Ferdinand Tönnies

Ferdinand Tönnies 1915

Tönnies monument in the birthplace of Oldenswort

Ferdinand Tönnies (born July 26, 1855 at Oldenswort ; † April 9, 1936 in Kiel ) was a German sociologist , economist and philosopher . With his major work, Community and Society , published in 1887 , he became the founder of sociology in Germany. Even as a schoolboy he was the proofreading assistant of the poet Theodor Storm , with whom he had a lifelong friendship. At the age of 16 he graduated from high school in Husum, and at 22 he started studying philology in Tübingen PhD . At the age of 25 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the life and work of Thomas Hobbes at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel . He remained associated with this university his entire life as a university professor, initially 27 years as a private lecturer , because the appointment as professor was blocked by the Prussian cultural bureaucracy. From 1909 to 1933 Tönnies was a professor in Kiel, and from 1916 as emeritus . In 1921 he took on a teaching position in sociology, which ended in 1933 when he was dismissed from his civil service by the Nazi rulers. He was also president of the German Society for Sociology from 1909 to 1933 . During the Weimar Republic , Tönnies was the representative figure in German sociology, and his book Community and Society became a bestseller. The community term he developed was, however, misused by the youth movement and the National Socialists and falsified with the name Volksgemeinschaft . After the Second World War , Tönnies became silent in German sociology. It was not until 1980 that the Ferdinand Tönnies Society in Kiel, with its President Lars Clausen, created new perspectives for the scientific study of its namesake.

Tönnies' sociological system is difficult to understand because the terms are used that do not correspond to those of current social science . For Tönnies, general sociology means any scientific analysis of people in space and time, including biology and psychology . His special sociology comprises what today corresponds to the subject of sociology as a whole and not what is meant by special sociology . Special sociology differentiated Tönnies into pure , applied and empirical sociology. Later he added practical sociology to his system . The Pure Sociology consists exclusively of mental constructs ( normal terms ), its Applied Sociology uses the concepts of pure sociology for understanding current conditions and great historical changes that empirical sociology based on observation and comparison of the actual phenomena of social life. With Practical sociology finally says Tonnies policy interventions on social scientific basis, such as its publications on the Hamburg harbor workers' strike in 1896/97 . Tönnies' main work Community and Society is one of the pure sociology , his criticism of public opinion one of the applied sociology . His old work Spirit of the Modern Era too. Tönnies' sociological work is voluntaristic and can be described as the sociology of the will .

Life

Childhood and Adolescence (1855–1872)

Eiderstedter Haubarg in the 19th century

Tönnies was the only sociologist of his generation who came from the country. It was on July 26, 1855 as the third child of the church chief and farmer August Ferdinand Tonnies (1822-1883) and his wife Ida Frederica (born Mau, 1826-1915) on the Haubarg "De Reap" at Oldenswort on the peninsula Eiderstedt in Born in the Danish Duchy of Schleswig at that time and given the baptismal name Ferdinand Julius. The parents had seven children, four sons and three daughters. The father came from an Eiderstedt farming family who had achieved prosperity with horse and cattle breeding, which ensured their descendants support and financial independence for decades. The mother came from a family of theologians in East Holstein.

Kavaliershaus (also called "Tönnies-Haus") in Husum

Theodor Storm, the much older friend

From the age of five, in 1860, Ferdinand Tönnies attended the Oldenswort parish school, where his two older brothers were already being taught. Since he could already read, he went straight to his brother Wilhelm in the second, middle, class. In 1863 the father had a classroom set up in Haubarg, in which the children were instructed by a tutor. Since the private tutor, a young theologian, accepted a preaching position in Breitenburg after a year and a successor for him could not be found, Ferdinand and his older brothers continued their training at the Husum school of scholars from January 1865 . They took up quarters at a grocer at Husum Market, and for lunch they went to the apartment of the bailiff, an uncle, in Husum Castle . But by May 1865 they were living with their parents and younger siblings again. August Tönnies had leased the “De Riep” farm and bought the “Kavaliershaus”, a former guest house of the Husum Castle, which the Husumers called “Tönnies-Haus” from then on. The family thus lived in the immediate vicinity of the Count family Reventlow, whose head Ludwig Graf zu Reventlow became the first Prussian district administrator in the Husum district in 1868 . Ferdinand became friends with his daughters Fanny and Agnes.

