The City — Selected Contexts and Examples from the Twentieth Century Historiography
In this article I examine different meanings attributed in the twentieth century historiography and social philosophy to the category of the “city”. For answers I look by referring to the conceptions of Oswald Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, Max Horkheimer, and Alvin Toffler. Structuring their positions, I propose to divide them into three types of discourses: 1) stances in which the problem of the role of the city in the dynamic of culture and civilization explicitly finds its place; 2) stances in which the city is regarded as an exemplification and basis of essential for a given theory substantial contents; 3) stances in which the category of the city appears explicitly or implicitly in reference to such notions as the instrumental reason, pragmaticism, industrialism, industry, and technology.
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