BOND, Gemeinschaft Und Gesellschaft. the Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy (1)

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

Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 brill.nl/chco

contributions to the history

of concepts

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Th e Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy

Niall BondUniversit Lumire Lyon 2 Universit Lyon/EHESS

AbstractFerdinand Tnniess oeuvre Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 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. Tnnies subscribed to the belief that terms could be rendered less ambiguous, de ning the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft more narrowly than their con-temporary usage. In so doing, he sought to reconcile a heterogeneous agenda ini-tially consisting in o ering a diagnosis of vast historical developments and later consisting in providing heuristic tools to analyze individual relationships. Th is 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-manys nationalist right wing and contrasts it with its appropriation by left-leaning communitarian movements in the English-speaking world. Th e polysemy of the terms in the German language accounts for their semantic evolution, for amalga-mations of meanings within Tnniess 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 of Tnniess work in the social sciences.

KeywordsTnnies, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, community, society

Ferdinand Tnniess Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is the founding work of modern German sociology and has achieved the status of a fundamental

N. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186 163

reference in the human sciences.1 Th e two terms of the title are elucidated in the works 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 Paulsens 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.3

Th e international reception of Tnniess terms, which preceded the rst translations of his work, was for a long time limited to loose and super cial allusions to the increasingly celebrated dichotomy. Emile Durkheim com-mented that the words, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, were untranslatable.4 Th e extent of this di culty is attested by the di ering English translations of the title: while the word Gemeinschaft which underwent shifts in meaning primarily under romantic authors in the early nineteenth century and more signi cantly through Tnniess own in uence 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 Harris 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- culty [. . .] 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 Tnnies, and since sociologists are familiar with Tnniess use of them, it has been deemed advisable to retain the German words in most places in the text.8

1) Karl Dunkmann (1925).2) Ferdinand Tnnies (1979).3) Friedrich Paulsen (1888), XII, 111-119.4) Emile Durkheim (1889), xxvii, 416 .5) Ferdinand Tnnies (1955).6) Ferdinand Tnnies (1957). Hereafter, Charles P. Loomis (1957).7) Ferdinand Tnnies (2001). Hereafter, Jose Harris (2001).8) Charles P. Loomis (1957), fn. 1, 283 f., fn. 2, 284.

164 N. Bond / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 162-186

Th roughout the life of Tnnies, 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 di culty posed by the works inaccessibility. But super cial 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.

Th e torpid reception of the work and resistance displayed by its transla-tors are related to its extremely di cult 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 of Tnniess language, Paulsen also complained of its cum-bersome syntax.10 Tnnies responded to Paulsens critique defensively, writing that he was happy not to use the mundane German of contempo-rary journalism.11 Jose Harris points out that Tnnies was a Great Unread-able to contemporary Germans,12 but while she attributes this to Tnniess 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 Gesellschaft seems to have never been carried out, and obfuscating passages were never remedied through-out the eight editions of Tnniess lifespan.

Th e terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have been received beyond the boundaries of the German language speci cally as Tnniess, 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. Tnniess ambition to restrict the semantics of words that had taken on vastly diverse meanings was doomed to failure. Th is, however, does not make his work uninteresting in itself. By now, critical readings of Tnniess work should be aware of the evolution of meanings revealed in the ground-breaking work Geschichtliche Grundbegri e, by Reinhart Koselleck et al., which devotes a full article to the opposition between Gesellschaft and

9) Gustav Schmoller (1888) and Ferdinand Tnnies (1888), 12. Jg. 2 Heft, 727-729.10) Friedrich Paulsen (1888).11) Friedrich Paulsen and Ferdinand Tnnies (1961).12) Jose Harris (2001), xxxviii.


Gemeinschaft.13 Yet in this respect, commentary on Tnnies has remained naive.

Th e Terms and their Translations

Loomis decision to use Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft 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 Jngling wird gewarnt vor schlechter Gesellschaft: 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 elds delimited by Gemeinschaft and community fully match each other: Tn-nies often uses Gemeinschaft to signify a small community of people, but also uses it abstractly, in the sense of communion. Th is being said, com-munity is the closest word the English lexicon o ers for Gemeinschaft, and society is the closest equivalent to Gesellschaft, rather than association and civil society.

