Schmalenbach, Herman (1885–1950)

German sociologist and philosopher

Herman Schmalenbach was born in 1885, in Breckerfeld, in the German province of Westphalia, where his father owned a hinge-and lock-making business. In 1910, after undergraduate studies at the University of Berlin, Schmalenbach received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. He then taught at the University of Gottingen. In 1931, Schmalenbach accepted a professorship at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, where he taught philosophy, the history of philosophy, and sociology until his death in 1950.

Schmalenbach is best known for his theory of the bund, an ephemeral, emotionally cohesive form of community, which he placed between the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies's well-established gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (association) dichotomy. Bunds (variously translated as communions, fusions, leagues, orders, or fraternities) are relatively short-lived, charismatic communities of rapture, rapport, and experience. Although a prolific writer, Schmalenbach's 1922 article on the bund remains his most cited and influential work.

When Schmalenbach published his article, bund was a common word used to describe small groups that were part of the pervasive waves of youth movements that had been sweeping through Germany since the 1890s. Schmalenbach's article took the term beyond mere description to a higher plane of theory. For Schmalenbach, a bund, or bund-like relationship, is based mostly on impulse and emotion. A frenzy of mutually shared feelings creates cohesiveness among bund members and absorbs them deeply into the relationship. This absorption allows the group's members to feel a fusion or communion with one another. Charismatic and enthusiastic groups of all sorts often exemplify bund-like relationships; familiar examples include religious cults, communes, fanatical political sects, youth gangs, the relationships of masters and disciples, or even couples in love. Bunds exist in the emotional intensity of the moment. They are impulsive and tend to ignore or oppose both traditional gemeinschaft-like and rational gesellschaft-like forms of community.

Consistent with their highly emotional and impulsive natures, bund-like relationships, as such, are short-lived. When the highly intense emotional communion that marks a bund burns out, the group will either disband or become institutionalized, thus fitting into the more normal communal or associational patterns of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. A bund is most bund-like at its inception, after which it begins to become less emotionally based and more routine. The bund undergoes the same process of community transformation that the sociologist Max Weber (1968) describes as the routinization of charisma. These ephemeral forms of social life cannot endure for long beyond their initial enthusiastic and ecstatic beginnings.

The most accessible commentaries on Schmalenbach are Gunther Luschen and Gregory Stone's introduction to Schmalenbach's On Society and Experience (1977), and Kevin Hetherington's (1994) essay on the bund. Among contemporary sociologists, Hetherington, in particular, has used the bund concept extensively in his studies of emotional communities and identity politics.

Schmalenbach's influence among sociologists is also obvious in Howard Becker's study of German youth movements (German Youth: Bond or Free, 1946), Werner Stark's sociology of religion (The Sociology of Religion: Types of Religious Culture, 1972), Benjamin Zablocki's study of the Bruderhof (The Joyful Community: An Account of the Bruderhof, 1971), and Edward Shils's essays on primary groups and group cohesion (Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology, 1975). Many studies on Israeli kibbutzim, such as Yonnina Talmon's Family and Community in the Kibbutz (1972), make use of Schmalenbach's bund concept.

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