Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft)

Introduction

Ferdinand Tönnies developed the book from his habilitation thesis of 1881 in Kiel and published it in 1887; the first edition was subtitled a treatise on communism and socialism as empirical forms of culture. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are ideal types rather than descriptions of real societies, and every actual group mixes both. Tönnies saw modern history as a movement from the first to the second and drew on Hobbes, on the legal historian Henry Maine’s formula “from status to contract” and on Marx. The book was hardly noticed at first; only the second edition of 1912, subtitled “basic concepts of pure sociology”, made it widely known, and its pair of concepts entered the everyday vocabulary of sociology.

Connections

Builds on

• Leviathan1651 · Thomas Hobbes

Taken up in

• From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society1947 · Fei Xiaotong