Introduction

It is probably the case that none of the classical sociologists has been as posthumously misrepresented as has Ferdinand Tönnies. Decades of accumulated stereotypes, caricatures, clichés and misunderstandings have served to obscure what he actually did, said and thought, what his actual social and political opinions were, and what his real legacies may be within sociology and the broader social sciences. The central caricature that continues to bedevil his reputation today is centered on the notions that he was, variously, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative blind to the benefits of modern social order, a proto-Nazi decrying the current state of society and politics in favor of an ethnically homogeneous Gemeinschaft, and an uninteresting, crude and simplistic precursor to analytically richer and more appealing analysts of social order, such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber (Adair-Toteff 1995). All of these conceptions are clearly and demonstrably wrong, but they continue to have a great deal of purchase at the present time, at least—or especially—in the Anglo-Saxon academy. When he is not condemned for an apparently distasteful or unacceptable social politics, Tönnies is relegated to being construed as a dry, rigid thinker whose key Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft distinction has been proven time and again to be far too simple to grasp how modernity creates forms of community as much as destroying or transforming others (Crow and Allan 1994). This latter charge is particularly ironic because Tönnies was very well aware of such matters, and his thoughts on them still should command attention today.

The various contributions to the present volume indicate the radically oversimplified, if not downright erroneous, representations of Tönnies that have been the mainstay of undergraduate sociology textbooks, and the less sophisticated forms of academic community studies, since at least World War II. Yet the question remains—why should anyone read Tönnies at the present time? What could be gained from that? What, if anything, does he have to say to contemporary sociology that is meaningful or productive? The view I will present in this chapter is that Tönnies's writings are quite remarkably fecund terrain for sociologists looking to the past of the discipline in order to try to find inspiration for how to carry out sociology in the future.