Yet T�nnies during his lifetime kept as far away from the National Socialists as possible. Worried about the rise of Hitler, he joined the Social Democratic party in 1930 (despite his former claims to academic political neutrality) and in 1932 wrote an open letter to the prime minister that advocated the use of force to keep the National Socialists out of power. This open letter cost him his job and his pension, reducing him to poverty for the rest of his life. Calling him a direct precursor to Nazism therefore seems extreme and even cruel, although we can still observe that the sentiments expressed in the book did align with the sentiments that contributed to the rise of the Nazis. But as John Samples noted, if we don’t blame Marx for Stalin, how can we blame T�nnies for Hitler?
This association with Hitler is not the only problem with the text; the other is its apparent cultural pessimism. On first glance, the book seems to be pure nostalgia, irrationally championing a long-lost feudalism while unequivocally damning the capitalist present. Yet T�nnies insisted throughout his life that his work was objective, emptied of emotion and judgment, and he said in his Introduction to Sociology that hanging on to the idea of a pure Gm would be �irrelevant and politically dangerous� (xvi). And we can only maintain this romantic interpretation if we are not aware of the the book�s function within T�nnies’s complete oeuvre: this book was not meant to describe reality or outline a historical progression from medieval Gemeinschaft to nineteenth-century Gesellschaft; it was meant to be a work of what T�nnies called �pure sociology,� which created ideal types�not empirically real types that actually exist, but artificially constructed, static categories merely meant to help the sociologist before beginning the empirical observations that would lead to descriptions of specific socities. Werner Cahnman, the preeminant T�nnies scholar, stresses the dialectical nature of the two concepts: they �are to be considered as co-existing and co-effective as well as contradictory and opposing tendencies� (qtd. in Muller 1263). A contemporary sociologist, John Killham, calls these two types �the twin impulses coexisting in the strange amphibian man under the more familiar names of heard and head� (381). In short, as descriptors of actually existing societies, Gm and Gs are mere directional tendencies. Any society will have a mixture of both impulses, so we could profitably see any society as somewhere along a continuum between Gm and Gs�but never purely one or the other.
Although T�nnies did admit to feeling despair in his youth about the current state of culture, he had a hypothesis for the future: a dialectical synthesis of the two wherein one could keep the progress made by scientific rationalism but use Gemeinschaft-ian ethics to keep the capitalist sharks at bay. Because of these ambiguities�his changes of mind during his career, his claim that his work is objective despite its clear distribution of morally loaded terms in favor of Gemeinschaft, and the rhetorical complexity of the book itself�T�nnies scholars and sociologists have had a range of interpretations: that both types are damned, that both types are praised, that one or the other is damned or praised, whether this is so in parts of the book, the whole book, or in light of his entire career. Most of the critical work on him, then, I found as criticism of other scholars, elaborations, objections, demythologizing theses, careful distinctions, and constant bickering. And indeed the book itself has generated a great range of interpretations (we might extrapolate Hulme�s theory to say that this text partakes of the �well� model, rather than the �bucket� model), so I think it safe to say that historically, T�nnies has been whoever his readers wanted him to be. For practical purposes, the book is a black box that reads �modernization,� and readers find in it their own hopes or fears about modernization.
I do not mean to suggest that the book has no specific tendencies or ideas; the sad voice we hear when reading the text is not just in our heads. And in fact, the persistent misreading of T�nnies�the causal reference to his �romantic nostalgia� that I found everywhere in literary criticism�itself contains the important lesson that the rhetoric of modernism depends on the distinction between the two types of society. But what I want to emphasize here is that the ambiguities in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft make it not only a litmus test for testing the conservatism, pessimism, romanticism, or progressivism of our favorite modernists, but also as a conceptual tool�a handy stylization of the contrary impulses of social relationships that let the modernists investigate the wonders and terrors of modernization with a certain clarity that is hard to find elsewhere. Perhaps, then, we can find more meaning and insight in the process of questioning and suspending the various interpretations of T�nnies against one another, than in any single answer we might formulate.
ip: 128.118.17.207
summary:
diff-major: 1

Ferdinand Tonnies!

