Abstract
The article intends to suggest a reflection upon the essay The Conflict in the Modern Culture by Georg Simmel; as a matter of facts the author gives a relevant contribution to the direction of an original explanation about the subject of the “opposition to the principle of the shape”, using just the same range of studies. The specific sphere where the article sets the perspective of the analysis of the essay by Simmel – among the most possible ones about the power, the richness of meanings and of contents it has got – is that one of the phenomenon, that can be observed both in the artistic field and the sphere of the culture and of the interpersonal relationships, of the progressive simplification of the exterior shapes. That, starting from the last decade of the nineteenth century, crossing the intellectual and scientific movements that characterized the German and the Austrian cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The consequences of this long historical process were the birth of the mass individualism of the twentieth century.