Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Biographical Background

Ferdinand Tönnies, along with Max Weber and Georg Simmel, is described as one of the fathers of classical German sociology. Like them, he sought to learn from the past in order to understand the future, and in so doing, he considered the characteristics of societies both traditional and modern. In his works he was heavily influenced by Hobbes and his theory of the human will. Today, and together with Simmel, he is credited with providing a leading contribution to urban sociology.

Tönnies grew up on a farm in Germany and witnessed the impact of both commercialization and mechanization on daily life. The historical context for ideas has relevance because they were promoted at a time when European society was experiencing a transition from an agrarian base to one that was increasingly reliant on commerce and trade. There was a fascination across the continent with the implications of modernity for traditional society; as evidenced in the works of Émile Durkheim and Weber.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Tönnies published the book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. This first edition (1887) gained a very limited readership, allegedly because of the old Germanic style of writing. Tönnies was ultimately a prolific writer in his native language, but it is often claimed that his work has been somewhat neglected. While seven German language editions were published between 1912 and 1940, an English language publication of the original book did not appear until the latter half of the twentieth century.

Tönnies had no advocate within Europe and beyond Germany. The impact of his work is therefore much less apparent. But closer scrutiny of twentieth-century sociology reveals a less than wholesale disregard of his work within a European context. Clearly, we see evidence of Tönnies's central ideas within theories of urbanization and associated dichotomies of urban and rural ways of life. His thinking is further implied in many of the community studies debates that emanated from the United Kingdom during the 1970s. Indeed, his influence is sometimes considered so hidden and inferred so that while the basic theory is well known, it is not widely read and as a result it is not fully understood.

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