Tönnies' Theory of Gemeinshaft and Gesellshaft 2

Berghahn Books
"Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft": The Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy

Author(s): Niall Bond
Source: Contributions to the History of Concepts, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2009), pp. 162-186
Published by: Berghahn Books
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BRILL Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 briil.nl/chco
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschafh,

The Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy
Niall Bond
Universite Lnmiere Lyon 2 Universite Lyon/EHESS
Abstract
Ferdinand Tonnies's oeuvre Gemeinschaft und Gesellschafi, published in 1887, has

been seminal for the social and human sciences in general, and is no less interest
ing for intellectual historians and theoreticians of concept formation in particular.
Tonnies subscribed to the belief that terms could be rendered less ambiguous,
defining the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschafi more narrowly than their con
temporary usage. In so doing, he sought to reconcile a heterogeneous agenda ini
tially consisting in offering a diagnosis of vast historical developments and later
consisting in providing heuristic tools to analyze individual relationships. This
article examines the origins of the concepts and their politicized transformation
prior to and subsequent to the publication of his work. As such, it takes on the
transformation of Gemeinschaft during the romantic era and its revival by Ger
many's nationalist right wing and contrasts it with its appropriation by left-leaning
communitarian movements in the English-speaking world. The polysemy of the
terms in the German language accounts for their semantic evolution, for amalga
mations of meanings within Tonnies's conceptual system, and for conundrums in
translating the work into English or French. Although the terms were erroneously
supposed to have been immediately applicable as ideal types, their adaptation,
inter alia by Max Weber or by Talcott Parsons in the form of pattern variables, has
been important in the reception ofTonnies's work in the social sciences.
Keywords
Tonnies, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, community, society
Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is the founding work of

modern German sociology and has achieved the status of a fundamental
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/180793209X12599171659574
N. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 163
reference in the human sciences.1 The two terms of the title are elucidated
in the work's three volumes, each one of them dealing respectively with
social structures typical of historical epochs — essentially medievalism and
modernism -, their underlying psychological basis in "essential" and "arbi
trary" will, and their normative foundations in natural law.2 Few have heeded
Friedrich Paulsen's advice to read the book not as a mere presentation of
two concepts of the social sciences but as a philosophical opus, the dimen
sions of which compare to the early works of Hobbes or Schopenhauer.•'
The international reception ofTonnies's terms, which preceded the first
translations of his work, was for a long time limited to loose and superficial
allusions to the increasingly celebrated dichotomy. Emile Durkheim com
mented that the words, Gemeinschafi and Gesellschaft, were untranslatable.4
The extent of this difficulty is attested by the differing English translations
of the title: while the word Gemeinschafi — which underwent shifts in
meaning primarily under romantic authors in the early nineteenth century
and more significantly through Tonnies's own influence at the beginning
of the twentieth century - has been consistently translated into English
as "community," the term Gesellschaft has been rendered inconsistently -
by Charles Loomis as "association" in 19555 and as "society" in 1957,6
and more recently by Jose ffarris and Margaret Hollis as "civil society"
in 2001.7
In his translation, Loomis left Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in German,

followed by "community" and "society" in parentheses, because of the "dif
ficulty [...] encountered if one attempted their translation by any one pair
of terms." Furthermore, "since the English words do not carry the conno
tations peculiar to the German concepts as used by Tonnies, and since
sociologists are familiar with Tonnies's use of them, it has been deemed
advisable to retain the German words in most places in the text."8
" Karl Dunkmann (1925).

21 Ferdinand Tonnies (1979).
31 Friedrich Paulsen (1888), XII, 111-119.
4) Emile Durkheim (1889), xxvii, 4l6fF.
5) Ferdinand Tonnies (1955).
6) Ferdinand Tonnies (1957). Hereafter, Charles P. Loomis (1957).
71 Ferdinand Tonnies (2001). Hereafter, Jose Harris (2001).
81 Charles P Loomis (1957), fn. 1, 283 f., fn. 2, 284.
164 N. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186
Throughout the life ofTonnies, who died in 1936, "his" terms came to
be "used" by non-German speaking sociologists in the French and English
speaking worlds, although the work had not been translated and subse
quent translations have always made sure to point out the enormous
difficulty posed by the work's inaccessibility. But superficial reference to
the dichotomy has spared uncountable academics of the painstaking anal
ysis that a scrupulous reading of the erudite and allusive philosophical
work necessarily entails.
The torpid reception of the work and resistance displayed by its transla
tors are related to its extremely difficult language, which appeared anti
quated even to contemporaries, transporting the reader back to the age of
Fichte and Hegel, according to Gustav Schmoller.9 While praising the
"terse strength" ofTonnies's language, Paulsen also complained of its cum
bersome syntax.10 Tonnies responded to Paulsen's critique defensively,
writing that he was happy not to use the mundane German of contempo
rary journalism." Jose Harris points out that Tonnies was a "Great Unread
able" to contemporary Germans,12 but while she attributes this to Tonnies's
command of a grammar that has fallen into desuetude, the obscurity is in
fact often due to ungrammatical sentences and idiosyncratic diction. Much
basic editorial work on Gemeinschaft und Gesellschafi seems to have never
been carried out, and obfuscating passages were never remedied through
out the eight editions ofTonnies's lifespan.
The terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschafi have been received beyond the
boundaries of the German language specifically as Tonnies's, as if they were
neologisms created in 1887, although both words were of ancient German
usage with a wealth of heterogeneous and at times contradictory meanings.
Tonnies's ambition to restrict the semantics of words that had taken on
vastly diverse meanings was doomed to failure. This, however, does not
make his work uninteresting in itself. By now, critical readings ofTonnies's
work should be aware of the evolution of meanings revealed in the ground
breaking work Geschichtliche Grnndbegrijfe, by Reinhart Koselleck et ah,
which devotes a full article to the opposition between Gesellschafi: and
9) Gustav Schnioller (1888) and Ferdinand Tonnies (1888), 12. Jg. 2 Heft, 727-729.
"" Friedrich Paulsen (1888).
n) Friedrich Paulsen and Ferdinand Tonnies (1961).
121 Jose Harris (2001), xxxviii.
GemeinschaftYet in this respect, commentary on Tonnies has remained

