The less, as a result of enlargement of the economic circle, the producer knows his consumers, the more exclusively is his interest focused on the level of the price that he can extract from them. The more impersonal and qualitatively empty is the public that confronts him, the more his own orientation comes to rest exclusively on the qualitatively empty result of labor, that is, on money. Apart from those lofty domains where the energy of labor stems from abstract idealism, the worker will impart his person and his ethical interest to his labor to the degree that his circle of consumers is personally known to him, and this occurs only under conditions of smaller scale. Along with the growing size of the group for which he works, and along with the growing indifference with which he is able only to confront it, many factors are lost that once restricted economic egoism.

XREF: Connects to Simmel and alienation theory, plus modern debates about market scale and producer-consumer relationships in craft economies.

XREF: Echoes Weber's disenchantment and Marxian alienation themes regarding impersonal market expansion.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 698