Ebook: Tonnies: Community and Civil Society

"Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (first published in 1887) is a classic of social and political theory in the later-modern period. It focuses on the universally endemic clash between small-scale, kinship and neighbourhood-based 'communities' and large-scale competitive market 'societies'. This theme is explored in all aspects of life - in political, economic, legal and family structures; in art, religion and culture; in constructions of 'selfhood' and 'personhood'; and in modes of cognition, language and human understanding. Tonnies is best known as one of the 'founding fathers' of modern sociology, but the present work lays greater emphasis on his relationship to European political thought and to developments in philosophy since the seventeeth-century scientific revolution, particularly the legacies of Hobbes and Kant. It can be read at many different levels: as a response to developments in Bismarckian Germany; as a more general critique of the culture of modernity; as a theoretical exercise in social, political and moral science; and as an unusual commentary on the inner character of 'democratic socialism'. This new translation and introduction make Tonnies's classic but difficult work accessible to English-speaking readers interested in social and political theory, intellectual and social history, language and cultural studies, and the history of economic thought."--Jacket. Read more...