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Contents 1 2008/2009 write-up 2 Studying Tönnies's life 3 Key dates 3.1 Chronology of Tönnies’s life and career 3.1.1 1855 3.1.2 1864 3.1.3 1865 3.1.4 1867 3.1.5 1870 3.1.6 1871-7 3.1.7 1878 3.1.8 1879-81 3.1.9 1881 3.1.10 1887 3.1.11 1889 3.1.12 1890 3.1.13 1892 3.1.14 1893 3.1.15 1894 3.1.16 1896 3.1.17 1899-1900 3.1.18 1904 3.1.19 1908 3.1.20 1909 3.1.21 1912 3.1.22 1913 3.1.23 1917 3.1.24 1920 3.1.25 1921 3.1.26 1922 3.1.27 1923 3.1.28 1925 3.1.29 1931 3.1.30 1932 3.1.31 1933 3.1.32 1935 3.1.33 1936 3.1.34 Life phases 3.1.35 Influential events and contexts 3.1.36 Significant interactions 3.1.37 Struggles and accomplishments 3.1.38 Tönnies's Key Works 3.1.39 Critical literature on Tönnies 3.1.40 Conceptual glossary for Tönnies 3.1.41 Talk

2008/2009 write-up

Lead-off: Mark Dzula

Studying Tönnies's life

Key dates

Chronology of Tönnies’s life and career

• • Tonnies, Ferdinand. Tonnies : Community and Civil Society.
  • West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2001. p xxxi-xxxiii.

1855

Born, July, Oldenswort in the duchy of Schleswig.

1864

Danish annexation of Schleswig, followed by Prusso-Austrian invasion and absorption of Schleswig-Holstein into Prussia.

1865

Tönnies family moved to Husum, where his father took up merchant banking.

1867

Tönnies entered the local grammar school, studied Greek, Latin and German classical literature.

1870

Franco-Prussian War; creation of German empire. Tönnies met Schleswegian poet and folk-hero, Theodor Storm, who became a life-long influence.

1871-7

Studied at the universities of Strasbourg, Jena, Leipzig, Berlin, Kiel and Tübingen. Gained doctorate in Greek philology at Tübingen. Became a close friend of Friedrich Paulsen, an admirer of Kant, Lassalle and Hobbes.

1878

First visit to England. Worked on Hobbes’ manuscripts at the British Museum, Oxford and Hardwick.

1879-81

Published ‘Remarks on the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes’, in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie.

1881

An early version of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft submitted as his Habilitationsschrift at university of Kiel.

1887

First edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (sub-titled ‘An Essay on Communism and Socialism as Historical Social Systems’).

1889

After prolonged delay, Tönnies’s editions of Hobbes’ Elements of Law Natural and Politic and Behemoth published in English.

1890

Failed to obtain a university professorship; became a Privatdozent at Kiel.

1892

Helped found Society for Ethical Culture, the vehicle for his life-long involvement in various co-operative, social reform and self-improvement movements.

1893

Offered a university chair, on condition that he gave up Society for Ethical Culture, which he refused.

1894

Marriage to Marie Sieck, daughter of a Protestant minister from the Schleswegian town of Eutin. Five children born over the next ten years.

1896

First edition of Thomas Hobbes. Leben und Lehre. Tönnies’s support for Hamburg dock strike compounded his difficulties in gaining a university chair.

1899-1900

Tönnies’s prize essay on ‘Philosophical Terminology’ published in an English translation by Helen Bosanquet in Mind.

1904

Visited America for International Arts and Sciences Congress at St Louis. Contacts with sociologists of the Chicago school.

1908

House guest of Max and Marianne Weber during the International Philosophy Congress at Heidelberg.

1909

First edition of his book on Custom (Die Sitte). With Weber and Georg Simmel a founder member of the German Society for Sociology. Tönnies was to be president of this body for most of his life.

1912

Second editions of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (now subtitled ‘Basic Concepts in Pure Sociology’) and of Tönnies’s study of Hobbes (re-titled Thomas Hobbes. Der Mann und der Denker).

1913

His first permanent chair, a professorship of ‘economic political science’, at the university of Kiel.

1917

Publication of Der englische Staat und der deutsche Staat.

1920

Third edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.

1921

Publication of Marx, Leben und Lehre.

1922

Publication of Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung.