In 1869 the 14-year-old Ferdinand made a closer acquaintance with the 52-year-old landlord, who helped the high school students to correct the "house book" he published, during a house visit, which was actually intended for the eldest son of the Husum magistrate and poet Theodor Storm German poets since Claudius ”. This turned into a familiar friendship that lasted until Storm's death. In a letter to Gottfried Keller , Storm wrote about Tönnies: “Next, at that time, Theodor Mommsen , he is the most important young man I have found in my life, and at the same time a boy, I do not know whether 'according to the heart of God', but at least according to mine; the intimate of my lawyer and full of true love for me. ”The lawyer meant Ernst Storm, the second oldest son, with whom Tönnies had been friends since 1878.

The influence that the poet had on the personality development and thinking of the young Tönnies was manifold. Storm's attitude towards law and justice was particularly influential. Intensive discussions about art and literature made Tönnies hesitate for a long time before deciding on a future as a writer or as a scientist. There are poems by him from later years.

At the age of 16 he passed the Abitur examination with the foreign languages ​​Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, French and Danish. A member of the Royal Examination Commission stated that he had never signed such a beautiful high school diploma. At the discharge ceremony in the auditorium of the school of scholars on March 23, 1872, Tönnies gave a lecture on the Reformation in Alsace. He had prepared for this lecture at an uncle's estate in Hagen . He used the Kiel university library for the first time .

Studied philology up to doctorate (1872–1877)

In April 1872, Tönnies set out for Strasbourg with a letter of recommendation from Storm to the linguist Friedrich Max Müller , who was a visiting professor there . For patriotic motives, he wanted to start his studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm University , which was newly founded in the same year , but left the city after a few days (some of which he had to spend the night in a tent because there was not enough accommodation) without enrolling to have. The situation in Strasbourg was too provisional for him. Because he had learned that his cousin Friedrich Mau (1850-1919) in Jena studied, he began his studies in philology and history in the summer semester 1872 at the city's university . He also became active in the Arminia fraternity in the castle cellar , to which he remained connected until his death. After three semesters, Tönnies switched to the University of Leipzig for one semester and then to the University of Bonn and returned to Jena for the winter semester of 1874/75, but only took one lecture (“About Telegraphy”) and at the same time did the first half of his compulsory military service year in the fusilier battalion of the infantry regiment "Grand Duke of Saxony". In the following summer semester he was not enrolled and also took a leave of absence from military service; he had injured his head during a pub belonging to his beating fraternity. During his convalescence leave at the North Sea, he was released from the military for disposition . Tönnies' first publication dates from the summer of 1875 - under his middle name Julius, he wrote a defense of fraternity and fraternity, which he later called a "rather meaningless" one.

Friend Friedrich Paulsen

In the winter semester of 1875/76 Tönnies continued his studies at the University of Berlin , where he attended, among other things, two lectures ("Epistemology", "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason") by the private lecturer in philosophy, Friedrich Paulsen , who came from the North Frisian Langenhorn . This contact resulted in a deep friendship that lasted over 30 years until Paulsen's death in 1908 and is documented by intensive correspondence.

In the summer semester Tönnies moved to the University of Kiel , then went back to Berlin for a semester and finally moved to the University of Tübingen in the summer semester of 1877 . There he was awarded a doctorate in June with a Latin dissertation on the oracle of Ammon in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa ("De Jove Ammone quaestionum specimen"). phil. PhD . Ernst Curtius had suggested the topic of the thesis, and Ludwig von Schwabe was the doctoral supervisor . With this, the almost 22-year-old Tönnies had completed the classical phase of his studies; according to his biographer Uwe Carstens, it had not given him any recognizable impulses for his later thinking .

Studied philosophy up to habilitation (1877–1881)

After completing his doctorate, Tönnies reconsidered his professional goal and no longer strove to work as a high school teacher, as he had considered under the influence of Paulsen, but to pursue a university career. He also said goodbye to philological studies and turned to philosophy with a special focus on economic and social science contexts. He spent the winter of 1877/78 studying himself in his parents' house in Husum. He read writings by Thomas Hobbes , Adam Smith , David Ricardo and others, including the then only first volume Das Kapital by Karl Marx , but kept coming back to Hobbes. In order to find out more about the English thinker, he traveled to England for ten weeks in 1878, where he stayed with his brother Gert Cornis Johannes Tönnies , who ran a commercial correspondence office in London . He did his research in the reading room of the British Museum and was only a few meters away from Karl Marx, who was immersed in his studies, but did not speak to him. There and during research in other archives, he discovered important Hobbes manuscripts that had not been evaluated for centuries.