Life and Works

• Along with Weber and Durkheim, seen as one of the three founders of modern sociology
• b. 1855 (Schleswig-Holstein) d. 1936 (Kiel)
  • Schleswig-Holstein: one of the few autonomous peasant communities left in Europe
  • Family sold cattle to England (wealthy, “well-to-do peasant”) so he saw both the agricultural Gm and the trading Gs while growing up
    • Always had an “easy” way of speaking to the common folks even though he was a “scholar’s scholar” (1971 vx)
  • As he grew up, the two duchies gave up a vague relationship with the Dutch for formal association with Prussian State (when 11 years old)
  • Educated at Gymnasium and then in many universities (like many intellectuals of that time), receiving doctorate from Tubingen in 1877 (age twenty-one) in classical philology
  • Two backgrounds: wealthy farmer background and philosophy
    • “both the universalist frame of reference of an enlightenment intellectual and the more homespun perspective of the provincial backwoodsman” (xi Jose Harris)
• 1909: co-founds German Sociological Association with Weber and others (president for most of the time, till ousted by Nazis in 1933)
• Was a socialist
• Visited England often (thought of emigrating) and US once
• 1892, cofounds German Society for Ethical Culture (society that helped various labor movements, social reform movements, etc; believed that b/c Christianity was on decline, needed some organization to replace its charity)
• Best known for Gm and Gs
• Saw himself as bringing analytic philosophy down to earth and daily life
• Seen as founder of modern methods of sociology: contributed mostly to “pure sociology” (theoretical sociology: ideal types, static conditions) (pure sociology, applied sociology, empirical sociology) (important for understanding Gm and Gs)
• Anti-positivist, despite American, French, and English positivist currents
• Influenced by
  • Karl Marx (he’s a Marxist b/c economics seen as key to history, but Tonnies emphasizes trade where Marx emphasized technological conditions; Tonnies said he was “happy to draw attention” to Marx – Jose Harris
    • Differences: thought Marx was pathological whereas he wanted to show where society worked well; Marx’s historical pictures weren’t detailed enough (“just a sketch”) (hence all those details about what was and wasn’t necessary in his own pictures of the development of Gs); Marx doesn’t understand central place of trade (it’s trade, not industry, that changed life, says Tonnies); skeptical about Marx’s prophecy about communism (comes “out of the blue”) (quotes are from Bergner 1975)
    • Wanted to interpret Marx’s apothegm that mode of production determines consciousness to production conditions it (a looser connection)
    • His book on Marx tries to look at him outside of the leftist bias of previous biographers; restores Engels’ influence
  • Lorenz Stein (first German thinker commenting on French socialism, taking it seriously, not just some demented folks)
  • Ferdinand Lasalle (introduced to him through a colleague; thought proletariat deserved more power)
  • Thomas Hobbes (actually stumbled across the manuscripts of Hobbes’ works that had been forgotten and thus published corrected versions of two of Hobbes’ works that had formerly been edited and published only in parts); Hobbes’ social contract similar to “arbitrary will” and took to heart characterization of society as one of competition); claimed Hobbes was actually a “pioneering sociologist” (Harris xxv); said Hobbes gave him the idea of the ideal type (paring human associations down to bare essentials, like geometrical figure; not as judgment or as true description, but cognitive tools Harris xxv)
  • Spinoza (ideas on will), Sir Henry Maine (romantic historicism)
  • Otto von Gierke (German historian who studied medieval law; Roman law influence on modern law ruined Gm-based law; opponent of civil law)
• Anti-influences: J. S. Mill (“flabby”), Hegel (neglected social groups’ relationship to will), Darwin (wanted to avoid social Darwinism: cares about social change, not biological change), and Nietzsche (Nietzsche represents the problems of the modern age, like moral relativism, abandonment of tradition, emphasis on individual progress; more directed against his followers; advocated aristocracy, libertinism, despotism)
• Academic career: didn’t seriously pursue his degree (wanted to study criminals, so just … left) and supported dockworkers’ strike in Hamburg (1896), so not given tenure (ie, still a Privatdozent) until 1906 (46 years old)
  • Failed and failed to get tenure
  • Mixture of his politics and his scholarly habits (moved around to study criminals instead of, you know, staying to lecture students and being a part of the department)
  • Offered one job on condition that he would give up the Ethical Society: refused
• Famous w/reprint of Gs and Gm in 1912; finally given tenure
• Utopian communities
  • 1881 (as begins Gm and Gs) first, alternative academic community (university is not right for real scholars; trust, community; economic equality; lectures on ethics)
  • Throughout 90s, he works with labor movements (even entered a workman’s association and would go hang out with them), lobbying for shortened work day, abolishing child labor, factory inspections, state insurance to cover any medical or economic calamity a family might suffer
  • 1893: Wanted Ethical Culture Society to sponsor groups of families to create small, cooperative neighborhoods (common use of common supplies), so later many of these small neighborhoods could be combined gradually into larger groups
• 1896: Was told to research the dockworker’s strike in Hamburg, and then sympathized with them so much that he wrote newspaper articles against the tendency to see this strike as some kind of international plot
• Crime and suicide were also his themes; public opinion, custom, and
• Critique of scientific reason
  • Science is not neutral
  • It’s really just about pursuing wealth
  • Even social science, insofar as it teaches that the way things are, are “necessary and eternal” (2002 xxi)
  • ”...the striving for freedom from nature only created a refined slavery” (xxi, free from nature but not from other people)
  • Yet eventually if torn from the grasp of capitalists, it could help humanity
• Critique of Public Opinion
  • Public opinion just private property of a few intellectuals in a big city
  • As a force of rational reason, in practice it just naturalizes the present state of domination
• All [of|] this connected to his philosophical contribution: “synthesis of|? rationalistic natural law theory and the historic-organic theory [of|] society” (Herberle 213)