naive.
The Terms and their Translations
Loomis' decision to use Gemeinschaft and Gesellschafi in German followed

in parentheses by the terms "community" and "society" is odd, as normally
translators would use the English terms in the text, followed by the Ger
man in parentheses. Loomis adopted this tactic when confronted with the
impossibility of translating German idiomatic expressions, such as "Der
Jiingling wirdgewarnt vor schlechter Gesellschafi": while Germans may warn
the young against bad Gesellschaft, in English, the young are told to avoid
not "bad society," but bad "company." Neither do the semantic fields
delimited by Gemeinschaft and "community" fully match each other: Ton
nies often uses Gemeinschaft to signify a small community of people, but
also uses it abstractly, in the sense of "communion." This being said, "com
munity" is the closest word the English lexicon offers for Gemeinschaft, and
society is the closest equivalent to Gesellschaft, rather than "association"
and "civil society."
Though Harris's and Hollis's choice of "civil society" may have been
motivated by their desire to underline a perceived continuity between
Tdnnies's and Ferguson's philosophies of history, their choice was not the
least unsuitable, since 1) the simple word, society, corresponds less inade
quately to the semantic fields covered by Gesellschaft, and Tonnies did not
use the contemporary German equivalent of "civil society," i.e. burgerliche
Gesellschaft-, 2) Tonnies's diagnosis of the development of modern society
hardly focused upon its "civility;" 3) Tonnies's occasional use of the term
burgerliche Gesellschaft, (translated by Leif into French as societe civile), was
more accurately rendered by Loomis as "bourgeois society," given Tonnies's
debt to Marx at a time when Treitschke's representations of burgerliche
Gesellschaft were also more bourgeois than civil;14 and 4) the collocation
"civil society" in English has taken on a meaning very different from
that of Locke or Ferguson, for example.15 While for Tonnies burgerliche
131 Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1992).

14) Heinrich Treitschke (1926).
15) Manfred Riedel (1975), 720-721 and 772.
166 TV. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186
Gesellschafi referred to the bourgeoisie in its self-interested domination of

the state, the contemporary catchword "civil society" refers to mobilized
opposition to the state often by those seeking empowerment. Harris's and
Hollis's portentous alteration oi the title from Community and Society to
Community and Civil Society diminishes the scope of the work to a philo
sophical historical narrative and misleads the reader as to its tenor and its
position in the history of ideas.
The difficulty translators have had with the text is also manifest in their
renditions ofTonnies's terms for the forms of will underlying Gemeinschaft
and Gesellscbafr. Wesenwille and Willkiir (in 1887), renamed "Kiirwille" in
the second, 1912 edition. The dichotomy is founded upon the philosoph
ical distinction between, on the one hand, those objects or persons desired
essentially, through the will of our very essence (Wesenwille), given the sub
jective importance of those objects or people rooted in our biological pre
dispositions or experience, and, on the other hand, those objects or persons
chosen (gekiirt) arbitrarily (willkiirlich) by subjects with sufficient distance
to calculate the suitability of said objects or persons in the pursuit of ulte
rior objectives. Although there is no apparent reason to avoid the near
equivalents "essential will" and "arbitrary will" (or in French volonte essen
tielle and volonte arbitraire), as the expressions that translate the ancient
philosophical tradition of debates on liberty and necessity, both the US
translator, Loomis, and the French translator, Leif, resist the obvious, and
adopt remote and unfaithful terms: "natural will" or volonte organiqne for
Wesenwille, "rational will" or volonte reflechie for Kiirwille. Both translators
present curious excuses for their infidelity. Leif argues he wanted to show
the terms were "biological,"16 while Loomis refers to another work by Ton
nies to justify his choice.1 In either case, the logical crux ofTonnies's orig
inal distinction is lost.
The reception of Tonnies has consecrated these foreign infidelities:

whereas it would have sufficed to translate " Wesenwille" as "essential will,"
Harris and Hollis adopt Loomis's practice of keeping the German original
in the text and parenthesising an English circumlocution - " Wesenwille
(i.e. "natural" or "organic" or "essential" will)"18 - offering, as it were, a
compendium of previous mistranslations. Even more curiously, apparently
161 Joseph Leif (1977).

I7) Charles P. Loomis (1957), 284, endnote 1.
'*> Jose Harris (2001), 95.
under the influence of the American mistranslation "natural will," Louis

Dumont, the French anthropologist, contends erroneously, while translat
ing back to German, that Tonnies himself employed the term " Naturwille"
(sic!), going on to render the term as "volontespontaneef although Wesenwille
is, according to Tonnies's reasoning, not spontaneous but necessary and
rooted in the deep past.19 These mistranslations are perpetuated through
tertiary references,20 leaving crude misconceptions of the original ideas in
their wake.
Conceptual Critique and Conceptual History
This critical discussion of the work and its concepts, which are subject to
multiple shifts in meaning, is influenced by the groundbreaking work of
Koselleck and others. The relativistic influence of conceptual history has
not yet impacted the often defensive reception of Tonnies. This is under
standable, given that the sciences are often loathe to acknowledge the fra
gility of a theory constructed upon the shifting grounds of terminological
ambiguity. Yet such fragility need not detract from our interest in Tonnies's
work, as Rene Konig has suggested:21 recognising the ambiguity of its
terms sheds even greater light upon the work's object, i.e. social configura
tions and values. Understanding the fluid values of words is vital for under
standing the oeuvre and its controversial reception, in spite of Tonnies's
vain struggle against conceptual ambiguities.
Tonnies himself reflected upon the methodological status of concepts,
which he referred to as Normalbegriffe (or normal concepts) in his work of
1887, published a few years after Carl Menger's writings on the status of
types,22 which is often seen as the most immediate precursor of Max
Weber's writings on ideal types.23 Although an admirer of the nominalism
of Thomas Hobbes, Tonnies was influenced by a Romantic and organic
school of thought. Thus, rather than offering definitions, as Max Weber
later did, for terms used in a variety of senses (as in Weber's opening words
of his own sociology, "Soziologie (im hier verstandenen Sinne dieses sehr
''J) Louis Dumont (1991), 50.