After his return from England, Tönnies spent the winter semester of 1878/79 in Berlin, became a member of the university's "statistical seminar", took part in exercises with Adolph Wagner and heard lectures by Ernst Engel and Richard Böckh . This semester he met regularly with his friend Friedrich Paulsen. He spent the summer of 1879 in Husum again. There he wrote his "Notes on the Philosophy of Hobbes", which were published in four parts (1879–1881) in Richard Avenarius ' Zurich " Quarterly Journal for Scientific Philosophy " on Paulsen's mediation .

In the winter of 1879/80 Tönnies went to the University of Leipzig because he wanted to do his habilitation with Wilhelm Wundt . He attended a lecture on psychology from Wundt, but mainly pursued his social science studies and increasingly occupied himself with the main authors of rationalistic natural law such as Samuel von Pufendorf , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Immanuel Kant and others. From the connection of his Hobbes research with economics , natural law and comparative legal history , the basic ideas of his main work developed at this time. According to Carstens, the beginning of the genesis of community and society can be fixed in 1879 .

The habilitation at Wundt was broken because his wife was related to Tönnies and he did not want to be suspected of nepotism . After one of his repeated drinking cures in Switzerland, with which he alleviated his migraines , he returned to his parents' house in Husum. There he continued to work on his main work. Here he received, again through Paulsen's mediation, a message from Kiel professor Benno Erdmann , who saw the possibility of a habilitation with the Hobbes work. Tönnies delayed the project - he wanted to be able to submit a manuscript of his main topic first in order to achieve his habilitation. In spring 1881 he presented Erdmann with the fragment of “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” as a habilitation thesis. It consisted of an introduction and three chapters and already contained the essential ideas of the later main work. Erdmann, however, caused the faculty to accept the “Notes on the Philosophy of Hobbes” already in print as a habilitation thesis. In the habilitation certificate, however, it was noted that “Community and society. Theorem of Culture Philosophy ”.

The trial lecture before the faculty in June 1881 had " Plato's State" on the subject. With this, Tönnies became a private lecturer shortly before his 26th birthday . He stayed that way for 27 years.

Almost three decades as a private lecturer (1881–1908)

Kiel, Hamburg, Altona (1881–1901)

From the beginning of his private lectureship, Tönnies, who now mostly sublet lived in Kiel, felt reluctance to take on the teaching obligations associated with it, because he would rather research alone than teach. His friend Paulsen had to warn him several times to offer courses on which the retention of the private lecturer status depended. He gave his first lecture at the University of Kiel in the summer semester of 1882 on natural law to eight students, and he also offered an exercise on the first book of Politeia . The interest in his teaching hardly changed in the following winter semester, his lecture on Spinoza's ethics took place mostly in his private rooms, an announced exercise on Plato's Protagoras failed due to a lack of demand.

He preferred to travel extensively, as in the summer of 1883, to the Swiss mountains, where he shared a hut with Nietzsche confidants Paul Rée and Lou Salomé and fell in love with Salome unrequitedly. The same thing had happened to him before with the Reventlow sisters Fanny and Agnes. It was the other way around with Storm's daughter Gertrud (1865-1936), which Tönnies only found out about as an old man, when a German professor working in the USA had provided him with a letter in which she described her love for him. After Salome's rejection, Tönnies withdrew to Sils Maria , where he met Friedrich Nietzsche several times.

Despite Paulsen's warnings, he spent the winter of 1883 in Husum and worked on “Community and Society”. In the spring of 1884 he went on his second trip to England to find a publisher for the editions of the two works by Hobbes he had restored. This succeeded in Oxford , but because of the publisher's unreliability it became a lengthy and troublesome affair which required further trips to England. "Thomas Hobbes - Behemoth or the Long Parliament" and "Thomas Hobbes - The Elements of Law - Natural and Politic" did not appear in London until five years later.

