Fragments of modernity Book

Fragments of Modernity provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early 20th century and an insightful appraisal of the methodological problems confronting any social theory of modernity. In their different ways, all three authors illuminated the experience of the modern in urban life, whether in mid-19th century Paris or in Berlin at the turn of the century or later as the vanguard city of Weimar Germany. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money economy (Georg Simmel), the process of rationalization of capita (Siegfried Kracauer), and the fantasy world of commodity fetishism (Walter Benjamin)--in each case focusing on those fragments of social experience that could capture the sense of modernity.