2,,) Sophie Duchesne (1997), 229.
211 Rene Konig (1955), Jg., 7, 348-420.
221 Carl Menger (1883).
231 Max Weber (1988).
vieldeutig gebrauchten Wortes) soil heissen"u Tonnies did not regard his task
as expediently delimiting the scope of words for given purposes, but as
chiselling the intrinsic and objective essential meaning of the terms out of
the mass of the German language.
Tonnies was aware that the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are
used inconsistently (Durch die Anioendung wird sich herausstellen, dass die
gewdhlten Namen im synonymischen Gebrauche deutscher Sprache begrundet
sind. Aber die bisherige wissenscbafiliche Terminologie pflegt sie ohne Unter
scheidnng nach Belieben zu verwechseln.)2'' Yet his aim was to impose greater
clarity upon contemporary usage and lexicography, since he was convinced
that he had established the correct meaning of the words: Alles vertraute,
heimliche, ausschliessliche Zusammenleben (so finden wir) wird als Leben i?i
Gemeinschaft verstanden.2b On the one hand, he seems to have reversed the
logical position of subject and predicate: a definition of "community"
should be phrased as follows: "Community life is understood to mean
close, intimate, exclusive living together." On the other hand, the expres
sion, "we find" shows that Tonnies is not offering a nominalist definition,
but arguing that he has discovered the correct meaning through semantic
explorations. The word, Begriffsbestimmung, literally "concept determina
tion," encompasses an ambiguity, for it may mean either nominalist defini
tion or the determination of an objective existing meaning - poles between
which lexicography forever meanders. "Gesellschaft," Tonnies then contin
ues resolutely, "ist die Offentlichkeit, ist die Welt."17 Although the dichot
omy is internationally renowned,28 the work is so obscure that even
specialists in the field of sociology are often unfamiliar with its tenor, which
can only really be grasped by seeing it in its intended place in intellectual
history — as a synthesis of rationalism and historicism and individualist
and collectivist methods. This in turn requires a familiarity with its refer
ences, with which few academics outside philosophy departments have.
24) Translation: "Sociology in tlie present understanding of this very ambiguously used
word shall mean [..Max Weber (2002), 1.
251 "Application shall show that the names chosen are used as synonyms in German. How
ever (sic), previous scientific terminology is accustomed to interchanging them arbitrarily."
26) All close, intimate, exclusive living together (we find) is understood as life in commu
nity. Translated by the author.
271 "Society is the public sphere, the world." Translated by the author. Ferdinand Tonnies
(1979), 3.
281 Shoji Kato (1981), 54-71.
Tonnies's work underwent a disciplinary transformation through a shift

of meaning: although his ambition was to reduce the ambiguity of the
terms, a mutation of the sense of the two signifiers transpired spectacularly
when the subtitle was changed. For a number of years, the first edition of
1887 bore the subtitle, Communismus und Socialismus als empirische Kul
turformen, or "Communism and socialism as empirical forms of culture".
From the second edition of 1912 onward, Tonnies adopted a new subtitle:
Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie or "Basic concepts of pure sociology."
The earlier subtitle presents the work as a historical interpretation fash
ioned after Comte and Spencer, which asserted that "communism," a term
in this case used to designate social (rather than economic) forms of cohe
sion based on affections that Tonnies saw in medieval community, was
being supplanted by "socialism," a concept that was used in scholarly dis
cussions of natural law prior to Marx to designate a society based upon the
individual pursuit of self-interest. In 1887, Tonnies's use of "socialism"
diverges widely from Marx's or von Stein's. When, for example, Tonnies
wrote "empirical" forms of culture, he meant that "communism" and
"socialism" were not "utopias" but historical stages that could be shown to
have actually existed.29
By the time the work was republished a quarter of a century later, in
1912, the terms "communism" and "socialism" had taken on different
meanings, and universal histories had gone out of fashion after being
debunked by Wilhelm Dilthey30 and Heinrich Rickert.31 As Carl Menger
showed in the case of theoretical economics, this left scholars with no
other choice but to elaborate types or concepts which could be used to
describe and grasp the causal relationships between individual phenom
ena,32 yet without the ambition of positing all-encompassing predictions
based on historical development. This was the trend in sociology, as Georg
Simmel's sociology33 and Max Weber's article on categories exemplify
rather explicitly.34 In 1912 the subtitle was changed, a reflection of Ton
nies's move away from the interdisciplinary thrust of the work of his youth,

}"> Wilhelm Dilthey (1883).
311 Heinrich Rickert (1913).
321 Carl Menger (1883).

331 Georg Simmel (1908).
34) Max Weber (1988).
which encompassed psychology, sociology, and political, legal and economic

theory, towards an embracement of the role of "Nestor of German sociol
ogy," underlined by his participation in founding the German Society for
Sociology, of which he became the first President in 1909. This established
his originally interdisciplinary work, which contained an implicit philoso
phy of history, as the cornerstone of the specialised discipline of theoretical
sociology, aimed at the construction of applicable concepts.
Hie Dichotomy within the Work
Tonnies should have been acutely aware of the openness of concepts to

vastly differing contents, since he had first used the terms Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschafi in 1879 to translate Thomas Hobbes's "commonwealth" and
John Locke's "politic society" - meanings utterly different from those ulti
mately adopted in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. "Just as the terms showed
to be very malleable, they also proved extremely mobile vehicles for the
revival of old political notions. Though presented in quite inaccessible sci
entific language, these concepts have inflamed such political passions as to
become rhetorical weapons for Utopian aspirations and mass movements.
The dichotomy has inspired identification and hostility across the political
spectrum: while Tonnies was close to the nationalists who embraced the
concept of "Volksgemeinschafit" or folk community around the time of
the First World War, in the 1930s, he vilified the abuse of the term by the
National Socialists, whom he courageously opposed. Marxists also had dif
fering views on Tonnies. Georg Lukacs ranked him among the "destroyers
of reason,"'6 while Giinther Rudolph praised him as one of the thinkers
showing the path to socialism.'7 Ralf Dahrendorf, a liberal, denounced his
thought as illiberal,'8 yet it became a classic for liberal U.S. sociologists
such as Parsons and members of the Chicago School.
Against this polemic background, reading Tonnies requires deconstruct
ing his use of the terms. Since the words, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
predate Tonnies, it is instructive to consider other lexicographic meanings