In the summer semester of 1885 he fulfilled his teaching duties at Kiel University and offered a lecture on “Social Science and Philosophy of Law”. In 1886 he accompanied the Storm couple on a trip to Weimar , in late summer he traveled back to London to deal with the issue of editing, but also did some research in the British Museum and found the original of a letter that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had written to Hobbes in 1670. It wasn't to be his last Hobbes discovery; In 1888 he found the "Seventeen Letters of Thomas Hobbes to Samuel Sorbière " in the Paris National Library .

After seven years of work on the manuscript, “Community and Society. Treatise on communism and socialism as empirical forms of culture ”. The book received little attention, fewer than 400 copies were sold. Some reviews did appear, for example by his friend Friedrich Paulsen, by the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding , with whom Tönnies was also friends, by Rudolf Eucken , Gustav Schmoller and also Émile Durkheim .

In order not to endanger his position as a private lecturer, he gave another lecture in the summer semester of 1888. During this semester his friend Theodor Storm died. In the winter Tönnies began with empirical investigations into crime and among other things collected material from personal files and in personal conversations with inmates of the prison in Rendsburg . Due to his work on crime statistics and his delinquency research , he was increasingly appointed as an expert in the following years.

Friedrich Althoff , who long prevented Tönnies' appointment as professor

In the winter semester of 1890/91, Tönnies shifted the focus of the courses he offered to political and economic topics. In the meantime he suffered from his academic status and wrote to Paulsen in December: “You walk around like a student who cannot make it to the traineeship.” At the end of 1891 he was awarded the title of professor by the Prussian Ministry of Culture. Nevertheless, he remained a private lecturer, it was a titular professorship . In 1892 the chance of an extraordinary professorship (with the prospect of taking over the chair from Wilhelm Seelig at a later date ) was dashed on the condition set by Friedrich Althoff that Tönnies irrevocably gave up his participation in the German Society for Ethical Culture . He refused. He was a founding member of this association, which was founded in the same year. Its main goal was to develop a moral teaching that was detached from religious ideas. Althoff, influential and idiosyncratic university advisor to the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs , was to stand in the way of Tönnies' academic career on several occasions, probably also because of his well-known skepticism towards the Prussian administration of the Empire. In a conversation with Max Weber , Althoff is said to have said that he could buy whores and professors on every street corner, except Ferdinand Tönnies.

In July 1893 Tönnies got engaged to Marie Sieck (1865–1937), who was ten years his junior and whom he had met as the housekeeper and partner of one of his tenants in Kiel. Marie was the daughter of a tenant from Kirchnüchel in East Holstein . On May 22, 1894, the couple were married in a civil ceremony in Kiel, and the next day in church. The wedding ceremony took place in the historic “Vosshaus” inn in Eutin . Soon afterwards, Tönnies and his wife moved from Kiel to Hamburg, where the couple lived in a modest apartment in the Uhlenhorst district . Tönnies remained connected to Kiel University as a private lecturer, although lectures he had announced did not always come about.

Although now married, he continued his intensive travel activities, always without his wife (the only exception was not until 1924 when they traveled to Italy together, which was connected to a congress in Rome ). In June 1894 he took part in a congress in London and visited Friedrich Engels on this occasion . In October he took part in the founding congress of the International Institute for Sociology in Paris on his own initiative and at his own expense . He had been personally invited by René Worms . He described the knowledge he gained at the congress in an article in the Viennese weekly Die Zeit . In the years 1895 and 1896 Tönnies completed three of his most important publications: the price publications “The fact of the will” (published only posthumously) and “Philosophical terminology with psychological-sociological intent” as well as the monograph “Hobbes. Life and Teaching ”.

In November 1896 the great Hamburg dock workers strike began , Tönnies soon sided with the strikers, and in January 1897 signed the “Professors Appeal” together with Otto Baumgarten , Friedrich Naumann and others. Tönnies narrowly escaped disciplinary proceedings by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and Baumgarten, who was listed first for alphabetical reasons, was not so lucky. Tönnies reacted to the end of the strike in February 1897 with two magazine articles and the book “The Truth About the Strike of Dock Workers and Seafarers in Hamburg 1896/97”. This political commitment reduced his chances of professional advancement, and his application for a professorship for economics at the University of Zurich was unsuccessful.

