The Material City

Redirecting the emphasis on the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on strains in the mental life of modern society, Alan Blum offers a timely resource for understanding our current environment, and innovatively shows how the desire to resolve such strains by great numbers produces extremist responses. The Material City pictures the city as a landscape of diverse clashes over beliefs, a scene of extreme and volatile expressions of hatred, accusation, and rancor. Blum discusses how the city proposes ideals implicitly for healing and reconciliation in its official and unofficial responses to this tumult. The originality of The Material City is Blum’s proposition that the desire to be correct in beliefs in the absence of proof and the desire to live forever in the face of death, makes the human desire for the impossible an inevitable source of tension. The innovative method of the book lies in its mixing and matching of academic research, and novels. By connecting elements of the philosophy of Plato and the tradition to modern thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lacan, The Material City offers a timely commentary on current affairs, democracy, and the temptation of tyranny that resonates in modern society.

Redirecting the emphasis on the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on strains in the mental life of modern society, in The Material City Alan Blum offers a resource for understanding our current environment, and innovatively shows how the desire to resolve such strains produces extremist responses.

Alan Blum is senior professor in sociology, social and political thought, and communication and culture at York University.