Th ough Harriss and Holliss choice of civil society may have been motivated by their desire to underline a perceived continuity between Tnniess and Fergusons philosophies of history, their choice was not the least unsuitable, since 1) the simple word, society, corresponds less inade-quately to the semantic elds covered by Gesellschaft, and Tnnies did not use the contemporary German equivalent of civil society, i.e. brgerliche Gesellschaft; 2) Tnniess diagnosis of the development of modern society hardly focused upon its civility; 3) Tnniess occasional use of the term brgerliche Gesellschaft, (translated by Leif into French as socit civile), was more accurately rendered by Loomis as bourgeois society, given Tnniess debt to Marx at a time when Treitschkes representations of brgerliche Gesellschaft were also more bourgeois than civil;14 and 4) the collocation civil society in English has taken on a meaning very di erent from that of Locke or Ferguson, for example.15 While for Tnnies brgerliche

13) Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1992).14) Heinrich Treitschke (1926).15) Manfred Riedel (1975), 720-721 and 772.


Gesellschaft 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. Harriss and Holliss portentous alteration of 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.

Th e di culty translators have had with the text is also manifest in their renditions of Tnniess terms for the forms of will underlying Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: Wesenwille and Willkr (in 1887), renamed Krwille in the second, 1912 edition. Th e 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 ( gekrt) arbitrarily (willkrlich) by subjects with su cient 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 volont essen-tielle and volont 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 volont organique for Wesenwille, rational will or volont r chie for Krwille. Both translators present curious excuses for their in delity. Leif argues he wanted to show the terms were biological,16 while Loomis refers to another work by Tn-nies to justify his choice.17 In either case, the logical crux of Tnniess orig-inal distinction is lost.

Th e reception of Tnnies has consecrated these foreign in delities: whereas it would have su ced to translate Wesenwille as essential will, Harris and Hollis adopt Loomiss practice of keeping the German original in the text and parenthesising an English circumlocution Wesenwille (i.e. natural or organic or essential will)18 o ering, as it were, a compendium of previous mistranslations. Even more curiously, apparently

16) Joseph Leif (1977).17) Charles P. Loomis (1957), 284, endnote 1.18) Jose Harris (2001), 95.


under the in uence of the American mistranslation natural will, Louis Dumont, the French anthropologist, contends erroneously, while translat-ing back to German, that Tnnies himself employed the term Naturwille (sic!), going on to render the term as volont spontane, although Wesenwille is, according to Tnniess reasoning, not spontaneous but necessary and rooted in the deep past.19 Th ese mistranslations are perpetuated through tertiary references,20 leaving crude misconceptions of the original ideas in their wake.

Conceptual Critique and Conceptual History

Th is critical discussion of the work and its concepts, which are subject to multiple shifts in meaning, is in uenced by the groundbreaking work of Koselleck and others. Th e relativistic in uence of conceptual history has not yet impacted the often defensive reception of Tnnies. Th is 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 Tnniess work, as Ren Knig has suggested:21 recognising the ambiguity of its terms sheds even greater light upon the works object, i.e. social con gura-tions and values. Understanding the uid values of words is vital for under-standing the oeuvre and its controversial reception, in spite of Tnniess vain struggle against conceptual ambiguities.

Tnnies himself re ected upon the methodological status of concepts, which he referred to as Normalbegri e (or normal concepts) in his work of 1887, published a few years after Carl Mengers writings on the status of types,22 which is often seen as the most immediate precursor of Max Webers writings on ideal types.23 Although an admirer of the nominalism of Th omas Hobbes, Tnnies was in uenced by a Romantic and organic school of thought. Th us, rather than o ering de nitions, as Max Weber later did, for terms used in a variety of senses (as in Webers opening words of his own sociology, Soziologie (im hier verstandenen Sinne dieses sehr

19) Louis Dumont (1991), 50.20) Sophie Duchesne (1997), 229.21) Ren Knig (1955), Jg., 7, 348-420.22) Carl Menger (1883).23) Max Weber (1988).


vieldeutig gebrauchten Wortes) soll heissen,24 Tnnies 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.