From private lectures that he gave in Hamburg, the small text "Der Nietzsche-Kultus" emerged at the end of 1897, according to Uwe Carstens the first sociological examination of Nietzsche. In it he honors the philosopher's rhetorically brilliant thoughts, but doubts their realism: "Indeed, it is not about much."

On January 31, 1898, the couple's first child was born and christened Gerrit Friedrich Otto . Soon afterwards the family moved to Altona , at that time still an independent Holstein town. From there, Tönnies succeeded in founding a Hamburg department of the German Society for Ethical Culture . In April 1899 he visited his friend Harald Høffding in Copenhagen. According to Carstens, Høffding was the first scientist to seriously consider “community and society”.

The second child of the Tönnies, Franziska Maja Hedwig Elisabeth, was born in Altona on February 14, 1900. The move to Eutin followed in the spring .

Twenty years in Eutin (1901–1921)

Tönnies rented the upper floor of a house with a garden in Eutiner Auguststrasse for a year, but then bought the whole house. The University of Kiel, where the lecturer continued to give lectures and exercises, was easy to get to from Eutin by train . After admission to the Eutin Literary Society , of which he was chairman for fifteen years, he was involved in the cultural life of the provincial town . His wife was happy to be living near her birthplace Kirchnüchel again, some of her childhood friends now lived in Eutin.

In the spring of 1902 Tönnies traveled (with financial support from the university) to London and Paris to do further research on Hobbes' manuscripts. In doing so, he found again letters from the philosopher that had not yet been published. This was followed in the summer of 1903 by a lecture tour to the university vacation courses in Salzburg . In autumn he engaged Willy Schlueter, a private secretary ( Amanuensis ), with whom he soon had little fun. Schlüter was constantly on the move, from which he sent a large number of letters to Tönnies, which soon showed his “narcissistic megalomania”. After all, there were only begging letters that came from the former assistant who was in constant financial need. Tönnies reacted to this with small donations of money until Schlüter's death in 1935.

The third child of the Tönnies, the son Jan Friedrich , was born in Eutin on October 10th . Shortly after the birth of the fourth child, the daughter Carola Theodora Elisabeth, on August 17, 1904, Tönnies set off for America. Hugo Münsterberg had invited him as a speaker to a congress within the framework of the world exhibition in St. Louis . He traveled with a large German delegation on the express steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Große , other participants were Max and Marianne Weber , Werner Sombart and Georg Simmel . On September 21, Tönnies gave the lecture “The Present Problems of Social Structure” there. It was published in the March 1905 number of the American Journal of Sociology and Tönnies was named as co-editor of the journal. During his travels he also visited Chicago , where the university had been the world's first university institute for sociology, founded by Albion Woodbury Small since 1892 .

Short trips followed in the next few years, lectures continued in Kiel and work on publications. On August 30, 1907, the fifth child was born with the son Kuno . In September Tönnies gave lectures on the biography of Hobbes and his new method of comparing statistical series at the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg . During his stay in Heidelberg he lived with the couple Max and Marianne Weber.

And on October 20, 1908, Friedrich Althoff died, who had permanently blocked Tönnies' academic career. A few weeks later, on December 31, Tönnies was appointed Associate Professor of Economic Political Science at Kiel University. Before the beginning of the summer semester of 1909, this became a personal full professor (full honorary professor). The appointments were linked to permission to maintain residence in the non-Prussian Eutin, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg .

Professor in Kiel (1908-1916)

Starting in the summer semester of 1909, Tönnies held two major lectures on political economy and taught statistical methods on a regular basis. He devoted himself to establishing sociology in Germany in the German Society for Sociology (DGS). This professional society, organized as an association, was founded on January 3rd in Berlin by 39 scientists, none of whom were full-time sociologists at the time. The first German chair for sociology was only set up ten years later at the University of Frankfurt am Main and occupied by Franz Oppenheimer . Tönnies was elected DGS president and remained so until 1933. Other members of the founding board were Alfred Ploetz , Georg Simmel, Heinrich Herkner (who was soon replaced by Werner Sombart), Alfred Vierkandt and Max Weber. Although Tönnies had publicly taken a clear position on social and political issues (for example in the Hamburg dockworkers dispute) and continued, especially with his publications against the approaching National Socialism, he stood at Max Weber's side in the value judgment dispute when the DGS was founded However, value judgment maxims are not considered dogma .