1923

Autobiographical sketch published in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung.

1925

Tönnies’s major writings collected in Soziologische Studien und Kritiken (3 vols.). Third edition of Hobbes.

1931

Publication of Einführung in die Soziologie.

1932

Joined the Social Democratic party to support resistance to the rise of fascism.

1933

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Tönnies stripped of his honorary professorship at Kiel, academic pension and personal library by local Nazi administration.

1935

A major conference at Leipzig in honour of Tönnies’s eightieth birthday. Eighth edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Publication of his final work, Geist der Neuzeit.

1936

Death of Tönnies.

Life phases

Influential events and contexts

The Dock Strike in Hamburg, 1896-1897

Tönnies’ first contention in criminology occurred when Hamburg authorities alleged that the strikers violated Article 153 of the labor law (the right not to be forced to strike). Using statistical analysis Tönnies argued that of the 290 individuals convicted during the strike, only 60 had been involved in acts of violence, a number roughly the same as the monthly number of young people convicted for similar acts in the years prior to the strike (http://www.cas.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/ztoen.htm). Hence, it could not be entirely because of the strike that these violent acts occurred.

Tonnies attributed the violent acts to the age of the dock workers rather than the Dock Strike. According to Tönnies, the violent acts were indeed not to be attributed to the strike but to the young age of the dock workers. In this analysis, Tonnies likewise shed light that the highest crimes without strikes occurred between 1892 and 1897 which were the years of economic depression. By the same token, in the same study, using statistical analysis Tonnies demonstrated that crimes against labor law were parallel with other crimes carried out by the working-class. He then concluded that crimes were due to the social conditions of the working-class.

Significant interactions

Struggles and accomplishments

Tönnies's Key Works

Tönnies/works

Critical literature on Tönnies

Tönnies/studies-of

Conceptual glossary for Tönnies

Wesenwille or Natural Will

Associated ideas: Vegetative, Animal, Human/Mental Life (p.99), complex of unified will (p.102), organic structure, self-generating (p. 132), exressing the integrity and individuality of the whole human being (p.125), accords with Gemeinschaft (p. 130)

Three forms: Pleasure, Habit, Memory

Manifestations: Passion, courage, creativity

Kurwille or Arbitrary Will

Associated words: goal-oriented calculation, dominance over thought (p.115), aims/ends/means, "egotistical," malignant and evil (p.125), engenders indifference towards the ups and downs of other men, corresponds to Gesellschaft (p.130)

Three forms: Deliberation, arbitrary choice, conceptual thought

Ambition, Calculation, Consciousness

"The element of free will is thus precisely lack of freedom with regard to oneself; it is self-compulsion, since compulsion and pressure from outside would destroy it." (p. 121)

"Observation and reflection will soon suggest that in practice no Wessenwille can occur without Kurwille, through which it is expressed, and that no Kurwille can exist without Wesenwille, in which it is deeply grounded. (p. 140) Still, contrasts can be purportedly seen in people due to sex, age, or education (152-160).

Community/Society Social Arrangement Graphs, p. 257-258

A. Community [Gemeinschaft]

Family life=concord

Man is involved in this with all his being

Its core is the tribe, nation, or common people.

Village Life=custom (traditional morality)

Man is involved here with all his heart and soul.

Its core is the commonwealth.

Town life=religion

Man is involved with his entire conscience.

Its core is the church.

B. Society [Gesellschaft]

Big city life=convention

This is based on the individual human being with all his ambitions.

Its core is the competitive market Society in its most basic form.

National life=politics and policy

This is based on man's collective calculations.

Its core is the State.

Cosmopolitan life=public opinion

This is determined by man's consciousness.

Its core is the republic of letters.

Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world. (Tonnies 2001:18)

Gemeinschaft means the unity we have from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. (p. 18) "Domestic Community". Tönnies explicitly wrote that any society can only to a certain degree be called Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft.

Union, Fraternity or Association: a collective term referring to the positive relationship functioning both inwardly and outwardly that brings about a social grouping as a unified living entity. "ein verbindung" = translatable as union, association, connection, combination, alliance, etc. Elsewhere in the book Tönnies uses the word speci?cally to mean the kind of holistic organic bonding that he attributes to Gemeinschaft, but here it is used in a more general way to cover groups in both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. (p. 17)

Talk