The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes, from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former.

XREF: Connects to Simmel's broader thesis on the metropolitan mind and to later work on rationalization by Weber and the Frankfurt School.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 9731