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Chapter Nine - The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies
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- By Niall Bond, University Lyon 2
- Edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 22 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2016, pp 181-204
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Summary
While Ferdinand Tönnies is recognized as a founding father of German sociology primarily because of the importance of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work he published in 1887 at the age of 32, and because of the leading role he played as president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) from its founding in 1909 until his ousting by National Socialist Hans Freyer and the subsequent deactivation of the DGS in 1933, he is among other things a preeminently political thinker. Tönnies has enjoyed the status as a founder of German and thus global sociology alongside other members of the sociological canon such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber mainly because he called himself a sociologist during a period in which sociology was identified as a source of threats to the existing order of the Second Empire–paradoxically, both liberalism in its relationship to the western European, positivist tradition, and socialism, of which Heinrich von Treitschke had warned more than a decade before the publication of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. These political contestations of sociology's legitimacy were backed up with epistemological arguments advanced by practitioners and philosophers of history opposed to “western European” social theory, for instance, Tönnies's rival at the University of Kiel, Wilhelm Dilthey, whose disdain for sociology was attenuated when Georg Simmel introduced Dilthey's philosophical insights to the field, or Heidelberg Neo-Kantians around Heinrich Rickert, who saw the redemption of the sociological project in Max Weber's sociological categories and comments on “regularities.”
Although Tönnies has long been linked almost exclusively to sociology, when Tönnies first wrote Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, sociology constituted only a third of his disciplinary identity. While the first book was dedicated to concepts he called sociological, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Bond 2009a, in Bond 2013b), the second dealt with concepts of psychology, Wesenwille and Kürwille, and the third with concepts of natural law that fall into the domain of political theory. The decision by intellectual historian Quentin Skinner and political philosopher Raymond Geuss to include Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in Cambridge University Press's Texts in the History of Political Thought shows that it is as much a work of “political thought” as of “sociology.”
Chapter Two - Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
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- By Niall Bond, University Lyon 2
- Edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 22 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2016, pp 33-58
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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.