Tönnies, Ferdinand (1855–1936)

German social theorist

Ferdinand Tönnies was born into one of the leading families of a farming community in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Both of his parents had deep roots in the rural region. His father's Dutch ancestors had settled in the area more than 200 years earlier; his mother's family had settled in nearby east Holstein. This background, coupled with his older brother's experience in adapting to the encroaching rationalization of farming life, likely affected Tönnies's sympathies and helped shape his outlook.

After graduation from the Gymnasium, Tönnies studied classical philology and philosophy and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tubingen in 1877. His interests were primarily in social philosophy and social science, and he developed over the years an immense knowledge in many branches of these subjects. He obtained a position at the University of Kiel, where he remained for over fifty [Page 1382]years. He knew a wide circle of scholars in many disciplines and traveled to the United States in 1904, where he lectured at Harvard. He was dismissed from his post at the university by the Nazis in 1933 for his ultra-liberal and communitarian ideas.

Tönnies was of a conservative nature yet able to speak easily to people from all walks of life. He became active in the labor movement, particularly in the labor unions and consumer cooperatives, from which he thought a better society might evolve. He was one of the founders, and for several years the president, of the German Sociological Society and was an honorary member of the American Sociological Society. Early in his career, in 1887, he published the book for which he is best known, Gemeinschaft und Geslleschaft (Community and Society). In this book, Tönnies analyzed the features of small, intimate communities that he believed were common in an earlier phase of human history but were being steadily replaced by the large-scale, impersonal societies of modernity. He followed this work with a great deal of research and many publications over the next fifty years—on customs, public opinion, political philosophy, law, the family, sociological theory, Karl Marx, Thomas Hobbes, and many other topics—but the later writings are not well known. It is the ideas in his early book, presented clearly and incisively, that have struck a responsive intellectual and moral chord among generations of social sciences scholars, and these are the ideas for which he is remembered today.