In July 1911 Tonnies took part in the First World Congress of Racial ( First Universal Races Congress partly in London). The aim of the meeting was to “promote mutual knowledge and respect between Western and Oriental peoples.” He originally wanted to go to London as the official representative of the DGS, but with the proposal he did not prevail against Sombart, Vierkandt and especially the racial theorist Ploetz can. Therefore he acted as secretary for Germany .

Significant second editions of earlier Tönnies books appeared in 1912. "Community and Society", in the first edition in 1887 with the subtitle Treatise on "Communism and Socialism as Empirical Culture Forms", now appeared with the subtitle "Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology" and was changed and slightly expanded by Tönnies. And his Hobbes book, published in 1896 as “Thomas Hobbes - Life and Teaching”, was published in a second edition, now as “Thomas Hobbes. The man and the thinker ”.

Harald Høffding , Danish friend and frequent correspondent

In September 1913 there was another change in academic status. Tönnies received the second ordinariate for political science at Kiel University. He wasn't satisfied with that. He wrote to Høffding in 1915: "This position does not quite correspond to the idea of ​​my scientific intentions." He consequently let himself be released from his teaching duties in autumn 1916 and became emeritus at the age of 61 in order to devote himself entirely to research. Almost at the same time, the Prussian State Ministry awarded him the title of Privy Councilor . According to Carstens, "it almost seemed as if you wanted to make up for a little bit of past injustice to the person of Tönnies."

Privy councilor and freelance journalist (1916–1921)

Tönnies' son Gerrit was called up for military service in the late summer of 1916 and was transferred to the Western Front after a short training period . He was soon considered missing and did not return from French captivity until 1920.

During the war, Tönnies had undertaken several “neutral trips” to Denmark and Sweden on his own initiative, partly together with his younger colleague Cay Baron von Brockdorff , in order to “counteract enemy influences”, as he wrote in a letter to Max Weber announced. He was deeply convinced of Germany's innocence. With this in mind, he wrote six major treatises on the war guilt issue from 1915 to 1922 . Nevertheless, Carstens points out, he never shared the “joke patriotic support” for the ideas of 1914 from other scholars, including Sombart.

In 1918 he was awarded the Finnish Freedom Cross III by the President of the Finnish Senate . Awarded class because he had campaigned for Finland's independence during his trips to Scandinavia and through publications. Because of the turmoil after the war, the award could not be presented to him by the Finnish embassy until January 1920. In 1920 the DGS, whose activities had ceased during the World War, was also revived.

After the monarchy was replaced by the republic, Tönnies belonged to the numerically small republican-democratic minority among German university lecturers. He had strong reservations about the goals of the November Revolution of 1918/19, the beginning of which he witnessed as an eyewitness to the Kiel sailors' uprising . In the context of a current diagnosis that he presented at the International Sociological Congress in Vienna in October 1922 , he described “proletarian revolutions” as a “paradoxical phase in the overall process of the political revolution of modern times.” Their result is, as in Germany or Austria, the There was a change in the form of government, but from a sociological point of view this would have led to "raising and strengthening the social powers that proletarian indignation wanted and wants to counteract."

Lecturer in sociology in Kiel (1921–1933)

The tense economic situation forced Emeritus Tönnies to sell the house in Eutin in 1921, to move the family's residence to Kiel and to accept the offer of the Prussian Minister of Education, Carl Heinrich Becker , as part of a teaching assignment for sociology, to improve their income Install university. In November 1921, the newly founded University of Hamburg awarded him an honorary doctorate in law. In 1927 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the law and political science faculty of the University of Bonn .

On June 6, 1924, the daughter Franziska married the sociologist Rudolf Heberle , who had completed his doctorate with her father the year before and who was now working at the University of Königsberg . After Heberle's three-year research stay in the USA, the family returned (in the meantime the first Tönnies grandson had been born) to Kiel, where Heberle completed his habilitation and taught as a private lecturer. The Heberles lived in the ground floor apartment of the house where the Tönnies lived on the 2nd floor. In 1936 they emigrated to the USA.

