Toennies and the Loss of Community

Ferdinand Tönnies was one of sociology's founding fathers. His influential dichotomy of community and society is one of the most famous and still most often applied concepts from the sociological toolbox today. The crisis that is described in the term "the loss of community" is therefore inescapably bound to his name. However, his conceptions were deeply intertwined in the philosophical discourse of his time and therefore, in contemporary interpretations, have been subject to misunderstanding and distortion.

Keywords Arbitrary Will; Community; Epistemology; Essential Will; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; Hobbes, Thomas; Industrialization 2.0; Neo-Kantianism; Society; Tönnies, Ferdinand

Social Change > Tönnies & the Loss of Community

Overview

Biographical Background

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) can be considered an "almost founding father of sociology." Generally, the first classic scholars of sociology, and therefore founders of modern sociology, are hailed to be Max Weber (1864–1920), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and either Karl Marx (1818–1883) or Georg Simmel (1858–1918). It must be said that Marx certainly belonged to a different generation and was not involved in academic discourse and discipline creation, but rather stuck between political philosophy and political ideology.

The generation of Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim found in Tönnies one of their anchors, both intellectually and institutionally. Tönnies crafted some of the most advanced and sophisticated conceptual frames of reference, eventually reduced by modern sociologists to a dichotomy between community and society (in the original German: gemeinschaft and gesellschaft). These two concepts were widely discussed and criticized by his contemporaries, specifically for the very rich conceptual and theoretical prerequisites in the forms of will, which Tönnies conceived.

At the same time, Tönnies co-founded the influential German Sociological Society and served as its president from 1909 until the Nazi takeover in 1933, when the shifting powers within the society led to his resignation and the reign of the Nazi-supporters of the Leipzig School of sociology, led by the notorious Hans Freyer (1887–1969).

The first edition of Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft, which remains to this day one of the best-known titles of sociology (at least in reputation), was first published in 1887 with a lengthy introduction, placing the study within the general discourse in between the experimental sciences, the social sciences, and epistemology (the theory of knowledge) of the time. Tönnies' seminal text cannot be fully understood without the reference to the intellectual disputes at the time, which were set between different branches of neo-Kantianism.

Tönnies himself was a student and admirer of Berlin philosopher Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), but clearly conceived his own philosophical point of view, combining his views on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) with his perception of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

However, most sociologists read Tönnies work(s) as being somewhat oblivious to the intertwinement with the debates of his era. This is partly due to the dismissal of the original introduction from all later editions of Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft and to the lack of attention paid to Tönnies' entire works and his life circumstances.

Tönnies lived most of his personal and academic life in his native region of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. And even though he travelled occasionally to speak at many of Europe's universities and attended conferences as far as the United States, his outlook on life remained somewhat rural and provincial, in a way close to being "pastoral," as William Purdue (1986) called it. His political views began in the community's structures of social life, which he supposed to be reflected in the structures of the nation. The decline or loss of the community through processes of urbanization and industrialization was a process that Tönnies had himself witnessed in the society around him. Many scholars seek to view his work as a critical perception of this loss of community.

Contemporary Comparisons

We should also bear in mind that today we face a situation similar to the one that presented itself to Tönnies. In many regards, our world has been experiencing a process of urbanization and re-urbanization both in developed and developing countries. Globalization and the digital revolution are picking up speed in what is sometimes called industrialization 2.0. Countries like Brazil and India have been rising into the ranks of players on the global political scene, not so much through their potential in military matters — as was the case with the global players of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century — but for their economic power. These countries have seen many regions undergo transformations that are, if not identical, remarkably similar to the effects of the decline or loss of community that Tönnies witnessed in his era.

Secondly, while the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by a scientific language that can be described as physical reductionism —that all aspects of the social sciences and arts have been subject to the idea that the facts and relations they investigate are reducible to (quantifiable) cause-and-effect laws and explanatory descriptions)—we have been seeing a return of more complex and holistic descriptions and a return of more organic and biologic semantics, specifically due to the challenges that the evolution of biotechnologies has presented us with.

The general problems debated, as well as the basic theoretical, empirico-pragmatical, and practical-ethical, often either refer directly back to much older discussions between the natural and the social sciences, or appear remarkably similar to problems debated in earlier times.