361 Georg Lukacs (1954).
>7' Giinther Rudolph (1995).
381 Ralf Dahrendorf (1965), 151-156.
and relationships between them, which for him constitute an unequivocal

conceptual dichotomy. The way German speakers understand the term,
Gemeinschaft has strong cultural overtones, overtones which Tonnies did
not himself create, but indisputably accentuated and disseminated. These
associations are not usually apparent to a non-German speaking audience,
which is why there might be a number of subtexts and associations implied
by Gemeinschaft that amplify its controversial content in social and politi
cal contexts. This should be taken into account when comparing and con
trasting them with contemporary usages of the currently fashionable and
controversial English term, "community." Thereafter, we can consider the
development of his thought and work and try to grasp the meaning that he
discovers in or imparts to those terms in his writings.
Given the need to find concepts with which to operate and the general
consensus that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft constitute such concepts, it is
understandable that a number of sociologists turn to reference books for
functional definitions after a brief (and frequently bewildering) inspection
of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft or its different translations. As the use of
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as ideal types denoting social relationships
became an accepted practice among sociologists, one can reconstruct how
these concepts are de facto employed in what is deemed to be the Tonnie
sian sense of the word. In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft itself, their use
emerges through deduction, following their introduction in the first para
graph of the Theme that opens the work proper. A "relationship" (Verhalt
nis) and a "connection" (Verbindung), (defined as a group constituted by a
positive relationship), can be "grasped" as the "essence" of Gemeinschaft,
which is "real and organic life", or as the "essence" of Gesellschaft, which is
"ideal and mechanical formation." The introduction is unfortunate: to
understand this putative definition, it is necessary to have a clear under

standing of what Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft mean, the former referring
to those relations based upon a sense of affective appurtenance, the latter
referring to relations pursued in the pursuit of an objective external to the
relationship. Only then can the meaning of the propositions that affective
relationships are more real or organic, and instrumental relationships more
ideal (meaning cerebral) and mechanical, emerge.
It is true that when the philosopher Gerda Walters described "the salient
feature" of Gemeinschaft as "the feeling of belonging together," Tonnies
railed against her "coarse simplification and distortion of the idea," going
on to say that she had been obviously unaware that "no lesser than Max
Weber" had taken up his concepts, and that she and others in academia
might seriously consider whether she had "done justice to proved and
recognised customs of literary exchange, the observance of which is of
particular importance for a beginner."39 Tonnies seems to forget Weber's
definition of Vergemeinschaftung&s a social relationship based upon a "sub
jectively felt (emotional or traditional) sense of appurtenance,"40 - the very
definition that led Tonnies to upbraid Walters. Finally, Tonnies himself
later wrote that his concepts were intended to denote social forms in which
"the aspect of feeling" or "the aspect of thinking" predominate, a simplifi
cation equal to Walters'.41 It is in this specific understanding that the terms
have come to be used as "ideal types" as employed by Max Weber, and
present usage of the terms relate more or less awkwardly to these under
standings. As "empirical forms of culture," the words Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft can be loosely identified with medievalism on the one hand
and capitalism on the other, whereas as "basic concepts of sociology," they
are respectively understood to designate affective or self-interested rela
tionships regardless of the historical configuration. In the former case,
where Tonnies refers to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as, what he later
called "Gefiige" or entire social structures, his assumption was that the great
transformation of Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft is an eternally recurrent
theme of the development of civilisation, with the succession of medieval
ism to capitalism mirroring an earlier transformation of Greek community
to the society of the Roman Empire at its apogee.
In the latter case, Gemeinschaft (or "community") and Gesellschaft (or
"society") cannot designate relationships involving, for instance, two indi
viduals, since the words refer to larger groups. The German adjectives
gemeinschaftlich and Gesellschaftlich are then used to describe, respectively,
relationships of closeness or anonymity. In Economy and Society, Max
Weber coined the nouns Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschafinng to desig
nate social relationships which were either more "communitarian," or in
other words emotional, or "societal," that is, instrumental or based upon
purposive rationality {Zweckrationalitat). Such concepts are necessary in
order to aptly describe the variety of relationships and motivations that
-i9i Ferdinand Tonnies (1979), xliv.

401 Max Weber (2002), 21.
TV. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 173
occur in every epoch: just as medieval economic life offers examples of

relationships entered into for ulterior motives of material gain, emotional
relations may exist even in the steely housing of advanced capitalism.
The Lexicographical Expanse of the Concepts
An English dictionary offers an immediate (if spurious) grip on the "Ton

