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Ferdinand Tönnies

1855–1936

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Modern life replaces close communities held together by feeling and custom with a society of contracts, markets and calculating individuals.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · Western Europe · Society & History, Politics & Law

Co-founder of the German Sociological Association (1909) and for many years its president: his distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft) became one of the discipline’s basic pairs of concepts.

Key ideas

  • Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
  • Essential will vs. arbitrary will
  • Critique of public opinion

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Influence

Influenced by 2

  • Thomas Hobbes

    influenced by

    Tönnies edited Hobbes’s Elements of Law and Behemoth (1889), wrote a Hobbes monograph (1896) and modelled his Gesellschaft, an association of calculating individuals, partly on Hobbes. F. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887); Hobbes Leben und Lehre (1896); T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law and Behemoth, ed. F. Tönnies (1889)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Thomas Hobbes › 1588–1679

  • Karl Marx

    influenced by

    Tönnies drew his type of Gesellschaft partly from Marx’s Capital, as a society of exchange and commodity production, and later wrote Marx: Leben und Lehre (1921). F. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887); Marx. Leben und Lehre (1921)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Karl Marx › 1818–1883

Influenced 2

  • Max Weber

    influenced

    Weber’s concepts of communal and associative relationships (Vergemeinschaftung, Vergesellschaftung) explicitly refer to Tönnies’s ‘fundamental work’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, 1921–22). M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921–22), “Soziologische Grundbegriffe”; F. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Max Weber › 1864–1920

  • Fei Xiaotong

    influenced

    Fei distinguished a rural society of custom and familiarity from a society of law, explicitly in Tönnies’s terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Xiangtu Zhongguo, 1947–48). Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo (1947–48), “Xiangtu bense”; Liu Shiding, Beijing daxue xuebao (2007)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Fei Xiaotong › 1910–2005

Criticism

Criticized by 1

  • Émile Durkheim

    criticised by

    Reviewing Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1889), Durkheim objected that modern society is no less natural and organic than community, not a mere mechanical aggregate held together by the state. É. Durkheim, review of F. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Revue philosophique 27 (1889)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Émile Durkheim › 1858–1917

Criticizes 1

  • Friedrich Nietzsche

    criticised

    Tönnies, an early admirer, attacked the late Nietzsche’s master morality and the fashionable cult around it (Der Nietzsche-Kultus. Eine Kritik, 1897). F. Tönnies, Der Nietzsche-Kultus. Eine Kritik (1897)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Friedrich Nietzsche › 1844–1900

Works

Position

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) contrasts two basic forms of social life. Community grows out of “essential will” (Wesenwille): the bonds of kinship, neighbourhood and friendship, in which people belong together before they choose to, as in the family, the village and the old town. Society arises from “arbitrary” or rational will (Kürwille): individuals who remain separate join only to pursue their own ends through exchange, contract and calculation, as in the market, the big city and the modern state. Tönnies drew the second type from Hobbes and from Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and saw modern European history as a movement from community to society. He meant both as “normal concepts” – idealised types, not descriptions of real groups – and he hoped for new forms of community in cooperatives and the labour movement rather than a return to the past. His terms passed into everyday German; the word Gemeinschaft was later taken up by nationalist and Nazi rhetoric, which he opposed. He also pioneered empirical social research and studied public opinion as a force in modern society.

Life & context

Ferdinand Tönnies was born in 1855 into a prosperous farming family at Oldenswort on the Eiderstedt peninsula in Schleswig. He studied philology, philosophy and history at several universities, took his doctorate in Tübingen in 1877 and qualified as a lecturer at Kiel in 1881. There he remained an unsalaried Privatdozent until 1908, partly because the Prussian authorities distrusted his sympathy for the labour movement; he became a full professor only in 1913, retired in 1916 and taught sociology again from 1921. A leading scholar of Hobbes, he co-founded the German Sociological Association in 1909 and was its president until 1933. In 1930 he joined the Social Democrats in protest against the rise of National Socialism. The Nazis dismissed him in 1933, and he died in straitened circumstances in Kiel in 1936.

Further main works

  • Hobbes. Leben und Lehre (1896)
  • Der Nietzsche-Kultus (1897)
  • Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (1922)
  • Einführung in die Soziologie (1931)

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

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