Tönnies, Ferdinand

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) is considered one of sociology's founding fathers. He studied in Strassburg, Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, and Tübingen where he received his doctorate in classical philology in 1877. His famous Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft served as his Habilitationsschrift in 1881. His father's wealth enabled him to follow his private, especially political, interests and to be relatively distant from the academic milieu. Nevertheless, he was appointed to a chair for economics and statistics in 1913 from which he retired only three years later. He resumed teaching sociology as professor emeritus in Kiel in 1921.

Tönnies took an active interest in the socialist and trade union movements and in consumer cooperatives. He joined the Social Democratic Party, protesting against the National Socialist Movement, which led to the discharge from his position as professor by the Hitler government in 1932–1933. Tönnies was president of the German Sociological Society from 1909 to 1933, which he had founded together with Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart.

Tönnies perceived of all human interactions as creations of thought and will. This distinguishes Tönnies's concept of the social from a behavioristic view, which regards any kind of interaction as social. Social entities in Tönnies's sense are creations of their members' will so that they are felt as a quasi-objective reality with its own obligations and rights. They can be classified roughly as social collectives (Samtschaften), social corporations (soziale Körperschaften), and social relationships (soziale Verhältnisse). Social relationships exist insofar as they are willed by their participants (even though they may well, as in the case of parent and child, rest on a psychological or biological basis). They are prevalent within social corporations and social collectives, as well. Social collectives (which as a concept is found only in Tönnies's later writings) stand for unorganized groups that have grown enough in size to be independent of the participation of particular individuals. The concept of social corporation refers to groups capable of acting collectively through representatives. They constitute the most “artificial” level because the participants' will to maintain a social relationship becomes manifest in their conformity with specific rules and norms.

Tönnies uses the term will in a broad sense. Similar to Max Weber's distinction of four ideal types of social action, Tönnies differentiates the will that creates a social entity according to its relation to ends and means. The main distinction here is between Wesenwille (derived from Arthur Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Wundt) and Kürwille (which stems from Thomas Hobbes and the rationalist tradition of natural law). The latter corresponds to Weber's purposiverational orientation of social action and is derived from [Page 843]an ancient Germanic word for choosing. The action is consciously motivated toward an end, and the actor chooses among several possible means to achieve that end. In contrast, Wesenwille manifests the actor's nature and has several degrees of rationality according to affect, tradition, and value orientation.

In applying these classifications to social entities, Tönnies distinguishes between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which was meant as a conceptual framework for the analysis of modern society. Certain entities are willed for their intrinsic value and depend on the members' sympathy, habit, and shared beliefs (e.g., clubs, sects, family, neighborhood). Other entities must be conceived of as means to specific ends such as the business association that constitutes the paradigm of the “Gesellschaft” and “Kürwille”-type of social entity. Kinship, neighborhood, and spiritual community form prototypes of “community.” Contractual relationships and special-purpose associations stand for “society.” Like Weber, Tönnies sees these categories as ideal types. In reality, we find neither pure Gemeinschaft nor pure Gesellschaft. Rather, social entities are more or less Gesellschaft- and Gemeinschaft-like because human conduct is never exclusively determined by reason or sympathy. Tönnies illustrates this concept by comparing the ideal types to chemical elements that are combined in different proportions. Accordingly, Tönnies identifies empirical mixtures that he combines with the question whether social relationships are conceived of as equal or unequal. A Genossenschaft is a Gemeinschaft-like relationship of equal peers, whereas Herrschaft implies social super- and sub-ordination. The relationship of husband and wife constitutes a mixture of perceived equality and superordination. Gesellschaft-like types of social entities create inequality by delegating authority to certain members while at the same time assuming a conceptual peer equality.

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