niesian" use of the term Gemeinschaft: the Oxford Shorter Dictionary
defines Gemeinschaft as "a social relationship between individuals based on
affection, kinship or membership of a community, as within a family or
group of friends; contrasted with Gesellschaft. So Gemeinschaft-like adj.,"
citing not only the title ofTonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, but also
Talcott Parsons' definition of Gemeinschaft as "a broader relationship of
solidarity over a rather undefined general area of life and interests." Curi
ously, the operational term in Parsons' "definition" is "undefined," and Par
sons, who probably spoke German quite fluently, had been sufficiently
misled by the reception of Tonnies to assume that the term Gemeinschaft
could refer to a relationship (as opposed to a group of people with diverse
relationships). At least in this reception in English, Gemeinschafi would
appear to be a smaller unit than "community." The dictionary goes on to
cite Gould and Kolb's Dictionary of the Social Sciences, which asserts that
because Gemeinschafi "is an ideal-type concept," it is "most correctly
applied in describing or analysing social systems in its adjectival form,
Gemeinschaft-like. Gemeinschaft-like social systems are those in which
Wesenwille (natural or essential will) has primacy."
The OED's definition of"Gesellschaftf on the other hand, while intended
to convey Tonnies's use, is wide of the mark: "a social relationship between
individuals based on duty to society or to an organisation; contrasted with
Gemeinschaft."42 Nothing could be more remote from Tonnies's notion
of Gesellschaft than the prevalence of "duty." The definitions of Gemein
schaft and. Gesellschaft we found here were introduced into English-speaking
sociology in 1937 with the publication of Parsons' Structure of Social Action
prior to the work's translation in 1940. That is, their use was established
before non-German speakers could read the original work from which the
42) Leslie Brown (1993), vol. 1. A-M: 424, 473.
terms were drawn, thus also ignoring the fact that they were German words
with an array of other meanings. The OED definition does illuminate the
confusion issuing from Tonnies's problematic agenda of reconciling the
use of his terms both as stages in a philosophy of history and as operable
sociological concepts. Thus, the OED defines Gemeinschaft as a relation
ship, while asserting that the term must be used in adjectival form to
describe a "social system"; in fact the opposite is the case.
While German lexicography treats the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesell
schaft as German words, Koselleck's Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe specifi
cally takes into account the portentous ideological influence Tonnies had
on the opposition of the concepts, offering a history of the dichotomy per
se. A review of German dictionaries from the eighteenth to twentieth cen
turies shows the evolution of the term: in Adelung's dictionary of 1796,
Gemeinschaft is defined succinctly as "the state of having something in
common with someone else," (in particular property or circumstances),
and "this expression can be given as many more precise definitions as there
are circumstances one can share."4-5 This radical nominalist definition
allowed Adelung to abandon any quest for an essential, core meaning. Yet
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word Gemeinschaft took
on strong affective connotations, borne out in the writings of Fichte
and Kleist. An array of shared circumstances described by the terms can
be found in the gamut of entries in Grimm's legendary dictionary; the
Deutsches Worterbuch is of particular interest because the compilation of
the second part of the first department of the fourth volume, (Gefoppe
Getriebs), published in 1897 by R. Hildebrand and H. Wunderlich, had
been elaborated between 1879 and 1886, in precisely the same years as
Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, thus providing a good idea of con
temporary usage unprejudiced by a reading of Gemeinschaft und Gesell
schaft. The fact (noted apologetically by the works' authors) that literature
from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards could not be taken
into account is thus an advantage in establishing a pre-Tonniessian use of
Gemeinschaft and "Gesellschaft."
4,1 "Die Gemeinschaft... der Zustand, da man etas mit einem andern gemein hat... denn
dieser Ausdruck (leide) so viele nahere Bestimntungen, als es Arten von Umstanden gibt,
an welchen man Iheil nimmt." Johann Christopli Adelung (1796), 552.
TV. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 175
In Grimm's Worterbuch, more than twenty distinct meanings are ascribed

to Gemeinschafi, many of which go back to middle high German, and
none of which truly corresponds to Tonnies's distinction. Like Adelung,
the Deutsches Worterbuch points out that the word is a substantive deriva
tive of "common," with a more functional than semantic breakdown. In
various forms (such as gemeindschaft, related to Gemeinde), Gemeinschafi
once designated civic rights, a locality (as early as the fifteenth century),
common ownership — as employed by Luther. The Deutsches Worterbuch
also points out differences between ecclesiastical usage, as in Gemeinschafi
der Heiligen, communio sanctorum, communion of saints, and christliche
Gemeinschafi, Kirchengemeinschaft, Glaubensgemeinschafi, on the one hand,
and secular usage on the other, with reference to polities and political
forms, to territories or to peoples.
A sample from Kleist seems to mark a Romantic turning point in the
use of Gemeinschafi. In his patriotic essay on the Napoleonic wars, Was gilt
es in diesem Kriege, of 1809, Kleist uses the term almost mystically, alluding
to a "Gemeinschafi with roots of a thousand branches, like an oak, pene
trating the soil of time [...] a Gemeinschafi which like a beautiful creature
has not believed in her own glory to this day [...] a Gemeinschafi whose
existence will not survive a German breast and will only be brought to its
grave with blood enough to darken the sun." It was this romantic transfor
mation of the concept that rendered it interesting and useful forTonnies,
inducing him to create a "higher synthesis" between romanticism and
rationalism. However, Tonnies's assumption that Gemeinschafi necessarily
implies harmony and intimacy is not borne out by Grimm. Gemeinschafi
can mean love "in the best meaning of the word, but also in the coarse and
coarsest (although as a euphemism)," but it can equally refer to commer
cial transactions. The contemporary definition lists the term, "Interessenge
meinschafif a "community of interests," which falsifies Tonnies's assumptions.
Grimm's Worterbuch cites the expression, "Gemeinschafi... leistenf (to
keep someone company),44 a collocation declared inconceivable in the
opening of Tonnies's Gemeinschafi und Gesellschafi, which refers to the
entirely synonymous expression " Gesellschafi leisten" as proof of the intrin
sic difference between the concepts of Gemeinschafi: and Gesellschaft.
44) Jacob Grimm (1897), vol. 4, 1,2. Gefoppe - Getreibs. 3264-3268.
Adelungs dictionary of 1796 contradicts Tonnies's restrictions on the

use of the word Gesellschaft by citing it alongside civil society (biirgerliche
Gesellschaft), and also alongside with marital (eheliche) and paternal (vaterli
che) Gesellschaft,45 Grimm's entry "Gesellschaft... der Weiher" squares with
the Oxford English Dictionary's quotation of 1699, "a society of wives,"
but blatantly contradicts Tonnies's assumptions.46 In Grimm's dictionary,
the term, gemeinschaftlich is given two main and three sub-definitions,
none of which correspond to Tonnies's usage, and all of which are compos
ite definitions of "common," as in common action, common ownership,
a common father. The term was used as gemeinsam is used today, and
nowhere do we find any implication of solidarity or affection.
Tonnies's work has substantially impacted common German usage,
inasmuch as the adjectivt gemeinschaftlich has taken on the affective colour
that Tonnies attached to it. Both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can refer to
a specific group and to an abstract state. In the former, it can be rendered
as "community," in the latter as "communion," "fellowship" or "intimacy."
German references to Gemeinschaft thus often equate with English refer
ences to communion, defined in the shorter Oxford English dictionary as
"fellowship, association in relations, [...] spiritual intercourse, [...] inti
mate personal converse, mental or ideal," or "an organic union of persons
united by a common religious faith and rites."47 Gesellschaft refers either
to "society" as a whole, or to a society in the sense of a club, or a trading
company, but can also refer to the abstract state of company. Thus, the
Gemeinschaft — Gesellschaft "dichotomy" can be rendered as the dyad "inti
macy" — "company," which in English do not appear to be antonyms.
When comparing Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft with community and
society, we find similarities and differences. Etymologically, community,
like Gemeinschaft, is derived from "common," society from socius, or com
panion, partner - the equivalent of the German Geselle. The ancient Latin
roots of community meant "fellowship, community of relations or feel
ings" but in Medieval Latin, community had come to mean "a body of
fellows or fellow-townsmen," and was introduced in this form into Eng
lish. Like the German Gemeinschaft, the English word, community can
be qualified by a gamut of attributes, such as community of goods and
45) Johann Christoph Adelung (1976), 623.