Further Insights

Tönnies grew up in a Germany that was not yet a nation. In fact, the unity of Germany as a nation was a product of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, when Tönnies was sixteen. He witnessed the rapid processes of the country's social transformation in the growth of population, Bismarckian political reforms, and industrialization. At the same time he was the child of a rural environment—his father a farmer, his mother the daughter of a protestant preacher. However, his view of the rural community was not idealistic or romanticized — as in comparison with that of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). But Tönnies certainly saw that the community could function as core unit of social life, because the organic and naturalistic mechanisms of the community forced individual wills to be in line with those of the group.

The Concept of Will

The concept of will is actually at the very heart of Tönnies' theoretical thought and is also at the heart of community and society. Will was for Tönnies not an abstract concept, but an actual and real force.

The first half of the nineteenth century in science was largely ruled by scholars battling with the "romantic conception of life," according to historian Robert J. Richards (2002). Beginning with Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and a group of philosophically trained physiologists, anatomists, and embryologists, the new science of biology (a term coined by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus [1776–1837]) became a guiding topic for this era, spanning the hard experimental science and the romanticists' abstractions, such as those of Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) and Georg Hegel (1770–1831). Followed by a time of struggle between materialists and idealists, the intellectual scene was then dominated first by (Hegel's arch-nemesis) Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788–1860) seminal The World as Will and Representation (1819) and later the works of physiologist/philosopher Rudolf Herman Lotze (1817–1881).

Schopenhauer's will was a largely metaphysical concept, while Lotze's work sought to build bridges between the disciplines, and will became part of the concept of personality, a new topic he (and his American followers, such as William James [1842–1910]) introduced. This made way for the concepts of the individual will and the group will as portrayed by Tönnies. It is also the beginning of the concept of the social as an explanatory category, which would emerge from the experimental and theoretical work of psychologists and philosophers, both in Germany (specifically in Berlin) and in Chicago (G. H. Mead [1863–1931]) and New England (William James), as has been argued by van der Veer and Valsiner (2001).

Neo-Kantianism

In 1860 neo-Kantianism emerged in the German universities, leading eventually to two leading schools of thought, the Southwestern School and the Marburg School, splitting neo-Kantianism into those reducing the basis of Kant's philosophical thought to epistemology and those reducing it to a philosophy of values. At the same time, the scientific method of the natural sciences with the works of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), and Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) took a new foothold in the academic world and discourse, and was closely followed by the introduction of Darwinism and in Germany the work of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).

This is the context of Tönnies’ thought, and it cannot entirely be separated from a discussion and interpretation of Tönnies, nor can a discussion of his tripartite approach to sociology, which he perceived to have three forms:

• Pure sociology, which consists of concepts that have to comprise a coherent and integral theoretical system;
• Applied sociology, which uses such a theoretical, pure system to deductively explain social development; and
• Empirical sociology, which relies on factual information.

The will, according to Tönnies, is subject to an evolution or social transformation of its own, in accordance with the emergence of modern industrial society, namely toward the reasonable and the individual.

Real social entities can be comprehended in different levels of abstraction, whether seen as interpersonal relationships between individuals, corporate groups that act through a representative, or collectivities that either transcend or subsume the prior. But in effect, each of these abstractions is an occurrence or manifestation of will.

Natural Will & Arbitrary Will

Occurrence is affected by the tension between two forms of will, which Tönnies called wesenswille — translated as natural will or essential will and Kürwille — rational will or arbitary will. It is nearly impossible to give an exact translation of these two loaded concepts.

In a short and certainly insufficient summary, we can say that the essential (natural) will describes the will that is inherently in the acting entity as a driving force, but it should not be confused with instinct or the subconscious. The arbitrary (rational) will is the will that leads to individual choice in a selection of goals.

For the social evolution in community and society, this leads to the following:

The recognition of other individuals is (and this is the debt Tönnies certainly owes to his meticulous reading of Hobbes) neither natural nor self-evident. However, the essential will of the members of a community suggests that action is quasi-naturally subsumed under the group interests of the community. With the rise and advancement of society, the number of selections and individual choices to be made increases, thereby making increased requisition on the arbitrary will, which in turn is less integrated into the community and thereby free. Tönnies described this in the term voluntarism, which has a long philosophical tradition since Duns Scotus (1266–1308), although Tönnies is often falsely credited with having coined the term.

