Wealth & Money Quote by Georg Simmel

A city doesn’t just contain money; it teaches people to think in money. When Simmel calls the metropolis "the seat of the money economy", he’s not offering a geography lesson. He’s naming a psychological regime. The modern city is where life gets translated into prices, schedules, transactions, and measurable outputs. In that sense, the metropolis isn’t merely financed by the money economy; it’s where the money economy becomes common sense.

Simmel wrote at the hinge of industrial modernity, when European cities were swelling with migrants, factories, department stores, and bureaucracies that replaced face-to-face obligation with impersonal exchange. Money is the perfect urban solvent: it lets strangers coordinate without trust, history, or kinship. That efficiency is the point, and it’s also the loss. The subtext is that money doesn’t stay in your wallet; it rewires perception. It flattens qualitative differences (care, craft, honor, time) into quantitative equivalents. The city’s famous speed and stimulation aren’t just sensory; they’re economic. Everything arrives as a claim on your attention, and attention is triaged with a calculator.

The line also smuggles in a critique of power. If the metropolis is the "seat", then money has a throne - institutions, landlords, employers, banks - that governs daily life at scale. People become legible as consumers and workers, not neighbors. Simmel’s genius is to make the metropolis feel less like a place and more like a moral climate: one where freedom from tradition is purchased with a chronic coolness, a protective distance, the early outline of what we now call urban alienation.