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Historical background

• Ancient forerunners: Confucius’ distinction between Small Tranquility and Great Similarity, Plato’s Republic features Gm like ideal republic versus his picture of an oligarchic republic like Gs, Cicero’s two types of friendship, St. Augustine’s City of God versus society of men
• As well as more recent forerunners: German Historical School and Hegel’s “family-society” versus “civil society;” Spencer’s militant form and industrial form; Wundt’s natural and cultural polarity; Maine’s status society and contract society
• Other philosophers before him had used the terms
  • But he makes the first sustained, precise study of them
• Took “six or seven years” to write
  • Right after the German Socialist Party had been outlawed: so that makes him disillusioned
• Meant to be his habilitation work, but he didn’t get it for the book until rediscovered in 1912

Reception

• 1887 publication (he’s age 32): little response, mostly negative
  • Only sold half of the 500 print run
  • Reviewers praised the sentiment for the premodern (which as we’ll see later is an unfair position)
  • Of original reviewers, only Durkheim liked it, but said that modern society isn’t as “artificial” as Tonnies makes it out to be
  • Only contemporary sociologists read it
  • Stamps says it’s because no one was really criticizing modernization yet and had to wait 25 years for people to start sympathizing with its message
• 1912 publication and the 6 reprints before his death in 1936: very popular (even internationally), and translated into English in 1940
  • 1926 article by Louis Wirth, American sociologist, praising him as the “veteran” sociologist (funny: saw American sociology as a “hey this is cool” attitude, with German ones as having little WWKD bracelets: what would Kant do?)
  • Why? Sociology now a firm discipline, and growing critique of modernization seems to fit in with the book
  • Why? Because during first World War, served as patriotic proof that German Gm society superior to rest of Western society
  • Why? Young Romantic thinkers liked what they saw as a call to return to a better, more organic society
• Also critiqued for its old-fashioned, nineteenth-century style
  • The words “lengthy,” “ponderous,” and “unreadable” come up again and again
• At his death, seen as “the first attempt to separate the trans-historical and historical elements within the social structure”
• After death: influence continues as the theoretician of the branches of sociology; resurgence of his works in the 1970s; the interest has slowed down; now, scattered works here and there, but work is mostly uneven and few and far between
  • Most of the work now is just clarification, justification, correction: all argument, little consensus about what he actually meant

Nazism

• Another reason why his work is neglected…
• After World War II, the book is condemned as being a party to Nazism
• Liberal thinkers like Lukacs saw it as the type of Romanticism that brought Hitler to power
• Conservatives between first and second world wars attacked the new Weimar Republic as “decadent” and full of “Western rationalism”
• Nazism was in part a negative response to modernization: change of life that happened so quickly all of the sudden needed to be reappraised
• Volksgemeinschaft: part of Nazi propaganda, coming out of the discussions of Gemeinschaft invigorated (but not exactly created) by Tonnies
  • “people’s community” (National Socialist): a mode of nationalist that called for complete control of cultural and social life of the nation
  • the rejuvenation of gemeinschaft will require purifying the state of all ethnicities not directly from the German soil… (Jews, Gypsies, communists, the handicapped, etc)
• Although his preface to Gm and Gs says “I was never a Romantic!”
• That’s unfair! As John Samples says, if you don’t blame Marx for Stalin, how could you blame Tonnies for Hitler?
• B/c worried about rise of Hitler, in 1930 joined the Social Democratic party (despite previous neutrality), and in 1932, wrote open letter to prime minister saying that they needed to use force to keep Hitler and the National Socialists away, and he expressed disapproval of the firing of a Jewish professor
• Letters show him as profoundly worried by anti-Semitism
• He was condemned in the Nazi official newspaper and stripped of his post and his pension: poor for the rest of this life
• Two decades later, said he’s a precursor of National Socialists: how sad.
• In general, he was misunderstood because of the complexity of his influences (some people only see Hobbes and not Maine, or just Maine and not Hobbes), because of his “archaic” and complex writing style, and the association with German Romanticism that lead to hyper-nationalistic political stands

