Person
Ferdinand Tönnies
German sociologist (1855–1936); known for the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft distinction, his theory of two kinds of will and his book on public opinion.
Biography
Ferdinand Tönnies was born on 26 July 1855 on a farm on the Eiderstedt peninsula in Schleswig-Holstein and went to school in Husum. He took his doctorate in classical philology in 1877 and lectured at the University of Kiel from 1882. He devoted much work to editing the writings of Thomas Hobbes.
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) made his name, but for about thirty years it was hardly known outside a small circle of scholars; interest came after the First World War, with a generation disillusioned with the existing social order. The book rests on two kinds of will: natural will (Wesenwille) and rational or elective will (Kürwille). Tönnies thought of the forms of association that arise from them as ideal types, whose pure cases do not exist in reality.
In 1922 he published Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (Critique of Public Opinion). With Weber, Simmel and Sombart he founded the German Sociological Society and served as its president from 1909 to 1933. In 1933 he was deprived of his emeritus status as “politically unreliable”; he died in 1936.
In this course
Appears in Roots of Social Thought in the cards on the two wills and community–society, on public opinion and on the “village versus city” myth.
Key works
- Tönnies, Ferdinand (1957 [1887]). Community and society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. — Loomis’s translation of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1957).
- Tönnies, Ferdinand (1922). Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung. Berlin: Springer. — The book on public opinion.