Ferdinand Julius Tönnies

German sociologist

• Born: July 26, 1855
• Birthplace: Oldenswort, Schleswig, Denmark
• Died: April 9, 1936
• Place of death: Kiel, Germany

Tönnies was one of the founders of sociology as a field of scientific study. His major contribution lay in the distinction he drew between two fundamentally different types of social orders the realm of Gemeinschaft contrasted with that of Gesellschaft, or in what has become the standard English translation, “community” versus “society.” The continuing influence of this dichotomy on sociological thought is shown in contemporary development theory with its distinction between traditional and modern societies.

Early Life

Ferdinand Julius Tönnies (TOHN-yehs) was born on a farm in the parish of Oldenswort, district of Eiderstedt, Schleswig, then part of Denmark but incorporated into Germany during his boyhood. His father, of Frisian stock, was a prosperous farmer and cattle-raiser; his mother came from a family noted for its Lutheran ministers. Tönnies spent his boyhood first on the family farm and then, after his father retired in 1864, in the North Sea town of Husum. After graduating from the local gymnasium in 1872, he entered the University of Strasbourg. Taking advantage of German students’ freedom to travel, he spent time at the Universities of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, and Tübingen. He received a doctorate in classical philology from Tübingen in 1877. By this time, however, the major focus of his interest had shifted to political theory and social problems. After postdoctoral work at the University of Berlin, he went on to London to continue his research on the seventeenth century English political thinker Thomas Hobbes. Tönnies gained his venia legendi (license to lecture) by submitting in 1881 a draft of what would become his major work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, as his Habilitationsschrift and became a Privatdozent in philosophy at the University of Kiel.

Tönnies had sufficient private means that he could devote the bulk of his time and energy to his own research and writing rather than to teaching. His most famous work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, was published in 1887. The revised and expanded definitive edition came out in 1912. An English translation by Charles P. Loomis first appeared in 1940 as Fundamental Concepts of Sociology; a new edition came out in 1955 under the title Community and Association, and later editions have used the title Community and Society. Community and Society is a work of immense erudition that reflects Tönnies’s extensive reading in social and economic history, the political and social philosophers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, and nineteenth century anthropological writings. Two themes found in nineteenth century German thought were along with his study of the philosophy of Hobbes of crucial importance in shaping Tönnies’s ideas. One was the distinction inherited from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel between Gesellschaft (“society”) and Staat (“state”): the first an organic reality, the second a mere artificial creation. The second was the concept of the Volkgeist (“spirit of a people”), with its corollary, the existence of a Völkerpsychologie (or collective psychology of a people) that was manifested in such social phenomena as customs, language, myths, and religion.

Life’s Work

In his mature work, Tönnies distinguished between broad and narrow conceptions of sociology. The broad conception included ancillary disciplines such as demography, physical anthropology, and social psychology. The narrow conception, which Tönnies took as his own primary interest, was limited to the study of social relationships and groups, their values, and their norms of conduct. He delineated three methodologically distinct levels of inquiry in this area. One was theoretical or pure sociology aimed at the formulation of an integrated system of basic concepts or ideal types. The second, which he termed applied sociology, applied the concepts of theoretical sociology to understand the development of concrete historical societies and explain the processes of social evolution, particularly the emergence of modern society. The third, empirical sociology, involved the description and analysis of contemporary human relationships and social phenomena.

One bibliography of Tönnies’s writings lists more than six hundred items. His research on Hobbes resulted in the publication from previously unprinted manuscripts of the English political theorist’s Behemoth: Or, The Long Parliament (1889) and The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1889), followed by a full-scale intellectual biography, Hobbes Leben und Lehre (1896), which would remain for many years the standard account. He undertook empirical studies dealing with population, the impact of business and seasonal cycles on society, and such examples of deviant behavior as suicide, crime, and illegitimacy, partly because of his personal humanitarian sympathies and partly because of his conviction that sociological theory must rest on a solid foundation of empirical research. He was a champion of the application of statistics for the illumination of contemporary social phenomena and processes; he even invented a new method of correlation, which he discussed in the article “Eine neue Methode der Vergleichung statistischer Reihen,” which appeared in the journal Jarbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung, und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich in 1909.