Purpose and Structure

• Tempting to see this book as a historical progression, but this one is more about creating the concepts
• Creating concepts here, will show history and give empirical data later
  • Tonnies saw it as founding methods for scientific sociology: pure sociology
    • Empirical sociology would actually start from facts and observations; he thought that when he actually got around to that part of the project, he’d see a mixture of the two)
  • Took Kantian view of world: the world is chaotic, and we construct ideas to explain and order it, so sociology should give us concepts to study society
• 1935: Geist der Neuzeit a collection of fragments that he had planned to make into that longer, historical work
• Aristotelian concepts (versus Weberian understanding of concepts in progress and change)
• Other two goals: to create a tentative view of history (this wasn’t the main point, mind you, and the changed subtitles took this second goal out); to comment on epistemological fights in philosophy (about relationship between experience and concepts)
• Subtitles
  • First one: A Treatise on Communism and Socialism as Empirical Patterns of Culture
    • Social organization and political philosophy are “not mere products of imagination but phenomena of real social life” (qtd in Herberle 214)
    • Communism in Gm as the past (primitive societies)
    • Socialism in Gs as a future possibility that is beginning to evolve now (world-wide planned economy to be developed out of labor movement)
    • Future socialism will be a synthesis of Gm and Gs
• Second one: Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology
  • Now, it’s less about historical progress, more about static types

The other half of the book is on will

• Will not as part of instinct, but affiliated with thought
• Natural will (Wesenwille) (wesen = “living being,” “an essence”) (or “integral will”)
  • First, primitive community, created around material and sexual needs, having pleasure and avoiding pain; then, learn to work, so that you learn that some “pain” (labor) is necessary for later pleasure; finally creation of language (no longer like animals)
  • “overcome unity of pleasure and activity” (xvii)
  • Associated with relationships as pleasure of association
  • Peasant, artist, women, young folks
  • Self-fulfilling
  • Unity of ends and means
• Rational will (Kurwille) (kur = “to choose”) (or, arbitrary will)
  • Ends are subordinated to means
  • Instrumental
  • Associated with relationships as instrumental use of your fellow folks
  • Businessmen, scientists, upper classes
  • Temperament, character
  • Completely separates feeling from action: severs ends and means
  • This instrumentalization asks how can you most easily get to the ends? (utility)
  • Thus leads to potential exploitation (people are only seen as means to ends)
  • Modern subject dominated by this: they are told they have a choice, but they know they must choose the choice that’s “logically” the right one (most efficient) – so we have no choice: lack of freedom (you are dominated by your reason) (example: labor: it’s not about freely choosing type of labor; it’s really about the forced necessity to sell your labor in the first place and getting put in a dominated position b/c you, as needing commodities, are in the vulnerable position, unlike capitalist, who in this venture only struggles for extra profit, for his cost of living is already secured)
  • Thought now given domination over feelings
  • For example, utilitarianism: greatest happiness. Tonnies says that the happiness never actually arrives, though it dominates our actions. In ends-means rationality, happiness is always a future goal (what will happen if you select the correct means), but you’re never going to get there because it is only an expectation. Leads to “general state of anxiety” (xviii) in society

What are Gm and Gs?

• “Two periods contrasted with each other in the history of the great systems of culture: a period of Gs follows a period of Gm. The Gemeinschaft is characterized by the social will as concord, folkways, mores, and religion; the Gs by the social will as convention, legislation, and public opinion” (231)
• One, you are born into; the other is entered by mutual agreement
• Why? to show that communism and socialism were real, actually existing in real social life; and that signs of it still exist in modern society (“survivals from the past” 2002 ix)
• They are more “ideal types” than existing societies (it’s not fair to say that he’s wrong b/c he oversimplifies: that’s kind of the point)
  • Gm and Gs work on realm of theoretical sociology: just an concept, folks!
  • No society is either one or the other
  • Any real society will be a mixture of the two
    • Dialectical: “are to be considered as co-existing and co-effective as well as contradicotry and opposing tendencies” (by premier Tonnies scholar Cahnman, qtd in Muller 1263)
    • Need quote in Killham: “twin impulses coexisting in the strange amphibian man under the more familiar names of heart and head” (381)
  • They are “directional concepts,” just tendencies
  • But you need these types before you can look at society with any form of organization (Kant: we need to create concepts to apply to chaotic reality; unlike Hume, who says experience itself generates concepts of understanding)
• Alternatively, we can conceptualize a continuum between the two
• The Middle Ages, or “family” is NOT really, actually a Gemeinschaft
  • Think of it more as a tendency (the gemeinschaft state of mind)