Tnnies was aware that the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are used inconsistently (Durch die Anwendung wird sich herausstellen, dass die gewhlten Namen im synonymischen Gebrauche deutscher Sprache begrndet sind. Aber die bisherige wissenschaftliche Terminologie p egt sie ohne Unter-scheidung nach Belieben zu verwechseln.)25 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 nden wir) wird als Leben in Gemeinschaft verstanden.26 On the one hand, he seems to have reversed the logical position of subject and predicate: a de nition 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 nd shows that Tnnies is not o ering a nominalist de nition, but arguing that he has discovered the correct meaning through semantic explorations. Th e word, Begri sbestimmung, literally concept determina-tion, encompasses an ambiguity, for it may mean either nominalist de ni-tion or the determination of an objective existing meaning poles between which lexicography forever meanders. Gesellschaft, Tnnies then contin-ues resolutely, ist die entlichkeit, ist die Welt.27 Although the dichot-omy is internationally renowned,28 the work is so obscure that even specialists in the eld 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. Th is in turn requires a familiarity with its refer-ences, with which few academics outside philosophy departments have.

24) Translation: Sociology in the present understanding of this very ambiguously used word shall mean [. . .]. Max Weber (2002), 1.25) Application shall show that the names chosen are used as synonyms in German. How-ever (sic), previous scienti c terminology is accustomed to interchanging them arbitrarily.26) All close, intimate, exclusive living together (we nd) is understood as life in commu-nity. Translated by the author. 27) Society is the public sphere, the world. Translated by the author. Ferdinand Tnnies (1979), 3.28) Shoji Kato (1981), 54-71.


Tnniess 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 signi ers transpired spectacularly when the subtitle was changed. For a number of years, the rst 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, Tnnies adopted a new subtitle: Grundbegri e der reinen Soziologie or Basic concepts of pure sociology. Th e 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 a ections that Tnnies 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, Tnniess use of socialism diverges widely from Marxs or von Steins. When, for example, Tnnies 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 di erent 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. Th is was the trend in sociology, as Georg Simmels sociology 33 and Max Webers article on categories exemplify rather explicitly.34 In 1912 the subtitle was changed, a re ection of Tn-niess move away from the interdisciplinary thrust of the work of his youth,

29) Ferdinand Tnnies (1922).30) Wilhelm Dilthey (1883).31) Heinrich Rickert (1913).32) Carl Menger (1883).33) 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 rst President in 1909. Th is 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.

Th e Dichotomy within the Work

Tnnies should have been acutely aware of the openness of concepts to vastly di ering contents, since he had rst used the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in 1879 to translate Th omas Hobbess commonwealth and John Lockes politic society meanings utterly di erent from those ulti-mately adopted in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.35 Just as the terms showed to be very malleable, they also proved extremely mobile vehicles for the revival of old political notions. Th ough presented in quite inaccessible sci-enti c language, these concepts have in amed such political passions as to become rhetorical weapons for utopian aspirations and mass movements. Th e dichotomy has inspired identi cation and hostility across the political spectrum: while Tnnies was close to the nationalists who embraced the concept of Volksgemeinschaft or folk community around the time of the First World War, in the 1930s, he vili ed the abuse of the term by the National Socialists, whom he courageously opposed. Marxists also had dif-fering views on Tnnies. Georg Lukacs ranked him among the destroyers of reason,36 while Gnther Rudolph praised him as one of the thinkers showing the path to socialism.37 Ralf Dahrendorf, a liberal, denounced his thought as illiberal,38 yet it became a classic for liberal U.S. sociologists such as Parsons and members of the Chicago School.