Tönnies’s major interest, however, lay in the elucidation and amplification of the concepts set forth in Community and Society. The more important of his writings along this line were Die Sitte (1909; Custom: An Essay on Social Codes , 1961), Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (1922; critique of public opinion), two collections of articles and papers, Soziologische Studien and Kritiken (1925-1929; sociological studies and reviews) and Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung: Geschichtsphilosophische Ansichten (1926; progress and social evolution: views on the philosophy of history), and Einführung in die Soziologie (1931; introduction to sociology).

Tönnies regarded all social interactions and groups what he called social entities (soziale Wesenheiten) as the products of human thought or will. He distinguished three levels of social entities: social relationships (soziale Verhältnisse); social corporations (soziale Körperschaften), that is, groups that were able to act through representative organs or officers; and social corporations (Samtschaften), that is, unorganized groups such as social classes or nations that are large enough to be independent of specific individuals. Although he acknowledged that social relationships may have their source in biological relationships or psychological relationships, or both (such as the relationship between parent and child), he emphasized the “voluntaristic” basis of all social relationships. A parent, for example, could disown his or her child. Marriage similarly could be terminated by divorce or, alternately, survive in name long after the psychological relationship had died. Social relationships thus exist because they are recognized, acknowledged, and willed by the participants via the acceptance of and adherence to certain norms or rules of conduct. A social entity, in other words, is the creation of the will of its members and, in turn, imposes on them certain obligations and grants them certain rights.

Tönnies went on to distinguish between two different kinds of “will” involved in establishing a social entity. One was Wesenwille (variously translated by commentators as “natural will,” “organic will,” or “essential will”), wherein an action is willed for its own sake, or because of primarily unconscious drives or inclinations, or out of habit, or because of its own intrinsic value. The second kind he called Kürwille (translated as “rational will,” “reflective will,” or “arbitrary will”), a term from the old Germanic word for “choosing,” because the actor chooses or wills a course of action from among possible alternatives to achieve a certain end or purpose.

The kind of will involved results in two fundamentally different types of social entity. Gemeinschaft is the type of social entity that is the project of Wesenwille; Gesellschaft is the type that results from Kürwille. Examples of the first include kin, neighborhood, village networks, social clubs, and religious sects, that is, relationships whose bonds grow out of mutual sympathy, habits, or common beliefs. Examples of the second include contractual arrangements, business associations, and special-interest organizations based on the deliberate calculation of advantage and disadvantage and weighing ends against means. Although Tönnies took pains to deny that he was writing an “ethical or political treatise,” the thrust of his analysis appeared to exalt “community” over “society.” Community, he suggested, answered the “need of real and organic life” and was characterized by trust and intimacy. Society, in contrast, was “a mechanical and artificial aggregate” in which every person lived for himself “in a state of tension towards all the others.”

Tönnies acknowledged that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were ideal types that did not exist in pure form in the real world. Even Gemeinschaften had their rational aspect. Human social conduct also could not be determined exclusively by intellect or reason. A given social entity must be ranked on a scale of more or less Gemeinschaft-like or more or less Gesellschaft-like. Yet Tönnies did see a long-term historical trend. It was his ambition to trace the evolution of human society from primitive agrarian communism through the individualistic society of modern capitalism to an ultimate socialistic-type order, which he envisaged as a higher-quality version of Gemeinschaft.

Although Tönnies published only fragments of this planned universal history in his Geist der Neuzeit (1935; spirit of modern times), his article and papers show that he viewed the transition from a predominantly Gemeinschaft-like to a predominantly Gesellschaft-like social order as largely the result of three major forces: growing commercialization with its attendant corollaries of competition, the market, trade, and credit; the rise of the modern state; and the advance of science.

Tönnies was a German patriot who defended the German side during and after World War I. By the standard of his time and milieu, however, he was politically a liberal, even a radical. An active participant in the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Politics) and the Gesellschaft für Soziale Reform (Society for Social Reform), Tönnies took a sympathetic interest in the trade union and socialist movements, workers’ education, consumer cooperatives, and national independence movements in such places as Finland and Ireland. In 1932, he joined the Social Democratic Party in protest against the rising National Socialist strength. Hopeful about the possibility of a nondogmatic universal religion that would unite all humankind, he was a leading figure in the Ethical Culture Society.