461 Cf. Leslie Brown (1993) and Jacob Grimm (1897).
47) Leslie Brown (1993), 580.
community of interest. It has retained the eighteenth century meaning of

"a body of people organised into a political, municipal or social unity; a
state or commonwealth," suggesting sub-entities of a larger society, as in
the breakdown of a nation into separate communities.
English usage contemporary to Tonnies suggests the word "community"
had a rural flavour, as when in 1884, Gladstone contrasted "rural commu
nities" and "town constituencies." It also came to mean the people at large,
e.g. in "the good of the community," later designating congresses of nations
with common interests after World War II. It has been used to describe a
commune, a socialistic or communistic society, or an ecosystem of plants

or animals (biotic community). The ancient Latin meaning of fellowship
of feeling was restored in English with the semantic shift from a necessarily
or merely physically delimited group of people to a group of people with
some identifying characteristic. This allowed for altogether new functions
in a differentiated, pluralist mass society. "Community" came to mean a
group with common and distinct interests and a sense of belonging: the
term "the Jewish community" was used in 1888.48 Community, in this
sense, will retain the meaning imparted to it under any particular circum
stances. It has been used to designate a polity of the utmost social virtue,
as it has been used, in the seventeenth century, to mean a particularly
undiscriminating prostitute, "these painted communities, that are ravisht
with Coaches and upper hands."49 In her magisterial work on communi
tarian politics, Elisabeth Frazer presents one of the problems of defining
community: apologising for her Oxonian preoccupation with language,
she notes that it is unclear whether "community" should entail either:
a bounded geographical area;

a dense network of non-contractual relations including those of kinship,
friendship and cultural membership;
a network, dense or otherwise, of multiplex relations a particular quality of
identification on the part of members with place, or culture, or way of life, or
tradition - usually involving emotional attachment, loyalty, solidarity or
unity, and/or a sense that the community makes the person what they are;
48) 1884, Standard, 29 Feb. 2/4., Amy Levy in Rueben Sachs i, 2, quoted Leslie Brown
(1993), 580-582.
4'J) Leslie Brown (1993), 582.
178 TV. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186
shared symbols, meanings, values, language, norms; shared interests such as

occupational interests (as in a "fishing community") or political and cultural
interests (as in "the gay community").5"
Society, according to the OED, means "association with one's fellow men,
esp. in a friendly or intimate manner; companionship or fellowship." As a
non-plural abstract, it refers to "the state or condition of living in associa
tion, company or intercourse with others of the same species; the system
or mode of life adopted by a body of individuals for the purpose of harmo
nious co-existence or for mutual benefit, defence, etc." As a reference to a
concrete group, it describes "the aggregate of persons living together in a
more or less ordered community." It can thus designate a community, or
the totality of all communities within a culture. However, usage analogous
to Tonnies's has survived in the sense of "partnership or combination in or
with respect to business or some commercial transaction," "a commercial
company," an "association" for "some common interest or purpose [...]
belief, opinion [...] trade or profession," as in a debate society, a learned
society, or the Society of Friends.'1 The salient feature here appears to be
the pursuit of an extraneous purpose.
At the same time, the term "society" refers to a segment of community,
"the aggregate of leisured, cultured or fashionable persons regarded as
forming a distinct class or body in a community; esp. those persons col
lectively who are recognised as taking part in fashionable life, social func
tions, entertainments, etc." Its use in the sense of "high society" incidentally
corresponds to the German "die Gesellschaft." As such, the term corre
sponds to a notion of biirgerliche Gesellschaft, or bourgeois society as
defended by the reactionary Heinrich von Treitschke and denounced by
the revolutionary Karl Marx. The German biirgerliche Gesellschaft origi
nated from the notion of "civil society," as taken from Latin, and devel
oped most consequentially by Adam Ferguson. However, in German there
is no lexical distinction between "bourgeois" and "civil," both being trans
lated as biirgerlich. The use of the adjective biirgerlich to mean bourgeois
is now frequently pejorative, whether used by militant Marxists or social
snobs.
,1" Elizabeth Frazer (1999), 45.

10 Leslie Brown (1993), 913f.
The Concepts as Catchwords
The word, Gesellschaft came to be used in a Tonniesian sense to express