His own opinions

• Myth: he’s a pessimistic dreamer who wishes to return to the Golden Age
  • Pessimism: he says in 1898, “I have personally rescued myself from the hopelessness of this thought” by seeing two alternatives for progress of society: either stagnation and preservation or adaptation. Adaptation would be the way of the workers and the people (516 Herberle)
• Is he a Romantic? He says he’s not
  • He claims “a historian’s disinterestedness” (Killham 381)
  • Lots of scholars who want to minimize the Nazi association feel like they have to do so by proving without a doubt that he’s not a Romantic
  • But then again, he did admit that civilization wasn’t all bad: it did lift people out of humdrum routines and make them more able to grasp the beauty of the world around them (Toennies, the Mandarins, and Materialism, by David Lindenfeld; German Studies Review 11.1 57-81); and science if properly handled could help bring a better society
    • So maybe we can find a compromise formation that allows his writing to be somewhat romantic but not a direct cause of Nazism
  • in Einfuhrung in die Soziologie: hanging on to the historical concept of Gm was “irrelevant and politically dangerous” (xvi), said that true Romantics glorify an illusory, fictive past
  • Stamps says that Tonnies shows that Gm is only “tyranny and lies,” while Gs is “new forms of domination,” so that both types are critiqued (not that one is great, the other not)
• Christopher Adair-Toteef says that he’s a “utopian visionary:” it’s less about critiquing the past or returning to it, but instead about using the best of the past in order to rejuvenate the present and therefore make a new future
• But other commentators definitely note the Romantic tendency (the people who say he’s not a Romantic sound the most on their guard and tenuous to me)
• But I still have a problem about reading Tonnies so generously. I still think the text itself is tricky, as far as tone goes (is he judging? is he affirmative? sometimes it’s not clear)
  • We need to read his style carefully (1890 review noted its “difficult” and “unusual” language and recommended reading it more than once)
• Is he pessimistic? Some critics said his stuff about the medieval Gm was pessimistic, and others said his stuff about modern civilization was pessimistic, but he said he wasn’t (in one preface, dissociated himself from Spenglers’ Decline and Fall)
• So, he said he’s neither Romantic nor pessimistic
  • Of course, he both made attempts to reinstate Gm in today’s society AND he still expressed doubt about the ability to get past Gs
  • He said Gm is youth, Gs is old age (and no one would condemn old age, so he’s not condemning Gs: it’s a natural process of aging)
• An early critic, Rudolf Herberle, said he was critical of both modes: probably the safest interpretation—but surely there’s room for making arguments either way
• What can we do with this ambiguity?
• Some say he liked Gm but not Gs, some that he liked Gs but not Gm, some that he hated both.
  • I think we can only safely say that people see what they want to read into it
• His solution
  • His own mixture of Kantian moral philosophy and Marxist social critique (2002 xxii)
  • Wanted to mix romantic ideas of organic society like Sir Henry Maine with materialist-rationalist criticism like Marx and Hobbes)
  • Keeps the idea of objective duty from the Gs but ditches its self-interest; keeps the Gm’s notion of ties and non-exploitation but ditches its unflinching acceptance of “old” ideas just for their own sake
  • His ideal society: free, rational individuals who nonetheless transcend egotism and thus keep Kant’s optimism about freedom
  • This utopia would be what Marx’s “rule of the working class” would look like

Gm/Gs as Theme in Modernist Lit

• The nostalgia trap: romanticization of older social formations
• Creation of “artificial” Gm within the Gs (coteries)
• Rejection of restrictive Gm in favor of the freeing Gs
  • Love of anonymity in the city (Baudelaire’s flaneur)
• Critique of means-ends rationality (why hate the bourgeois?)
  • “You only care about money!”
  • Science is only a tool to uncover causality for the purposes of exploitation (it tells us the proper means to your given ends)
• Some authors
  • Eliot: “dissociation of sensibility” akin to shift from Gm to Gs and later career (esp. with religious commitment) as attempt to reconnect with Gm
  • Benjamin: loss of aura is akin to this shift
  • Woolf: Between the Acts village pageantry
  • Ford: The Good Soldier, where John Dowell tries assiduously to go back in time and revive the old paternalistic “lord of the manor” lifestyle
  • Rhys: her characters are aswim in Gs, lost, with only the memory of or a fragmentary grasp on any Gm (Wide Sargasso Sea with its reference to the Caribbean plantation)
  • Forster: Howards End as an attempt to create a new view of England uprooted rationalist Schlegels with the Gs aristocrats Wilcoxes, A Room with a View asks, though marriage plot, to choose between customary values and intellectual cosmopolitanism
  • Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand stories
• Astonishing group-ism of modernists: where you see an “ism,” you can also see a community: a Gm in the midst of Gs: Bloomsbury, Der Blaue Reiters, groups about HD, around Valery; Vorticists, Imagists
• The best direct influence argument is for D H Lawrences, whose two-year stint in Germany happened to begin in 1912
  • At least heard about it from people around him
  • The Rainbow and Study of Thomas Hardy use the mixture of will and community formation, as well as the gendered understanding of society (men as rational and ungrounded, women as instinctual and grounded)

