Misery’s impersonal immediacy once demanded local assistance, only later state centralization.

Evidence

To this may be added an extremely important circumstance for the sociology of the poor: that of all the social claims of a non-individualistic character based on a general quality, it is that of the poor which most impresses us. Laying aside acute stimuli, such as accidents or sexual provocations, there is nothing such as misery that acts with such impersonality, such indifference, with regard to the other qualities of the object and, at the same time, with such an immediate and effective force. This has given at all times to the obligation of assisting the poor a specific local character. Rather, to centralize it in the largest circle and thereby to bring it about not by immediate visibility but only through the general concept of poverty—this is one of the longest roads which sociological forms have had to travel to pass from the immediate sensate form to the abstract. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 429

Categorization

• XREF: The observation that poverty is noticed through immediate sensory presence rather than abstract concept parallels how urban anonymity (blasé attitude) shifts perception away from the concrete other.