Against this polemic background, reading Tnnies requires deconstruct-ing his use of the terms. Since the words, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft predate Tnnies, it is instructive to consider other lexicographic meanings

35) Ferdinand Tnnies (1975).36) Georg Lukcs (1954).37) Gnther Rudolph (1995).38) Ralf Dahrendorf (1965), 151-156.


and relationships between them, which for him constitute an unequivocal conceptual dichotomy. Th e way German speakers understand the term, Gemeinschaft has strong cultural overtones, overtones which Tnnies did not himself create, but indisputably accentuated and disseminated. Th ese 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. Th is should be taken into account when comparing and con-trasting them with contemporary usages of the currently fashionable and controversial English term, community. Th ereafter, 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 nd 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 de nitions after a brief (and frequently bewildering) inspection of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft or its di erent 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 Tnnie-sian sense of the word. In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft itself, their use emerges through deduction, following their introduction in the rst para-graph of the Th eme that opens the work proper. A relationship (Verhlt-nis) and a connection (Verbindung), (de ned 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. Th e introduction is unfortunate: to understand this putative de nition, 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 a ective 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 a ective 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, Tnnies railed against her coarse simpli cation 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 Tnnies seems to forget Webers de nition of Vergemeinschaftung as a social relationship based upon a sub-jectively felt (emotional or traditional) sense of appurtenance,40 the very de nition that led Tnnies to upbraid Walters. Finally, Tnnies 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 simpli -cation equal to Walters.41 It is in this speci c 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 identi ed with medievalism on the one hand and capitalism on the other, whereas as basic concepts of sociology, they are respectively understood to designate a ective or self-interested rela-tionships regardless of the historical con guration. In the former case, where Tnnies refers to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as, what he later called Gefge 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. Th e 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 Vergesellschaftung 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 (Zweckrationalitt). Such concepts are necessary in order to aptly describe the variety of relationships and motivations that

39) Ferdinand Tnnies (1979), xliv.40) Max Weber (2002), 21.41) Ferdinand Tnnies (1931).


occur in every epoch: just as medieval economic life o ers examples of relationships entered into for ulterior motives of material gain, emotional relations may exist even in the steely housing of advanced capitalism.

Th e Lexicographical Expanse of the Concepts

An English dictionary o ers an immediate (if spurious) grip on the Tn-niesian use of the term Gemeinschaft: the Oxford Shorter Dictionary de nes Gemeinschaft as a social relationship between individuals based on a ection, 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 of Tnniess Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, but also Talcott Parsons de nition of Gemeinschaft as a broader relationship of solidarity over a rather unde ned general area of life and interests. Curi-ously, the operational term in Parsons de nition is unde ned, and Par-sons, who probably spoke German quite uently, had been su ciently misled by the reception of Tnnies 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, Gemeinschaft would appear to be a smaller unit than community. Th e dictionary goes on to cite Gould and Kolbs Dictionary of the Social Sciences, which asserts that because Gemeinschaft 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.

Th e OEDs de nition of Gesellschaft, on the other hand, while intended to convey Tnniess 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 Tnniess notion of Gesellschaft than the prevalence of duty. Th e de nitions 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 works translation in 1940. Th at 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. Th e OED de nition does illuminate the confusion issuing from Tnniess problematic agenda of reconciling the use of his terms both as stages in a philosophy of history and as operable sociological concepts. Th us, the OED de nes 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, Kosellecks Geschichtliche Grundbegri e speci -cally takes into account the portentous ideological in uence Tnnies had on the opposition of the concepts, o ering 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 Adelungs dictionary of 1796, Gemeinschaft is de ned 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 de nitions as there are circumstances one can share.43 Th is radical nominalist de nition 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 a ective 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 Grimms legendary dictionary; the Deutsches Wrterbuch is of particular interest because the compilation of the second part of the rst 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 Tnniess Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, thus providing a good idea of con-temporary usage unprejudiced by a reading of Gemeinschaft und Gesell-schaft. Th e 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-Tnniessian use of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

43) Die Gemeinschaft . . . der Zustand, da man etas mit einem andern gemein hat . . . denn dieser Ausdruck (leide) so viele nhere Bestimmungen, als es Arten von Umstnden gibt, an welchen man Th eil nimmt. Johann Christoph Adelung (1796), 552.


