TÖnnies, Ferdinand
TÖNNIES, FERDINAND (1855–1936), German sociologist. Tönnies provided elaborate definitions of branches of sociology long before it was recognized as an academic discipline.
Ferdinand Julius Tönnies's academic preparation for his work as sociologist was uncommonly broad. In 1877 he received his doctorate in classical philology. Beginning his teaching career at the University of Kiel in 1881, he successively taught philosophy, economics, statistics, and sociology, and meanwhile published many articles on public policies. From 1909 to 1933 he was president of the German Sociological Society (founded by him along with Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber). Having been publicly opposed to rising National Socialism and anti-Semitism, he was later illegally discharged from this post by the Hitler regime.
In 1887 he published his most famous book, a typological study, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (translated as Community and Society, 1957). Outside Germany the reputation of this work overshadowed his other important writings such as those on Thomas Hobbes, on Karl Marx, on custom and morals, and on public opinion. Employing his dichotomous ideal types, Gemeinschaft ("community") and Gesellschaft ("society"), he attempted to define fundamentally different kinds of human relationships in their dimensions and structures. He took into account biological and psychological as well as institutional perspectives, and he expounded the typology with impressive erudition and poetic imagination. He leaned heavily on English literature from Hobbes to Herbert Spencer and Henry Maine. He compared his typology to Maine's distinction between status and contract.
For Tönnies, all social groupings are willed creations manifesting different kinds of human will. He saw these differentiations in terms of another dichotomy. On the one hand is a common "natural will" consisting of life forces associated with instincts, emotions, and habits, forming personal bonds and obligations that engender an unconscious sense of organic unity and solidarity of persons and groups. On the other hand is a deliberate, consciously purposeful "rational will" manifest in the impersonal pursuit of individual and group interests. In the rational will is a combination of motifs issuing from romanticism and rationalism. These differentiations become evident also in religion. (In his later period he envisaged the possibility of a nondogmatic universal religion to unite humankind.)
The "natural will" of community is integrative; the "rational will" of society is pluralistic and segmental, reaching its peak in capitalism. Both kinds of will are always present in some form or degree, but Tönnies favored a community-oriented socialism.
Some critics have seen these typological dichotomies an inimical to strictly empirical studies. Typology, they say, should not replace historiography, though the latter requires the former. Tönnies was aware of the danger of oversimplification and reduction in one's view of social reality. This becomes readily evident in his sharp critique of statisticians.
In his early essay on Spinoza, "Studie zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Spinozas" in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (1883), Tönnies spoke of the emphasis on will as revealing a philosophy (stimulated by Arthur Schopenhauer) that he called "voluntarism," which entails the recognition of the primacy of will over intellect, and which is applicable to psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics. His old friend Friedrich Paulsen in his Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892) spelled out the conception of voluntarism in psychological terms. Paul Tillich in Socialist Decision (1933) adapted Tönnies's concepts of community and society. William James was so enthusiastic about Paulsen's book that he provided a lengthy introduction for the English edition, and one can see voluntaristic elements in James's concept of the "will to believe."
Bibliography
Cahnman, Werner J., ed. Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation; Essays and Documents. Leiden, 1973.
Wirth, Louis. "The Sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies." American Journal of Sociology 32 (1926): 412–422.
New Sources
Bickel, Cornelius. Ferdinand Tönnies: Soziologie als skeptische Aufklärung zwischen Historismus und Rationalismus. Opladen, Germany, 1991.
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