Week 1: Community and Society

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) was born into a wealthy farming family in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, in an era in which the peasant culture of the rural province was being transformed by mechanization and the money economy. His oldest brother was engaged in a thriving trade with English merchants, exposing Tönnies first-hand to the world of English capitalism. In 1881 he became a lecturer at the University of Kiel, where he remained until ousted by the Nazis in 1933 because of his social-democratic political associations. Though less influential than his contemporaries Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, Tönnies may be recognized as a founding father of sociology.

His enduring contribution to urban sociology is the distinction between two basic types of social formations, Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), with a general historical trend from the former to the latter. Societies of the earlier form are organized around family, village, and town, with a mainly agricultural economy and local political culture. The latter form of society, by contrast, is exemplified by larger-level social units of metropolis and nation-state and based on complex trade and industry. Primary sentimental relationships predominate in Gemeinschaft, while secondary associational relationships proliferate in Gesellschaft. While some of his interpreters proliferated the impression that Tönnies sentimentalized Gemeinschaft while criticizing Gesellschaft, he disclaimed such intention. For him, the shift was a normal developmental process of the body social, comparable to the transition from youth to adulthood.