Ferdinand Tönnies Totally Explained

Everything about Ferdinand T Nnies totally explained

Ferdinand Tönnies (July 26, 1855, near Oldenswort (Eiderstedt, North Frisia) - April 9, 1936, Kiel, Germany) was a German sociologist. He was a major contributor to sociological theory and field studies, as well as bringing Thomas Hobbes back on the agenda, by publishing his manuscripts. He is best known for his distinction between two types of social groups — Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. He was, however, a prolific writer and also co-founder of the German Society for Sociology (being its president 1909-1933, when he was ousted by the Nazis). In English his name is often spelt without the umlaut as Ferdinand Toennies, as this spelling can also be accepted in German.

Life

Ferdinand Tönnies was born into a wealthy farmer's family in Nordfriesland in Schleswig-Holstein, then under Danish rule. He studied at the universities of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin, and Tübingen. He received a doctorate in Tübingen in 1877 (with a Latin thesis on the ancient Siwa Oasis). Four years later he became a private lecturer at the University of Kiel. Because he'd sympathized with the Hamburg dockers' strike of 1896, the conservative Prussian government considered him to be a social democrat, and Tönnies wasn't called to a full professorship until 1913. He held this post at the university of Kiel for only three years. He returned to the university as a professor emeritus in 1921 and taught until 1933 when he was ousted by the Nazis, due to his earlier publications that criticized them.
Tönnies, the first German sociologist proper, published over 900 works and contributed to many areas of sociology and philosophy. Many of his writings on sociological theories — including Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) — furthered pure sociology. He coined the term Voluntarism. Tönnies also contributed to the study of social change, particularly on public opinion, customs and technology, crime, and suicide. He also had a vivid interest in methodology, especially statistics, and sociological research, inventing his own technique of statistical association.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings. Gemeinschaft — often translated as community (or even gemeinschaft)— refers to groupings based on feelings of togetherness and on mutual bonds, which are felt as a goal to be kept up, their members being means for this goal.. Gesellschaft — often translated as society — on the other hand, refers to groups that are sustained by it being instrumental for their members' individual aims and goals. Gemeinschaft may by exemplified historically by a family or a neighborhood in a pre-modern (rural) society; Gesellschaft by a joint-stock company or a state in a modern society, for example the society when Tönnies lived. Gesellschaft relationships arose in an urban and capitalist setting, characterized by individualism and impersonal monetary connections between people. Social ties were often instrumental and superficial, with selfinterest and exploitation increasingly the norm.
His distinction between social groupings is based on the assumption that there are only two basic forms of an actor's will, to approve of other men. (For Tönnies, such an approval is by no means self-evident, he's quite influenced by Thomas Hobbes) Following his "essential will" ("Wesenwille"), an actor will see himself as a means to serve the goals of social grouping; very often it's an underlying, subconscious force. Groupings formed around an essential will are called a Gemeinschaft. The other will is the "arbitrary will" ("Kürwille"): An actor sees a social grouping as a means to further his individual goals; so it's purposive and future-oriented. Groupings around the latter are called Gesellschaft. Whereas the membership in a Gemeinschaft is self-fulfilling, a Gesellschaft is instrumental for its members. In pure sociology — theoretically —, these two normal types of will are to be strictly separated; in applied sociology — empirically — they're always mixed.
Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, like others between tradition and modernity, has been criticized for over-generalizing differences between societies, and implying that all societies were following a similar evolutionary path, which he's never proclaimed.

Published Works

1887: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Fues's Verlag, 2nd ed. 1912, 8th edition, Leipzig: Buske, 1935 (reprint 2005, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft); his basic and never essentially changed study of social man; translated in 1957 as "Community and Society", ISBN 0887387500
1896: Hobbes. Leben und Lehre, Stuttgart: Frommann, 1896, 3rd edn 1925; a philosophical study that reveals his indebtedness to Hobbes, many of whose writings he's edited
1897: Der Nietzsche-Kultus, Leipzig: Reisland
1906: Philosophische Terminologie in psychologischer Ansicht, Leipzig: Thomas
1907: Die Entwicklung der sozialen Frage, Leipzig: Göschen
1909: Die Sitte, Frankfurt on Main: Rütten & Loening
1917: Der englische Staat und der deutsche Staat, Berlin: Curius
1921: Marx. Leben und Lehre, Jena: Lichtenstein
1922: Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, Berlin: Springer; 2nd ed. 2003, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter (Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14); translated as On Public Opinion. Applied sociology revealing Tönnies' thorough scholarship and his commitment as an analyst and critic of modern public opinion
1924, 1926, 1929: Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 3 vols, Jena: Fischer, a collection in three volumes of those papers he considered most relevant
1926: Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung, Karlsruhe: Braun
1927: Der Selbstmord in Schleswig-Holstein, Breslau: Hirt
1931: Einführung in die Soziologie, Stuttgart: Enke, his fully elaborated introduction into sociology as a social science
1935: Geist der Neuzeit, Leipzig: Buske; 2nd ed. 1998 (in: Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22); a study in applied sociology, analysing the transformation from European Middle Ages to modern times

Tönnies' Complete Works (Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe), 24 vols., since 1998, critically edited by Lars Clausen, Alexander Deichsel, Cornelius Bickel, Carsten Schlüter-Knauer, and Uwe Carstens; Publisher: Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York)

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