Community and Civil Society (TONNIES 1887)

 

Community and Civil Society

A translation of Ferdinand Tönnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: an Essay on Communism and Socialism as Historical Social Systems (1887)

re-issued as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: fundamental Concepts in Pure Sociology (1912, 1920, 1935)

Cambridge University Press / ed. Jose Ferial Harris, translated by Margaret Hollis, 2001

 

 

General Introduction

IX (...) Moreover, in relating political behaviour to psychology, social structure, economic processes, natural history, law, religion and language, Tönnies was recognisably engaging in an exercise pursued over many earlier generations by philosophers who had written conjointly about both society and politics, from Plato and Aristotle through to Hegel and J. S. Mill.

XI (...) When he was ten years old, his father’s banking business brought a move to the neighbouring town of Husum, where Tönnies attended the local grammar school and received an intensive education in Greek, Latin, and classical German literature.

XII (...) He received his first doctorate from Tübingen, in Hellenic philology, at the age of twenty-two (an even earlier attempt having been rejected by Berlin). (...) Perhaps in response to his failure in Berlin, he resolved after taking his first doctorate to shift his interests from classical literature to philosophy, particularly the study of mind, epistemology and scientific method.

XIII (...) The following winter a growing interest in Hobbes’s political ideas led him into ‘rationalistic natural law’ and the writings of Pufendorf, Rousseau and Kant – which in turn led him on to modern Roman law, to the ‘historical’ reaction of Savigny, Gierke and Maine, and to the rising tide of contemporary writing (American and antipodean as well as European) on anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

XVI (...) At a second more tentative level, and one that was to generate much misinterpretation, the study sketched out a theory of general historical change – a theory that aimed to encompass both the two grand cycles of European history from Hellenic times to the present, and the transition from past ‘communism’ to some kind of ‘socialist’ model of society in the near or distant future.

XIX (...) But where they survived as ‘civic commonwealths’, as in the Hellenistic polis or the Germanic ‘free cities’ of the later middle ages, then they constituted Gemeinschaft in its highest and purest form: a form that still endured in certain residual institutions and practices within the atomised, competitive, imperialist cultures of the late nineteenth century.

XX (...) Such, in Tönnies’s view, was the essence of the role of the state in competitive market Society. This role had been both induced and legitimised by the modern revival of Roman law, with its emphasis on free contract, its indifference to the very existence of communities and corporations, and its remorseless undermining of local particularism, archaic practices and all forms of popular historic ‘custom’. (...) And by destroying Gemeinschaft and universalising the mental outlook of arbitrary rational will, the modern state was inadvertently opening up a Pandora’s box of boundless and ungovernable popular desire. Such trends, Tönnies argued, increasingly foreclosed upon any return to Gemeinschaft arrangements of the traditional kind; but they also imposed intolerable strains and contradictions upon the stability of Gesellschaft as a political system. On the outcome of these tensions Tönnies was pessimistic, sybilline and vague.

XXI (...) As with the eclipse of the Roman empire, Tönnies concluded, ‘the entire civilisation has been turned upside down by a modern way of life dominated by civil and market Society, and in this transformation civilisation itself is coming to an end’. (...) (...); and on ethical issues he referred frequently to classical writers, among them Aristotle, Plato, Cicero and Seneca. (...) An important background source was Theodor Mommsen’s 1870 edition of Justinian’s Digest, which used the Latin terms ‘communio’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘societas’ (Gesellschaft) to distinguish collective from individual property ownership under Roman law in a way that exactly corresponded with Tönnies’s own usage. And the fact that

Tönnies was so closely acquainted with many Roman law sources and texts suggests that a hidden backcloth to his work was the impassioned debate on the proposed codification of German law that was taking place in academic and political circles throughout the 1880s.

XXIII (...) From Gierke Tönnies derived one of his most powerful themes – that the ‘modernist’ revival of Roman law had been an allpowerful theoretical engine for discrediting and subverting customaryand intuitive ways of life and thought.

XXV (...) He saw him [Hobbes] as the toppler of Aristotelian theories of nature and matter, the champion of nominalism against linguisticmysticism, the inventor of truly ‘scientific’ political science, and the forerunner of that combination of a priori analysis and concrete empiricism that he himself strove to emulate.

XXVI (...) On the contrary, it explicitly suggested that – twice over in two long cycles of human history – communitarian arrangements had been eroded and ultimately destroyed by the rise of market Society, fuelled by theoretical developments in Roman law. This process had led to the collapse of ancient civilisation, and was currently bringing about the collapse of its modern equivalent. (...) Moreover, in these latter spheres there were signs that Tönnies’s rejection of pre-Hobbesian classical notions was far from complete, a view confirmed by his later treatment, in his 1896 monograph on Hobbes, of the contrasting political theories of Hobbes and Aristotle.   

The chief explicit references to Aristotle in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft came in Tönnies’s portrayal of small-scale communities as a natural outgrowth of the autochthonous household ‘Oekonomie’. There were, however, many other implicitly Aristotelian allusions: most notably in Tönnies’s reluctance to see commerce as adding anything of genuine ‘worth’ to exchange values, his particular dislike (despite his family interests in this sphere) of trading in money, his idealisation of the selfgoverning polis, and his frequent resort when analysing both social and physical organisms to a dichotomy of ‘form’ and ‘substance’. Moreover, in many of his deviations from Hobbes there were certain oblique echoes, if not of Aristotle himself, then of an older tradition of political thought of which Aristotle was the exemplar. The most obvious was the very striking contrast between Tönnies’s vision of the concordia that naturally evolved in a properly functioning Gemeinschaft, and the negative portrayal of pre-contractarian social relations in chapter XVII of Leviathan (‘in all places, where men have lived by small families, to rob and spoil one another, has been a trade’).

XXVII (...) In all of this there was an underlying assumption that ‘natural’ social relations were beneficent and normal, while artificial ones were predatory and pathological: a distinction that bore all the hallmarks, not of the ‘mechanistic’ outlook of the scientific enlightenment, but of Aristotelian and mediaeval scholastic roots.

 

A note on the texts and further reading

XXXVI (...) (...); but writing in English about his affinities with Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Ferguson, Kant, von Stein, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Gierke, remains relatively scarce, as does commentary on his relation to developments in natural science, to orthodox and modernist theology, and to Roman, natural and ‘positivist’ theories of law.

 

Glosary

XLIV (...) Stadt town or city. Tönnies’s usage covers the Greek polis, the free city of the mediaeval German empire, and any urban community that has a composite organic life (as opposed to the atomistic ‘big city’ or Grossstadt).

 

1 (...) ‘According to Xenocrates, the reason for the invention of philosophy is to remove the disorderly element in the affairs of life’ (Galen, History of Philosophy, c.3).