Current scholarship

• Raymond Williams uses GM and GS as one of his key words in his scholarship, most notably The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence/
• Used in musicology and film critique; mostly in sociology, as you might guess
• John Killham’s 1977 article in 19 c Fiction “The Idea of the Community in the English Novel” one of the few sustained analyses”
  • Wordsworth’s “Home at Grasmere” contrasts the city where “he is truly alone / He of the multitude whose eyes are doomed / To hold a vacant commerce day by day,” with the rural land where “Society is here / A true Community, a geniune frame / Of many into one incorporate”
  • Jane Austen as the last of the great Gemeinschaft writers (Austen’s “two or three families in a country village is the very thing to work on)
  • George Eliot documenting the signs of Gs emerging within the old Gm world (Mill on Floss: Maggie’s love for her brother and legend of St. Ogg are the old, whereas the society of St Ogg town is Gs)
  • Dickens’ lamentations are for the passing of Gm, with some of his grotesqueries coming out of a need to manufacture Gm artificially (for example, Wemmick’s castle in David Copperfield)
  • Henry James showing how awful it is when people are used as means and not ends (Golden Bowl, Bostonians, Wings of the Dove)
• Janet’s 2004 article Gadze Modernism in Modernism/Modernity on Gypsy culture
  • Alternative communities that did not conform to the orthodox definition of community as defined by Tonnies (ie, centered on families associated with a particular piece of land) were set up as positive models by modernists such as Symons, Lawrence, and Marinetti
  • From Ottoline Morrell dressing up as a Gypsy to Eliot’s Madame Sosostris in “The Wasteland”
  • Wasn’t necessarily premodern or an escape from modernity, but possibility within modernity itself
• Noah Isenburg’s 1999 book //Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism
  • Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Zweig
  • As Gemeinschaft became popular in German culture, Jewish intellectuals reacted to it in various ways
  • Zionism: their own Gemeinschaft
  • Pessimism: they see that they’re excluded from German Volk
  • Recovery of Yiddish as organic, authentic language
• Jed Esty: “National Objects: Keynesian Economics and Modernist Culture in England”
  • Eliot’s lamentations in the thirties about soil erosion are Gm
  • He uses Gm as an adjective to put onto “nostalgia:” misreading?
  • Says that Woolf, Forster, and Eliot wrote literature in the 1930s that examined the Gm positively, though in the 1920s their literature had expressed cynicism and rejection of Gm
• Jessica Berman’s 2001 Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community
  • James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein used cosmopolitanism to re-create a Gemeinschaft that looks past national boundaries
• Kevin Whelan’s “The Memories of ‘The Dead’”
  • Loss of gemeinschaft, now in a cultulrally unified Western society, serves as cornerstone for politically “right” modernism (Eliot, Pound)
  • While the left makes do with a “fragmented” cultural inheritance
  • Meanwhile, Joyce is different because heritage of being Irish: they are modernity because they are colonized, directly feeling the alienation and fragmentation associated with Gs
  • Like Zionism, the Celtic Revival in Ireland (Irish language, Celtic sports, etc)
  • http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v015/15.1whelan.html
• The basic understanding of Tonnies is that he’s a romanticist who thinks in black-and-white terms only and wishes a return to feudalism. It really hurts to see people constantly saying that Tonnies’ ideas are simplistic! They don’t understand the place of the work within his oeuvre…
• Most of the works refer not to Tonnies, but to the general concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
  • Suggests that his heritage is not exactly his own ideas, but instead the availability of these terms to use flexibly and loosely
  • They help to organize the questions about the value of modernization

In Modernist Thought

• One of the founders of sociology (the technique of categorizing, plus thoughts about statistics)
• Durkheim and Weber: they all read and reacted to each other, and teasing out the pattern is outside the scope of this project
• Similarity to Simmel: Gm is relation for relations’ sake, just as sociability is socializing for its own sake
• Louis Mumford’s 1938 The City in Culture (assessment of urban environment)
• Otto Spengler’s 1918 Decline of the West (idea of cultures “aging”)
• Heidegger (concerns about modernity)
• Although most modernist uses Tonnies as a punching bag, sociology’s own recurring reinterpretations of Tonnies are a better place for us to start at.
• Yes, I know that the simplistic version is what most people were probably conversant in and knew about; I don’t want to underemphasize the power of this model as a stimulus to imagination: a strikingly clear way to understand the complex reactions to modernity that modernism encompasses.
• However, if we want to get closer to Tonnies himself, we notice that his ideas recede. Even inside the work itself, and seen as a part of his overall career.
• Tonnies’ ambiguity makes the book Gs and Gm a litmus test for your own views on modernization. Perhaps, then, we can find more meaning and insight in the process of questioning and suspending the various interpretations of Tonnies against each other than in any single answer we might arrive at.