In Grimms Wrterbuch, more than twenty distinct meanings are ascribed to Gemeinschaft, many of which go back to middle high German, and none of which truly corresponds to Tnniess distinction. Like Adelung, the Deutsches Wrterbuch 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), Gemeinschaft once designated civic rights, a locality (as early as the fteenth century), common ownership as employed by Luther. Th e Deutsches Wrterbuch also points out di erences between ecclesiastical usage, as in Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, communio sanctorum, communion of saints, and christliche Gemeinschaft, Kirchengemeinschaft, Glaubensgemeinschaft, 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 Gemeinschaft. 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 Gemeinschaft with roots of a thousand branches, like an oak, pene-trating the soil of time [. . .] a Gemeinschaft which like a beautiful creature has not believed in her own glory to this day [. . .] a Gemeinschaft 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 for Tnnies, inducing him to create a higher synthesis between romanticism and rationalism. However, Tnniess assumption that Gemeinschaft necessarily implies harmony and intimacy is not borne out by Grimm. Gemeinschaft 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. Th e contemporary de nition lists the term, Interessenge-meinschaft, a community of interests, which falsi es Tnniess assumptions.

Grimms Wrterbuch cites the expression, Gemeinschaft . . . leisten, (to keep someone company),44 a collocation declared inconceivable in the opening of Tnniess Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which refers to the entirely synonymous expression Gesellschaft leisten as proof of the intrin-sic di erence between the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

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


Adelungs dictionary of 1796 contradicts Tnniess restrictions on the use of the word Gesellschaft by citing it alongside civil society (brgerliche Gesellschaft), and also alongside with marital (eheliche) and paternal (vterli-che) Gesellschaft.45 Grimms entry Gesellschaft . . . der Weiber squares with the Oxford English Dictionarys quotation of 1699, a society of wives, but blatantly contradicts Tnniess assumptions.46 In Grimms dictionary, the term, gemeinschaftlich is given two main and three sub-de nitions, none of which correspond to Tnniess usage, and all of which are compos-ite de nitions of common, as in common action, common ownership, a common father. Th e term was used as gemeinsam is used today, and nowhere do we nd any implication of solidarity or a ection.

Tnniess work has substantially impacted common German usage, inasmuch as the adjective gemeinschaftlich has taken on the a ective colour that Tnnies attached to it. Both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can refer to a speci c 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, de ned 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. Th us, 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 nd similarities and di erences. Etymologically, community, like Gemeinschaft, is derived from common, society from socius, or com-panion, partner the equivalent of the German Geselle. Th e 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 quali ed by a gamut of attributes, such as community of goods and

45) Johann Christoph Adelung (1976), 623.46) 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 Tnnies suggests the word community had a rural avour, 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). Th e 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. Th is allowed for altogether new functions in a di erentiated, 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 de ning 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 identi cation 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), 580-582.49) Leslie Brown (1993), 582.


shared symbols, meanings, values, language, norms; shared interests such as occupational interests (as in a shing community) or political and cultural interests (as in the gay community).50

Society, according to the OED, means association with ones 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 bene t, 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 Tnniess 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.51 Th e 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 brgerliche Gesellschaft, or bourgeois society as defended by the reactionary Heinrich von Treitschke and denounced by the revolutionary Karl Marx. Th e German brgerliche 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 brgerlich. Th e use of the adjective brgerlich to mean bourgeois is now frequently pejorative, whether used by militant Marxists or social snobs.

50) Elizabeth Frazer (1999), 45.51) Leslie Brown (1993), 913f.


Th e Concepts as Catchwords

Th e word, Gesellschaft came to be used in a Tnniesian sense to express disenchantment with modern society, while Gemeinschaft expressed nostal-gia for disinterested devotion to a collective entity or cause. Gemeinschaft and community have become catchwords in very di erent contexts, and Tnniess 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 Jugendbewegung or youth movement, which adopted Tnniess 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 Tnnies) in a compound word with Volk, a term that was very much in vogue during the First World War (when Tnnies veered towards jingoism), and was seemingly irreparably tainted due to its totalitarian and racist adoption by the National Socialists, leading Tnnies to be tarred unjustly with the brush of the irrational right wing.

