The essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) was delivered as a lecture at an exhibition series in 1902-03 held in Dresden, Germany. The theme of the exhibition was the emergence of the modern metropolis and it aimed at examining the intellectual, economic, and political dimensions of German urbanism. It also addressed planning problems and social issues related to public transportation, housing, employment, health, welfare and cultural institutions.

The organizers wanted Simmel to write about the role of the intellectual on the city but he chose to write on the effect of the city on the mental life of the individual. Simmel’s essay focused more upon the philosophical and psychological implications of this emergent urban reality on the metropolitan mind. Simmel was interested in the social construction of the urban self under unrelenting commercialization which was the fate of the modern world.

He was influenced by Hegel and Kant and as well as by Durkheim (relation between individual and society), Weber (effects of increasing rationalization of all facets of life), and Marx (alienation). Like Marx he took the political economic factors seriously but he explored their philosophical and psychological dimensions. For Simmel, the question was: What happens to the individual due to the rise of money economy and continuous quantification of all objects?