Ferdinand T nnies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work of global import and condensate of the history of ideas, was much influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen. The study of their friendship shows how these intellectuals chose to adopt and adapt paradigms of the European legacy—rationalism and empiricism on the one hand, rationalism and romantic historicism on the other—in achieving creative idiosyncratic syntheses of idealistic monism. Beyond the shared scientific agenda of monism, they were convinced of the vocation of intellectuals in (...) social legislation, which Paulsen pursued through pedagogy, while T nnies became a social activist. Their interest in forms of socialism, romanticism and pessimism had varying consequences due to the differences in temperament between the political realist Paulsen, whose choices were more expedient for career advancement, and the political idealist T nnies. Their relationship is an instance of the specific rapport that T nnies characterises as intellectual friendship. (shrink)

Modern sociology emerged in part out of the milieu of ‘state socialists’ in imperial Germany. An exploration of the milieu and its discourses provides insights as to the sense of the founding work of German sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the political context in which historicist economics were transformed into sociology, explicit and implicit influences behind sociology in the writings of von Stein, Rodbertus, Wagner and Schmoller, the response of the ‘socialists of the lectern’ to Tönnies’ sociology, and differing (...) responses to the debate between the historicist human sciences and rational theory. (shrink)

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on (...) Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment. (shrink)

The romantic influences behind Ferdinand Tönnies's work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and society] (1887), though significant, have been largely obscured due, on the one hand, to the disrepute into which iticism as a philosophical and political movement fell after 1945 and, on the other, to Tönnies's own ambivalence towards the movement and the period. Here we explore the impact of iticism on the revaluation of sentiment, critiques of rationalism in economics and law, the legitimacy of authority, conceptions of the will, (...) and on the organic interpretations of society, history, and language, particularly on the notions of Gemeinwesen (commonwealth) and Gemeinschaft (community). (shrink)

While the roots of modern German sociology are often traced back to historicism, the importance of rational natural law in the inception of the founding work of German sociology, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft by Ferdinand Tönnies, intended as a ?creative synthesis? between rational natural law and romantic historicism, should not be overlooked. We show how in his earliest scholarly work on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke the shift in the meaning of the two concepts ?Gemeinschaft? and ?Gesellschaft? represents a departure from (...) early liberal enlightenment to a Weltanschauung marked by romantic authors such as Fichte, Novalis and Haller, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer and Marx, notwithstanding Tönnies' adherence to the political and social values of a liberal civil society. (shrink)

This volume presents essays analysing the ambivalent history of the globally influential political and social concept of community and the paradigms it has engendered in academia and politics.