His pro-labor, pro-reform sympathies brought Tönnies into disfavor with the Prussian educational authorities and retarded his academic advancement. His growing international reputation, however, finally led to his appointment to a full professorship in political economy at the University of Kiel in 1913. He retired in 1916 but five years later resumed teaching as professor emeritus of sociology. His public denunciation of Nazism and anti-Semitism led to his dismissal from his professorship emeritus after Adolf Hitler came to power. With Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel, Tönnies founded the German Sociological Society in 1909, and he served as president from its founding to 1933. He died on April 9, 1936, at the age of nearly eighty-one, at Kiel.

Significance

Tönnies was one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. Perhaps his major intellectual significance lay in how he offered a new way of looking at the relationship of the individual to society that could resolve the long-standing conflict between the mechanical and rationalistic view of the social contract theorists, on the one hand, and the organicist conception of the romantic and historical schools, on the other. Tönnies’s point was that both positions were correct and complemented each other: Humans were both social and asocial beings, and there were both preexisting social relationships into which individuals were born and others that were the result of conscious agreement among formerly independent individuals.

Tönnies, one of the leading students of the history of sociology, inaugurated a typology of social relations that no sociologist can henceforth ignore if he or she does not wish to pass for an amateur. Indeed, all discussions on the opposition between competition and accommodation, conflict and association, cooperation and hostility, fusion and tension, integration and dissolution, solidarity and rivalry, communion and revolt, and all the other forms of social concord and discord, bring us back, directly or indirectly, to the work of Tönnies.

Although Tönnies’s work attracted attention and controversy in scholarly circles from its first publication, he had not much influence outside the academic world until after World War I. A disillusioned post-World War I generation romanticized the supposed virtues of the close-knit rural and small-town community in contrast to the impersonality and anonymity of modern industrial, urban society. A more recent variant on this same theme has been the popularity of the concept of “mass society” and its resulting “alienated man.” Tönnies’s work was first exploited to legitimize hostility to liberal capitalism and bourgeois society by the communitarian romantics of the German political right and had via this route an indirect influence on aspects of National Socialist ideology. In the 1960’s and since, Tönnies has been drawn on to justify the communitarian nostalgia of the New Left.

Bibliography

Cahnman, Werner, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation, Essays and Documents. Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1973. A valuable collection of writings about and commentaries on Tönnies, many of which come from difficult-to-obtain scholarly journals.

Freund, Julien. “German Sociology in the Time of Max Weber.” In A History of Sociological Analysis, edited by Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet. New York: Basic Books, 1978. A brief but perceptive analysis that sketches the basic parameters of Tönnies’s Community and Society distinction, places his work into the larger context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century social and philosophical thought, and offers a sympathetic appreciation of his contributions to the field of sociology.

Mitzman, Arthur. Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. A brilliant exercise in comparative intellectual biography focusing on Tönnies, Sombart, and Robert Michels. Mitzman’s account is the fullest available exploration in English of the influences shaping Tönnies’s thinking, the sources of his major concepts, and the evolution over time of his views.

Splichal, Slavko. “In Pursuit of a Socialised Press: Ferdinand Tönnies’s Critique of the Press and His Predecessors.” In Radical Mass Criticism: A Cultural Genealogy, edited by David Berry and John Theobald. New York: Black Rose Books, 2006. Tönnies’s essay examining the relationship between public opinion and propaganda is included in this book about the early critics of the mass media.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. Ferdinand Tönnies on Public Opinion: Selections and Analyses. Edited and translated by Hanno Hardt and Slavko Splichal. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Contains English translations of selections from Tönnies’s book Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung and analyses of his ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ferdinand Tönnies on Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical. Edited with an introduction by Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. The brief introduction by editors presupposes more background than the average undergraduate student is likely to have. The volume is invaluable, however, for its English translation of selections from Tönnies’s previously untranslated writings. For students wishing to go further, there is a handy, but dated, bibliography listing Tönnies’s more important publications.