While essential will is associated with community, the latter inherently is ruled by informal laws, such as those of kin, which seem to exist for their own sake and also create homogeneity and organicity of views and common language.

In society, on the other hand, which in itself is a rational and willed creation of men, the laws and rules of society need to be formalized and made explicit. The bonds that hold society together are artificial, thereby also more fragile and open to abuse—for example, the bonds that are created by monetary affiliations.

The loss and decline of community can thereby be seen as a loss and decline of family and familial forms of social cohesion. And indeed, Tönnies has often been interpreted to have created the dichotomy of community and society for just such a purpose.

Viewpoints

Tönnies' Views Still Hold Today

The classic Marxist and the neo-Marxist ideologies also illustrate the loss of community. Therefore it would seem that Tönnies would be a natural intellectual ally. But for Tönnies, the process of community loss plays the exact opposite role in comparison to the Marxist view. The Marxist interpretation, in its anti-capitalist attitude, blames capitalism as a cause for the loss of community with all its bad consequences. In Tönnies’ perception, it is actually the loss of community that gives rise to capitalism. Industrialization, individualization, and instrumentalism are therefore mutually interacting forces in the process from community toward society. And this holds true today.

It can be said, in general, that we are faced today with some very old discussions and debates, especially in the "new age of biology" due to the emergence of biotechnologies and the advancements in neurology and genetics. This offers many ethical problems, as well as rendering the approaches to science itself problematic. The discovery of phenomena such as the plasticity of the brain questions the fundamental understanding of many concepts considered unshakable in the reductionist view that had ruled the life sciences in the past decades.

In the history of philosophy, we are being faced with a re-discovery of the heritage of Kant and neo-Kantianism in the evolution of the natural sciences, as shown by Timothy Lenoir (1981) or Michael Friedman (2000). We also find that the current ethical questions can be adequately addressed from a Kantian point of view, as has been pointed out by Onora O'Neill (2002) and Richard Ashcroft (2003).

The scientific and philosophical situation we find ourselves in is to a certain degree a world that resembles the tensions of the intellectual world of Tönnies' time. And similarly, the loss of communal structures, the decline of the integrity of the family, and other such issues are repeatedly criticized in major news publications today.

Intellectually, socially, and structurally we find similar situations in Brazil and India, countries facing rural and urban transformations that owe their dynamics largely to the accelerating globalization. Globalization itself also renders obsolete many of the norms and legal structures we have taken as self-evident, just as was the case within the transformation that occurred in Tönnies' world. In the global arena of politics this has been illustrated by Saskia Sassen (2006) in general, and with regard to the shape and discourse of our civil societies and with explicit reference to Tönnies’ conceptions, we find this in the seminal analysis on The Civil Sphere by Jeffrey Alexander (2006).

The similarities in Alexander's work to the work of sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) can hardly be denied by anyone familiar with the study (except, perhaps, Alexander himself). In particular, in his final book, which was published almost thirty years after his death, Parsons (2007) makes intensive use of Tönnies' categories, whom he repeatedly credits to have held major influence, not only on Parsons’ own, but on all of the early sociology, specifically early American sociology.

Misinterpretations of Tönnies

Nonetheless it must be said that many of these early sociologists as well as sociologists today have fallen into a grave misinterpretation of Tönnies, partly due to the incomplete understanding of the dichotomies of Tönnies, such as the forms of collectivities or the types of will, as "either/or"-categories. Tönnies' categories should be understood as interpenetrating or as poles in a much more complex empirical reality. Actual societies, in his view, are formed in the tension between essential and arbitrary will and therefore lie in between community and society, for every actual society entails elements of gemeinschaft as well as of gesellschaft.

The warning of a loss of community, thus actually a misnomer, is to be understood as a dynamic process wherein we are losing community but never have entirely lost it. We must therefore find a healthy balance between the two forms of social integration.

Terms & Concepts

Arbitrary Will (Kürwille): In Tönnies' conception, the arbitrary will comes with the abundance of choices that are not inherent to the nature of things, thus not essential to the entities and groups that are part of the social (inter)action.

Community: In Tönnies' interpretation, community (gemeinschaft) is formed by the essential will (wesenwille). It rests on the informal and organic bonds of family, kin, and tradition. Its mechanisms work implicitly and need not be made explicit for the members of the group living in a community.

