The Sociology of Ferdinand Tonnies

HE SCOPE OF TONNIES' WORK. The works of Ferdinand T6nnies cover so many topics, and such wide reaches of sociology, social philosophy, economics, and politics, that at first glance, it seems all but impossible, in a short essay, to do justice to the life work of a man who, at his death, had reached the biblical age of eighty. The task, however, is the lighter in that the focus of Tonnies' scheme of thought lies in the concepts, marked by genius, which first appeared in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, written at the age of thirty-two. On these concepts, T6nnies' international reputation rests. In vigor of thought and beauty of style the famous Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft was hardly surpassed by any of the numerous later writings of the author. Here, already, the social psychological foundations and the fundamental sociological categories of T6nnies' scheme are well and truly laid. In a large part of his later work T6nnies has "applied" the fundamental concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft to special phenomena of social life, as e.g., morals and folkways' or public opinion.2 The broader public knows Tonnies merely as the author of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft but it would be unjust to identify his scientific life work with the theorem of that book and its application. For, on the one hand, his sociological system was fully developed only in later years and, on the other, his achievements in the social sciences reach far beyond the narrower field of theoretical sociology. T6nnies' sociological system as a whole was for many years known only to his personal students. It has, indeed, never been published in adequate form, but only in some short essays and in the Einfuhrung in die Soziologie, a book of his maturer years which did not attain to the classic form of the Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. The Einffihrung, nevertheless, is quite indispensable to the understanding of Tonnies' theory and, because of its easy manner, will be found to be very useful in the teaching of sociology.