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Daniel Robinson's An Intellectual History of Psychology is more than that. It's psychology and history, but also sociology, culture, philosophy, Patristics, and other things.

A great example from Chapter 6, "Nature and Spirit of the Renaissance." Pico, Savonarola, da Vinci . . . then ending with a section on the rise of the modern city.

In an important way, it was the Renaissance that invented the idea of a city, at least as that idea survives, though weakly, in our time.

Problem is, that idea of the city has ravaged the modern landscape. From the noble Greek city-state, with its symbiotic balance between aristocrat and farmer, the modern city has slid from fine soil into mud.

[T]he possibilities the city once announced are now obscured by the realities it presents to its citizens. Living becomes coping, and the quest for perfection gives way to the struggle for success. The chivalric ideal becomes perverted into the gaudy ritual of self-conscious heroism as the knight is displaced by the banker. The city takes on its own life and begins to use and abuse the citizen in return for which it offers mere services. Values give way to fashion, valor to competition, restraint and sacrifice to unimaginable poverty.

I sit shamefully smugly in my small town.

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