Epistemology: Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is a branch of philosophy. It is concerned with the question of what the nature of knowledge is and how it relates to truth and belief.

Essential Will (Wesenswille): The essential will lies inherent in the entities and necessitates actions toward it. In the life of the community, it is the essential will that leads the individual to act in favor of the community.

Industrialization 2.0: The two processes of globalization and digitalization (or computerization) in combination have not only increased in speed since the 1990s, but they have also — in many countries previously deemed to be developing nations — proliferated new industrial and economic expansions. Many areas that were previously productive only to the point of providing the self-sustenance for their communities have been absorbed into new forms of industry and industrialization. This development has also given rise to the outsourcing of classic industry from Western nations to Asia, South America, and East Europe. While digitalization supposedly has "replaced" classic industry, this is therefore often not true. Instead the "hard and physical labor" has just been relocated to where it can be procured at a much lower price. At the same time, the digital age has taken a hold of the entire economic world and created a boom in new industry, most of them service- and consumption-oriented.

Neo-Kantianism: Around the 1860s, perhaps most vividly with Adolf Trendelenburg, a return to Kant became the leading dogma in science and philosophy. Along this guideline a plurality of neo-Kantianism was born. Eventually two major trends crystallized: in the Southwestern School, with scholars such as Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber; and in the Marburg School, with Paul Natorp and Hermann Cohen. Scholarship suggests that the entire philosophical and scientific discourse from Kant into the first half of the twentieth century can only be adequately understood in light of the different forms of neo-Kantianism.

Society: In the work of Tönnies, society is the counterpole in the dynamic mutual interaction between community and society. Society emerges from the instrumentalism of the arbiratry will. (Social) actions are not made for their own sake as for the group, but in the abundance of choices that are removed from the group onto the level of individuals. Freed from the bonds of the laws that govern close ties and relationships, individuals must seek explicit yet artificial bonds of integration, which create a very fragile social cohesion. The collectivity thus created by rational wills is society.

Bibliography

Alexander, J. (2006). The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ashcroft, R. E. (2003). Kant, Mill, Durkheim? Trust and Autonomy in Bioethics and Politics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 , p. 359–366.

Bond, N. (2012). Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber. Max Weber Studies, 12 , 25–57. Retrieved October 31, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=74234454&site=ehost-live

Friedman, M. (2000). Carnap Cassirer Heidegger. Chicago Lassalle, Ill: Open Court.

Inglis, D. (2009). Cosmopolitan sociology and the classical canon: Ferdinand Tönnies and the emergence of global Gesellschaft. British Journal of Sociology, 60 , 813–832. Retrieved October 31, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=45231331&site=ehost-live

Jerolmack, C. (2012). Toward a sociology of nature. Sociological Quarterly, 53 , 501–505. Retrieved October 31, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=80204797&site=ehost-live

Lenoir, T. (1980). Kant, Blumenbach, and vital materialism in German biology. Isis 71: 77–108.

Lenoir, T. (1997). Instituting science: The cultural production of scientific disciplines. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

O'Neill, O. (2002a). Autonomy and trust in bioethics: Gifford lectures. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

O'Neill, O. (2002b). A question of trust: Reith lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parsons, T. (2007). American Society. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers.

Perdue, W. D. (1986). Sociological theory: Explanation, paradigm, and ideology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Richards, R. J. (2002). The Romantic conception of life. Chicago: Chicago University.

Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Valsiner, J. R. van der Veer. (2000). The social mind: Construction of an idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whimster, S. (2012). The coming of age of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe. Max Weber Studies, 12 , 7–12. Retrieved October 31, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=74234452&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Bond, N. (2013). Understanding Ferdinand Tönnies’ “community and society”: Social theory and political philosophy between enlightened liberal individualism and transfigured community. Portland, OR: International Specialized Book Services.

Bruhn, J. G. (2011). The sociology of community connections. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.

Lenoir, T. (1981). The strategy of life. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Lenoir, T. (1981a). The Göttingen School and the development of transcendental naturphilosophie in the Romantic era. Studies in the History of Biology, 5. 111–205.

Stingl, A. (2008). The House of Parsons: The biological vernacular from Kant to James, Weber, and Parsons. Lampeter: Mellen Press.