villain that keeps getting away: social form.
Simmel’s sociology is obsessed with how structures we invent - money, bureaucracy, fashionable taste, urban rhythms, even “politeness” - harden into systems that start shaping us back. “Unhampered” is a normative flare shot into that landscape. It implies that what passes for natural development is routinely constrained by the very networks that promise freedom: the metropolis that expands possibility while numbing attention, the cash economy that enables individuality while flattening value into price, the modern division of labor that specializes talent while shrinking the self.
The phrase “common to all” also does subtle political work. It resists the era’s hierarchy-making reflexes (race science, class essentialism) by insisting on a shared human baseline. Yet it’s not egalitarian comfort food. If the good is common, then the obstacles are institutional and cultural, not personal failure. Simmel’s intent is less to romanticize the origin than to indict the interference: modernity’s genius for multiplying opportunities and, at the same time, building elegant, invisible cages around how a person can become.
Simmel’s sociology is obsessed with how structures we invent - money, bureaucracy, fashionable taste, urban rhythms, even “politeness” - harden into systems that start shaping us back. “Unhampered” is a normative flare shot into that landscape. It implies that what passes for natural development is routinely constrained by the very networks that promise freedom: the metropolis that expands possibility while numbing attention, the cash economy that enables individuality while flattening value into price, the modern division of labor that specializes talent while shrinking the self.
The phrase “common to all” also does subtle political work. It resists the era’s hierarchy-making reflexes (race science, class essentialism) by insisting on a shared human baseline. Yet it’s not egalitarian comfort food. If the good is common, then the obstacles are institutional and cultural, not personal failure. Simmel’s intent is less to romanticize the origin than to indict the interference: modernity’s genius for multiplying opportunities and, at the same time, building elegant, invisible cages around how a person can become.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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