disenchantment with modern society, while Gemeinschaft ex pressed nostal
gia for disinterested devotion to a collective entity or cause. Gemeinschaft
and "community" have become catchwords in very different contexts, and
Tonnies's impact upon the German language has been so great as to have
perceptibly spilled over into other languages. Gemeinschaft became a rally
ing cry for the romantics in the nineteenth century, and became the focus
of a neo-romantic Jugendbeivegung or youth movement, which adopted
Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as a sacred work, between its reap
pearance in 1912 and the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Gemeinschaft had become such an obsession among the German youth
that in 1924 the philosopher Helmut Plessner warned of transgressing the
"limits to community" through "social radicalism."52 It came to be used
(inter alia by Tonnies) in a compound word with Volk, a term that was very
much in vogue during the First World War (when Tonnies veered towards
jingoism), and was seemingly irreparably tainted due to its totalitarian and
racist adoption by the National Socialists, leading Tonnies to be tarred
unjustly with the brush of the irrational right wing.
The abuse of the terms Volksgemeinschaft and Gemeinschaft under the
National Socialist dictatorship has cast a long shadow. After the demise
of the Third Reich, many Germans came to regard the ideal of Gemein
schaft as pernicious, as a siren that dragged their countrymen into the
abyss; as a concept that subtly misguides people as to the nature of their
real individual wants. The radical German right responded that "authen
tic" Gemeinschaft is possible. Henry, from a respected family in former East
Germany, argues that where he lives, "we have got real Gemeinschaft, even
if it is unfortunately not yet a Volksgemeinschaft for all Germans." Anne
adds, "back in the old GDR we all needed each other, we depended on one
another, there was a feeling of Gemeinschaft." These were the yearnings of
young East German Neo-Nazis, interviewed by the news magazine Der
Spiegel, longing for the emotional security of the good old days under
communism.55 The term, Gemeinschaft has remained a staple of the far
right, as evidenced by the founding in 1983 of the Gesinnungsgemeinschaft
121 Helmut Plessner (2002).
s" Der Spiegel (1992), 50: 27.
der neuen Front, a neo-Nazi youth organisation,54 and continues to face the
scepticism of Germany's political mainstream.
At the same time, the German word is pervasive in other contexts: since
the term for flat sharing is Wohngemeinschaft. Post-Tonniessian usage sug
gests that this might imply forced intimacy. The most deliberately lucid of
Germany's youth may insist that theirs is a reine Zweckwohngemeinschaft,
or literally a "pure purpose living-community," a term that Tonnies would
have presumably found inherently contradictory and endlessly offensive,
given that to him this would have meant that its members had moved
together solely to pursue a goal, to economise rather than to get cosy, and
that anyone wishing to transgress the bounds of purely economical rela
tions would be committing a breach of the underlying social consensus, in
a context in which spontaneous feeling was not expected and would be
regarded as disturbing. This compound expression was only coined because
Gemeinschaft means both "sharing," whence the compound word Wohnge
meinschafi for flat share, and communion, which is why people who just
cannot afford a flat of their own, may feel compelled to point out that they
are not looking for any sort of intimacy.
With the closure of the post-war era following the fall of the Berlin wall,
the term Gemeinschaft began a comeback in Germany.55 In the English
speaking world, the notion of folk community was not mobilised in a
comparable way: the word "folk" in the United States was not the battle
cry of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant power elite, but of racially dis
criminated minorities seeking to carve out sub-national entities and iden
tities in a melting pot.56 In the English-speaking world, "community,"
although it continues to be invoked in conservative appeals to patriotism,
has long had a "politically correct" tang, figuring prominently in the redef
inition of British ideologies by John Major and New Labour. In an article
on the backlash against government's "Back to Basics" movement, pub
lished in The Economist on January 8, 1994, one reads '"Family values are
dead. Long live community values.' That [...] is likely to be the next catch
phrase from the stiff upper lip of John Major."57 Not long before, Anthony
,4) Sabine Siitterlin (1989), 5.

Ian Buruma (1990). "There's no place like Heimat." New York Review of Books (Dec. 20,
1990), 34ff.
,6) Bernard Bell (1974).
,7) The Economist (January 8, 1994), 38.
Wright argued in the New Statesman and Society that in the absence of a big
idea, Labour "should celebrate the fact that it is escaping from the conser
vative grip of old labourism and old Marxism, and go on with the ideo
logical offensive." He proceeds with the following words:
Labour's big idea" should be "are we a community or are we not? If so, what
kind of community are we? [...] A liberal belief in atomic, possessive indi
vidualism creates one kind of society (interest-pursuing, rule-bound competi
tion) [...] A socialist belief that we are all members one of another has
different consequences (solidarity, co-operation and collective provision) [...]
Either we are a community, all in it together, with public interests and collec
tive purposes, reflected in activities and institutions, or we are not [...] We
need a notion of community that extends both upwards and downwards, able
on one side to give some reality to the global community without which we
shall perish (as millions of our fellow terrestrials already do), and on the other
side able to find local and accessible arenas for collective life without which
we shall eventually cease to be a society at all. But we also need a notion of

community that goes wider and deeper, recognising and embracing diversity
and plurality, a community of communities of many kinds, actively defended,
sponsored and nurtured by an enabling state, but within a framework of guar
anteed and extending basic rights of citizenship [...] The left's response should
be to democratise the activity of politics itself as well as the structures through
which it takes place. Then we may have a genuine politics of community.58
"Suddenly, 'community' is every political thinker's Big Idea," Bagehot was

able to report in The Economist, in June, 1994. Amid the present-day "swirl
of cynicism and worry, the warm, vague word 'community' shines like a
beacon." Its political use in England dates back to Burke on the Tory side,
and to Christian socialism on the Labour side.
For Labour politicians, it summons visions of terraced streets in the late

1940s, the people poor but honest, [...]. all wrapped in the comfort of the
new-born welfare state [...] Conservatives think of 1950s villages where
benevolent squire and kindly vicar presided over people who knew their place,
and there were crumpets still for tea [...] Each vision responds to present
pains by conjuring past Edens, ignoring the fact that such paradises passed
away for good reasons.'9
Wl Anthony Wright (1990), 18-20.

591 The Economist (June 25, 1994).
1 82 N. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186
The notion of community in the English-speaking world was brought

forth by a communitarian movement which shared a certain number ol
epistemological tenets with romantic historicism, but identified sufficiently
with the socially marginalized and the destitute that community has most
prominently belonged to the left. There is nothing inherently right-wing
about the term Gemeinschaft either — it may be remembered that a swan
song after the Nazi takeover of Otto Wels, a Social Democrat member of
the Reichstag, after the Nazi takeover, was that the Social Democrats had
wanted to forge the folk community. But there is a conservatism in the
German notion of Gemeinschaft that is borne out in Tonnies's typology: he
views the origins of community as lying in those essential relationships
into which humans are born, asserting that the "Gemeinschafi of blood,"
which he calls the "unity of the essence," develops to the "Gemeinschafi of
place."60 German nationality is based upon a communitas sanguinas in con
trast to other republican traditions, and the issue of whether community
should be determined by free choice or by biological affiliation is still hotly
debated between the German left and right.61 It is unsurprising that the
roots of community are less frequently sought in blood and soil in the
United States, where the indigenous populations were exterminated.
As remote as the use of the term "community" in association with a
totalitarian state may be in English, the term's potential for political abuse
has been noted. After the founding of the Universal Communitarian Asso
ciation and of the London Communist Propaganda Society by Goodwyn
Barmby in 1841, Miall interestingly accused "communitarians, or societar
ians of modern days" of being "intent on fashioning a new moral world by
getting rid of all individuality of feeling."62 In 1926, that is, before the
advent of the Third Reich, Aldous Eluxley presciently blazoned the triad
"Community, Identity, Stability" upon the shield of the World State in
Brave New World, presenting "community" as the sum total of "identity" in
the service of "stability," as a means generated through collective identifica
tion aimed primarily at stabilising power.6'
'<") Ferdinand Tonnies (1979), 12.

Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul (1994), 40ff.
1121 Leslie Brown (1993), 581.
f'" Aldous Huxlev (1932).
Conclusions
As much as history has tainted the concept of Gemeinschaft, the term's suc
cess reveals its potential to express human desires and aspirations. Rational
inter-subjective exchange on what is meant by the polysemous word
requires its explicit clarification in each context. Tonnies worked in the
hope that constancy could be found in language and imposed, as science,
upon a linguistic community. Though Tonnies's earliest scholarly work
had focused on the great nominalist Thomas Hobbes, he subscribed to
essentialist premises. Later, Tonnies was forced to account for the vicissi
tudes of language: in his brief treatise on the life and teachings of Karl
Marx, he pointed out that the notion of "communism" was an idea in flux
to which the young Marx ascribed no theoretical importance "in its pres
ent form." For Lorenz von Stein, on the other hand, it was the "simple
negation of the existing, without a definite goal and will", while for Moritz
Hess "the law of life of love applied to social life." Marx, however, thought
he had transformed communism into science through economics, and
went on to name a political league and a party after it. Even as he advo
cated communism in the early 1840s, Engels had no precise notion,
according to Tonnies, as to what the signifier "communism" meant.64
However, Tonnies himself did not draw the obvious consequences from
the inconstancy of usage in his own idiosyncratic identification of "com
munism" with Gemeinschaft in his subtitle of 1887.
Although Tonnies's use of his own terms are fraught with inconsisten
cies and errors, falsifying his assumptions does not detract the value of his
work and thought. Nor does the history of the term Gemeinschaft suggest
that its use is necessarily linked to an ideology of racial exclusion: the entire
process of post-war European integration was conducted under the banner
of the European communities or Gemeinschaften. Weber reminds us that
the errors of expansive spirits may be vastly more fruitful for a field of
enquiry than the myriad accuracies of the narrow minded: this is the case
of Tonnies, whose Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft opened up a new science
of sociology focusing upon the subjective meaning of actors and the qual
ity of the relationships in which those actors were engaged.
641 Ferdinand Tonnies (1920), 7, 8, 22, 24, 28, 29, 31, and 32.
Tonnies created a human science to distinguish between, on the one

hand, human ties based upon a shared past and a desire for the prolonga
tion of togetherness, and, on the other, self-interested alliances which are
contingent upon the achievement of underlying purposes and deliberately
temporary. Anthony Giddens takes up this theoretical insight, as one of
many in Tonnies's wake, by coining the expression, "pure relationship" to
"refer to a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake,
for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with
another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both par
ties to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it."65
It is not surprising that Tonnies's youthful and Faustian enterprise ot
encompassing within the boundaries of a single pair of concepts all social,
economic and political history, individual and collective psychological
development and religious, scientific or artistic manifestations posed more
questions than provided answers. The concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesell
schafi opened up new paradigms, while awkwardly accompanying the
coming of age of the human sciences across the threshold of the nineteenth
to the twentieth centuries.
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Berghahn Books

"Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft": The Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschafh,

Ferdinand Tonnies's oeuvre Gemeinschaft und Gesellschafi, published in 1887, has

Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is the founding work of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/180793209X12599171659574

In his translation, Loomis left Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in German,

" Karl Dunkmann (1925).

GemeinschaftYet in this respect, commentary on Tonnies has remained

The Terms and their Translations

Loomis' decision to use Gemeinschaft and Gesellschafi in German followed

131 Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1992).

Gesellschafi referred to the bourgeoisie in its self-interested domination of

The reception of Tonnies has consecrated these foreign infidelities:

161 Joseph Leif (1977).

under the influence of the American mistranslation "natural will," Louis

Conceptual Critique and Conceptual History

''J) Louis Dumont (1991), 50.

Tonnies's work underwent a disciplinary transformation through a shift

291 Ferdinand Tonnies (1922).

321 Carl Menger (1883).

which encompassed psychology, sociology, and political, legal and economic

Hie Dichotomy within the Work

Tonnies should have been acutely aware of the openness of concepts to

351 Ferdinand Tonnies (1975).

and relationships between them, which for him constitute an unequivocal

understand this putative definition, it is necessary to have a clear under

-i9i Ferdinand Tonnies (1979), xliv.

occur in every epoch: just as medieval economic life offers examples of

The Lexicographical Expanse of the Concepts

An English dictionary offers an immediate (if spurious) grip on the "Ton

42) Leslie Brown (1993), vol. 1. A-M: 424, 473.

In Grimm's Worterbuch, more than twenty distinct meanings are ascribed

44) Jacob Grimm (1897), vol. 4, 1,2. Gefoppe - Getreibs. 3264-3268.

Adelungs dictionary of 1796 contradicts Tonnies's restrictions on the

45) Johann Christoph Adelung (1976), 623.

community of interest. It has retained the eighteenth century meaning of

commune, a socialistic or communistic society, or an ecosystem of plants

a bounded geographical area;

shared symbols, meanings, values, language, norms; shared interests such as

,1" Elizabeth Frazer (1999), 45.

The Concepts as Catchwords

The word, Gesellschaft came to be used in a Tonniesian sense to express

121 Helmut Plessner (2002).

s" Der Spiegel (1992), 50: 27.

,4) Sabine Siitterlin (1989), 5.

we shall eventually cease to be a society at all. But we also need a notion of

"Suddenly, 'community' is every political thinker's Big Idea," Bagehot was

For Labour politicians, it summons visions of terraced streets in the late

Wl Anthony Wright (1990), 18-20.

The notion of community in the English-speaking world was brought

'<") Ferdinand Tonnies (1979), 12.

Tonnies created a human science to distinguish between, on the one

Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1796. Grammatisch-kritisches Worterbuch der hochdeutschen

Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1883. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschafien. Versuch einer Grundlegung

r>,) Anthony Giddens (1991) and (1992), 58.

Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity.

Lukacs, Georg. 1954. Die Zerstorungder Vernunfl, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.

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