Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One Ferdinand Tönnies and the Development of Sociology
- Chapter Two Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
- Chapter Three Whither Gemeinschaft: Willing and Acting Together as
- Chapter Four Tönnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology
- Chapter Five From Metropolis with Love: Tönnies, Simmel and Urban Social Architecture
- Chapter Six Ferdinand Tönnies: Hobbes Scholar
- Chapter Seven Gender and Family
- Chapter Eight The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will
- Chapter Nine The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies
- Chapter Ten Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter Two - Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One Ferdinand Tönnies and the Development of Sociology
- Chapter Two Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
- Chapter Three Whither Gemeinschaft: Willing and Acting Together as
- Chapter Four Tönnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology
- Chapter Five From Metropolis with Love: Tönnies, Simmel and Urban Social Architecture
- Chapter Six Ferdinand Tönnies: Hobbes Scholar
- Chapter Seven Gender and Family
- Chapter Eight The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will
- Chapter Nine The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies
- Chapter Ten Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
If we are to discount writers who did not actually call themselves sociologists—such as Karl Marx—Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918) were the first German-speaking writers to leave a lasting mark on the nascent science of sociology. Tönnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft appeared in 1887, eight years after his introductory article on Hobbes was published. A year later, in 1888, Simmel, whose doctorate and Habilitation in philosophy had dealt with Kant, published his first sociological article on problems of “social ethics,” following close on Tönnies's methodological heels; this treatise was followed by a compact volume on “Social Differentiation” in 1890, which broke completely with the nineteenth-century, positivist tradition, pointing to the complexities of the reality of the psychological interplay of individuals (Simmel 1890). Tönnies may be said to have introduced individual relations based alternatively on emotional commonality or instrumental reason for ulterior motives into the focus of sociology. He thus introduced the theme of emotiveness to the social sciences—a topic that was to become dominant inside and outside Germany. Simmel accepted this basic theme and notably the consequences of purposive rationality for human intercourse—alienation—but from a more urbane vantage, streamlining it using the prism of Neo-Kantian logic. It was with the publication of a survey on Polish and German workers east of the Elbe in 1892 that Max Weber (1865–1920) moved from law, the discipline in which he received his first degree, to sociology, having started his studies in history with Theodor Mommsen. Max Weber followed the trails of Tönnies and Simmel but left deeper tracks. Given the negligible impact of an earlier, self-proclaimed sociological work published between 1875 and 1878, Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers by Albert Schäffle (1831–1903), on sociology within and beyond the German-speaking world (notwithstanding the author's influence on Otto von Bismarck's plan to insure workers), it can be said that Tönnies had published the founding work for the discipline in Germany, one even his detractor, René König, called the Grundbuch of sociology. The word Grundbuch means both land register and basic book; it was in this work that the discipline's extent and orientation were staked out.
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- Information
- The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies , pp. 33 - 58Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016