Th e abuse of the terms Volksgemeinschaft and Gemeinschaft under the National Socialist dictatorship has cast a long shadow. After the demise of the Th ird 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. Th e 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. Th ese 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.53 Th e term, Gemeinschaft has remained a staple of the far right, as evidenced by the founding in 1983 of the Gesinnungsgemeinschaft

52) Helmut Plessner (2002).53) Der Spiegel (1992), 50: 27.


der neuen Front, a neo-Nazi youth organisation,54 and continues to face the scepticism of Germanys political mainstream.

At the same time, the German word is pervasive in other contexts: since the term for at sharing is Wohngemeinschaft. Post-Tnniessian usage sug-gests that this might imply forced intimacy. Th e most deliberately lucid of Germanys youth may insist that theirs is a reine Zweckwohngemeinschaft, or literally a pure purpose living-community, a term that Tnnies would have presumably found inherently contradictory and endlessly o ensive, 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. Th is compound expression was only coined because Gemeinschaft means both sharing, whence the compound word Wohnge-meinschaft for at share, and communion, which is why people who just cannot a ord a at 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, guring prominently in the redef-inition of British ideologies by John Major and New Labour. In an article on the backlash against governments Back to Basics movement, pub-lished in Th e Economist on January 8, 1994, one reads Family values are dead. Long live community values. Th at [. . .] is likely to be the next catch phrase from the sti upper lip of John Major.57 Not long before, Anthony

54) Sabine Stterlin (1989), 5.55) Ian Buruma (1990). Th eres no place like Heimat. New York Review of Books (Dec. 20, 1990), 34 .56) Bernard Bell (1974).57) Th e 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 o ensive. He proceeds with the following words:

Labours 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 di erent consequences (solidarity, co-operation and collective provision) [. . .] Either we are a community, all in it together, with public interests and collec-tive purposes, re ected 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 nd 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 [. . .] Th e lefts response should be to democratise the activity of politics itself as well as the structures through which it takes place. Th en we may have a genuine politics of community.58

Suddenly, community is every political thinkers Big Idea, Bagehot was able to report in Th e 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.59

58) Anthony Wright (1990), 18-20.59) Th e Economist ( June 25, 1994).


Th e notion of community in the English-speaking world was brought forth by a communitarian movement which shared a certain number of epistemological tenets with romantic historicism, but identi ed su ciently with the socially marginalized and the destitute that community has most prominently belonged to the left. Th ere 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 Tnniess typology: he views the origins of community as lying in those essential relationships into which humans are born, asserting that the Gemeinschaft of blood, which he calls the unity of the essence, develops to the Gemeinschaft 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 a liation 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 terms 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 Th ird Reich, Aldous Huxley 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 identi ca-tion aimed primarily at stabilising power.63

60) Ferdinand Tnnies (1979), 12.61) Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul (1994), 40 .62) Leslie Brown (1993), 581.63) Aldous Huxley (1932).


Conclusions

As much as history has tainted the concept of Gemeinschaft, the terms 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 clari cation in each context. Tnnies worked in the hope that constancy could be found in language and imposed, as science, upon a linguistic community. Th ough Tnniess earliest scholarly work had focused on the great nominalist Th omas Hobbes, he subscribed to essentialist premises. Later, Tnnies 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 ux 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 de nite 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 Tnnies, as to what the signi er communism meant.64 However, Tnnies himself did not draw the obvious consequences from the inconstancy of usage in his own idiosyncratic identi cation of com-munism with Gemeinschaft in his subtitle of 1887.

Although Tnniess 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 eld of enquiry than the myriad accuracies of the narrow minded: this is the case of Tnnies, 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.

64) Ferdinand Tnnies (1920), 7, 8, 22, 24, 28, 29, 31, and 32.


Tnnies 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 Tnniess 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 Tnniess youthful and Faustian enterprise of encompassing within the boundaries of a single pair of concepts all social, economic and political history, individual and collective psychological development and religious, scienti c or artistic manifestations posed more questions than provided answers. Th e concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesell-schaft 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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Vol. 3, No. 118, London.

Documents

BOND, Gemeinschaft Und Gesellschaft. the Reception of a Conceptual Dichotomy (1)