Shawna Ross
Spring 2008
Janet Lyon

The Modernists’ Rorschach:
Ferdinand T�nnies, Ambiguity, and the Evalution of Modernity

Born in 1855 in a timber-clad manor house in the middle of nowhere, in a lonely farming community between Prussia and Denmark, Ferdinand T�nnies entered the world as the younger son of a wealthy cattle breeder. Living in one of the few remaining independent peasant communities, unruled by any prince or parliament, T�nnies enjoyed a life of pure Gemeinschaft until eleven years of age, when his beloved Shleswig-Holstein was engulfed into the Prussian state. As the son of a land-loving farmer, but the brother of a cosmopolitan trader as comfortable with London as he was with the farm or with Berlin, and as the best friend of the sentimental poet Theodor Storm but as a philosophy student conversant with the classics of Western literature, T�nnies enjoyed �both the universalist frame of reference of an enlightenment intellectual and the more homespun perspective of the provincial backwoods-man� (Harris 318). His influences came from a wide variety of disciplines: he loved Marx even when he disagreed with him, believed German thinker Lorenz Stein�s novel assertion that the French socialists were not in fact just a group of poor demented souls, loved Hobbes’ social contract theory so much that he called Hobbes a �pioneering sociologist� (Harris xxv), and selectively choose congenial ideas from Otto von Gierke, Herbert Spencer, Sir Henry Maine, and Baruch Spinoza. Meanwhile, he dismissed Hegel and Mill as �flabby� and looked in disgust at the unthinking, bandwagoneers following Darwin and Nietzsche (the former because social Darwinism placed too much emphasis on biology, and the latter because the Nietzsche cult glorified and encouraged what he thought was worst in modernity�its libertinism, its despotism, and its aristocractic elitism).
After roving around various universities, he finally acquired his doctorate in classical philology from T�bingen in 1877, though his interests already tended towards sociology, which was not yet a well-defined discipline. Not the most devoted or conscientious of young scholars, he habitually ditched the university for the comforts of his ancestral home or for the stimulating interest of various prisons (as a part, of course, of his sociological interests). As a result of his peripatetic life, he languished as a Privatdozent until 1913�over fifty years of age. Of course, larger causes loomed in the background: his shady political proclivities. Widely suspected as a socialist (which he was), T�nnies had worked openly with various labor movements, notably supporting the 1896 dockworkers’ strike in Hamberg with a series of bitter diatribes against the state, published in a newspaper where he also aired his beliefs in shorter work days, the abolition of child labor, the necessity for regular factory inspections, and a state-supplied insurance that would cover any medical or economic calamity a working family might face. A habitual joiner, his founding and involvement with the German Society for Ethical Culture had raised eyebrows. (This was a society joined by intellectuals and prominent citizens to support socialist-tinged efforts like labor movements and reform bills, energized by the belief that the deterioration of Christianity created a need for other sources of support for the lower classes.) When told that he could have a full professorship if he quite the Ethical Society, he refused and therefore had to wait until 1913 for a stable position with which to support his wife and five children.
Why did he finally receive a chair? His early work, 1887’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft had languished in obscurity�having only sold a little over two hundred copies in its first run, read only by a few sociologists, and not well-reviewed by them, except for Weber (maybe part of it was that the reviews I saw mentioned words such as �lengthy,� �ponderous,� and �unreadable�)�until was reprinted in 1912 to rousing success, running into six more editions before his death in 1936. This book gave him international fame, and its ideas are still what he is primarily known for. Within sociology, he is known as a biographer and critic of Marx, as one of the three founders of sociology (along with the two sociologists more well-known today, Weber and Durkheim), as the theorist of the types of sociology (pure, applied, and theoretical), and as an incisive thinker about such wide-ranging topics as customs and folk-beliefs, criminality, public opinion, and suicide. In philosophy, he is known as the biographer and commentator on Hobbes (in fact, while at Oxford doing research, he re-discovered manuscript versions of crucial texts that had been ignored since Hobbes’ death), as the critic of scientific reason (science, he argued, is not value-neutral; it supports the capitalists’ pursuit of wealth, so that �the striving for freedom from nature only created a refined slavery� und Gs xxi?), and as the great synthesizer of two opposing philosophical methods: rational social-contract theory of folks like Hobbes and Locke and romantic, organic theories of history like those of Sir Henry Maine.
But Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is still his most important work. Though a wealth of philosophers had made similar distinctions (refer to your handout), T�nnies was the first one to make a careful, systematic examination of them. For its belated fame�recognized twenty-five years after its initial publication�we should thank faith that nineteenth-century Germany had in modernization, which did not fade until the first years of the twentieth century, when more and more commentators started having second thoughts about the wonders of modernization. Around the outbreak of World War I, a growing number of young Romantic thinkers starting coming out of the woodwork; they sympathized with the apparently blissful portrait of Old Germany. In addition, political conservatives liked the unfavorable picture of the modern capitalist world. Interestingly enough (and unfortunately enough for him), this resurgence of interest in T�nnies is largely responsible for his relative obscurity today: the Romantic strain some read into the book has often been read as a contributing cause to the rise of Hitler. After World War II, liberal thinkers like Luk�cs noticed the unsettling parallels between his portraits of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft with the Nazi party’s distinction between solid German folk values and the Jewish-Western world of rationalist, capitalist decadence. Out of the discussions that T�nnies had helped to raise came the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft, literally �the people’s community,� which justified the state’s complete control over the social and cultural life of its citizens and therefore also justified its purging of all of those not considered sons and daughters of German soil.
Yet T�nnies during his lifetime kept as far away from the National Socialists as possible. Worried about the rise of Hitler, he joined the Social Democratic party in 1930 (despite his former claims to academic political neutrality) and in 1932 wrote an open letter to the prime minister that advocated the use of force to keep the National Socialists out of power. This open letter cost him his job and his pension, reducing him to poverty for the rest of his life. Calling him a direct precursor to Nazism therefore seems extreme and even cruel, although we can still observe that the sentiments expressed in the book did align with the sentiments that contributed to the rise of the Nazis. But as John Samples noted, if we don’t blame Marx for Stalin, how can we blame T�nnies for Hitler?
This association with Hitler is not the only problem with the text; the other is its apparent cultural pessimism. On first glance, the book seems to be pure nostalgia, irrationally championing a long-lost feudalism while unequivocally damning the capitalist present. Yet T�nnies insisted throughout his life that his work was objective, emptied of emotion and judgment, and he said in his Introduction to Sociology that hanging on to the idea of a pure Gm would be �irrelevant and politically dangerous� (xvi). And we can only maintain this romantic interpretation if we are not aware of the the book�s function within T�nnies’s complete oeuvre: this book was not meant to describe reality or outline a historical progression from medieval Gemeinschaft to nineteenth-century Gesellschaft; it was meant to be a work of what T�nnies called �pure sociology,� which created ideal types�not empirically real types that actually exist, but artificially constructed, static categories merely meant to help the sociologist before beginning the empirical observations that would lead to descriptions of specific socities. Werner Cahnman, the preeminant T�nnies scholar, stresses the dialectical nature of the two concepts: they �are to be considered as co-existing and co-effective as well as contradictory and opposing tendencies� (qtd. in Muller 1263). A contemporary sociologist, John Killham, calls these two types �the twin impulses coexisting in the strange amphibian man under the more familiar names of heard and head� (381). In short, as descriptors of actually existing societies, Gm and Gs are mere directional tendencies. Any society will have a mixture of both impulses, so we could profitably see any society as somewhere along a continuum between Gm and Gs�but never purely one or the other.
Although T�nnies did admit to feeling despair in his youth about the current state of culture, he had a hypothesis for the future: a dialectical synthesis of the two wherein one could keep the progress made by scientific rationalism but use Gemeinschaft-ian ethics to keep the capitalist sharks at bay. Because of these ambiguities�his changes of mind during his career, his claim that his work is objective despite its clear distribution of morally loaded terms in favor of Gemeinschaft, and the rhetorical complexity of the book itself�T�nnies scholars and sociologists have had a range of interpretations: that both types are damned, that both types are praised, that one or the other is damned or praised, whether this is so in parts of the book, the whole book, or in light of his entire career. Most of the critical work on him, then, I found as criticism of other scholars, elaborations, objections, demythologizing theses, careful distinctions, and constant bickering. And indeed the book itself has generated a great range of interpretations (we might extrapolate Hulme�s theory to say that this text partakes of the �well� model, rather than the �bucket� model), so I think it safe to say that historically, T�nnies has been whoever his readers wanted him to be. For practical purposes, the book is a black box that reads �modernization,� and readers find in it their own hopes or fears about modernization.
I do not mean to suggest that the book has no specific tendencies or ideas; the sad voice we hear when reading the text is not just in our heads. And in fact, the persistent misreading of T�nnies�the causal reference to his �romantic nostalgia� that I found everywhere in literary criticism�itself contains the important lesson that the rhetoric of modernism depends on the distinction between the two types of society. But what I want to emphasize here is that the ambiguities in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft make it not only a litmus test for testing the conservatism, pessimism, romanticism, or progressivism of our favorite modernists, but also as a conceptual tool�a handy stylization of the contrary impulses of social relationships that let the modernists investigate the wonders and terrors of modernization with a certain clarity that is hard to find elsewhere. Perhaps, then, we can find more meaning and insight in the process of questioning and suspending the various interpretations of T�nnies against one another, than in any single answer we might formulate.