Ferdinand Tonnies was born on July 26, 1855, in Oldenswort, Germany. He was one of the founders and first president of the German Sociological Society , founded in 1909 and which encompassed the three main German schools of sociology: the Cologne School, the Leipzig School, and the Frankfurt School. Tonnies's thinking explored the limits of modern contractualism and the subjectivity closely related to it. His best-known work is Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft – 1878), in which the German sociologist attempted to transcend the two fundamental theories of society, the historical-organicist and the contractualist, introducing the famous community-society typology as a fundamental tool for understanding social change.
Community and society
Ferdinand Tonnies thus identifies two different forms of social organization: community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft). Community is a mutual relationship felt by participants, founded on a lasting, intimate, and exclusive coexistence. For Tonnies, community is organic , whose embryonic forms emerge within the family in the relationships between mother and child, husband and wife, and siblings, and then extend to neighborly and friendship relationships. These relationships are characterized by intimacy, gratitude, and the sharing of languages, meanings, habits, spaces, memories, and common experiences. Ties of blood (family and kinship), place (neighborhood), and spirit (friendship) constitute organic wholes—communities, in fact—in which people feel permanently united by factors that make them similar to one another and within which inequalities can develop only within certain limits. None of this occurs within society.
In society , individuals live apart, separated, in a tense relationship with others, and any attempt to enter their private sphere is perceived as a hostile act of intrusion. The typical social relationship is the exchange relationship : in exchange, the parties are never willing to give more than they receive; indeed, the exchange occurs precisely because each believes they are receiving something of greater value than what they give up, otherwise they would not even enter the relationship. Sellers and buyers are in a relationship of mutual competition, since the former seek to sell at the highest possible price, while the latter seek to buy at the lowest possible price. The gain of one is the loss of the other. The exchange relationship, moreover, does not relate individuals as a whole, but only their performance; the seller is not interested in the buyer as an individual, nor in the use the latter will make of the exchanged good, but only in the buyer's ability to pay the agreed price.
The thought of Ferdinand Tonnies
For Tonnies, community must therefore be understood as a living organism , while society as a mechanical aggregate and product . The community form, based on a sense of belonging and spontaneous participation, predominates in the pre-industrial era , while the corporate form, based on rationality and exchange, dominates in modern industrial society . It is important to note that in his construction, the concepts of community and society are not separable, since they are constructed in opposition, as elements of a single interpretative scheme. Tonnies's definitions and theory were influenced by the thinking of philosophers, jurists, and historians—both contemporary and previous—to whom the founders of sociology drew attention. Tonnies himself is particularly reminiscent of Marx , without however explicitly citing his works closest to the problematic of community, namely his studies on pre-capitalist societies. In conclusion, his influence on German sociology was notable. Ferdinand Tonnies died in Kiel on 9 April 1936, at the age of 80.
Sociologicamente.it