The 70th birthday of the privy councilor was celebrated in Kiel, 500 citizens honored the jubilee with a torchlight procession the evening before , which ended with a dinner at the Institute for World Economy , to which Bernhard Harms had invited. On the actual day of the anniversary 200 friends and students gathered to Tonnies with a fixed Kommersbuch to celebrate. He spent September in the Assenheim des Max zu Solms research center to celebrate his birthday with colleagues. Tönnies repeated his visits to the research home several times, each autumn. The home corresponded to what Tönnies had wished for as a “Philosophical Community” forty years earlier. A paternal-friendly relationship with Solms developed during his visits.

He presided over several sociological days of the DGS, held regular lectures in Kiel and continued his sociographic work. On the 250th anniversary of Thomas Hobbes' death on December 4, 1929, the International Hobbes Society was founded in Oxford and Tönnies was elected President.

When the time of the presidential cabinets began in the Weimar Republic in 1930 , which were not dependent on parliamentary majorities but based on the law of emergency ordinances , Ferdinand and Marie Tönnies left the Protestant Church and joined the SPD . The freethinker Tönnies had only been a member of the church out of consideration for his family; in view of the broken relationship between the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Weimar Republic, membership had become unbearable for him. He gave up his party-political independence because the republic drifted further and further to the right. His wife followed him in both steps, so Carstens, not out of blind obedience, but out of conviction.

In 1930 the 75-year-old's journalistic resistance to political developments began. With the text "Is it really that bad" he called for the election of the SPD. Soon it became clearer. With “The Leaflet of Defamation. A monument of shame for the National Socialist student union ”he denounced the student association that defamed the theologian and Nazi opponent Otto Baumgarten . In 1932 he took a massive support for the SPD, for example in the appeal “Schleswig-Holsteiner, listen!”, Which appeared on July 29 in the Schleswig-Holsteinische Volkszeitung (VZ). He repeatedly positioned himself against the right-wing development in newspaper articles, but feared the restoration of the monarchy rather than a takeover by the National Socialists. He did not grant them a long survival time: "And if Caesarim Mussolini's held out for almost 12 years, a Caesarim Hitler's would certainly not last twelve weeks." He shared this misjudgment with many Republicans. His publications had long since been targeted by the National Socialist party press.

Last years under National Socialism (1933–1936)

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich on January 30, 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg . On February 19, a congress entitled “ The Free Word ” took place in the large ballroom of the Berlin Krolloper , in which Ferdinand Tönnies also took part in addition to organizer Carl von Ossietzky , Harry Graf Kessler , Rudolf Olden , Wolfgang Heine and others. After Heine made a critical remark about the National Socialists, the meeting was dissolved by the police.

Hans Freyer , he became DGS President in 1933 and closed the specialist society

At the 8th German Sociologists' Day planned for autumn 1933, Tönnies wanted to resign from the DGS presidency for reasons of age and health. However, since the Sociologists' Day was canceled (it did not take place until 1946) and in Jena, in the meantime, Franz Wilhelm Jerusalem and his assistant Reinhard Höhn had formed an opposition loyal to the regime to the "liberal" DGS, which threatened to set up a counter-foundation, Tönnies became illegal in August President replaced and replaced by a three-man body consisting of President Werner Sombart, Secretary Leopold von Wiese and Assessor Hans Freyer . Tönnies protested against this and was then co-opted into this body. At a regular general meeting in Berlin in December 1933, Freyer was elected as the new president, who shut down the DGS in the following years.

At that time Tönnies was no longer a member of the university. By decision of September 26, 1933, he had been dismissed from the civil service in accordance with the law for the restoration of the civil service and had no more income. It was only in the course of 1934 that he was granted a “minimal pension”, which had a more symbolic character and could in no way finance the needs of daily life. Although there was no clear "ban on publication" for him, the number of his publications decreased rapidly. When the press was brought into line, the newspapers and magazines he had written for were gone. Additionally, at the entry into force of the treachery law any threatened in December 1934 ventured a critical word against government or party. Tönnies was thus deprived of the opportunity to compensate for the loss of income with publication fees. Until 1936 he gave private sociological courses in his study.

Financially and very limited in its effectiveness, with the support of his students and colleagues Eduard Georg Jacoby and Ernst Jurkat, he succeeded in 1935 in the first part (the second part was lost for decades, although it was almost finished) of his last work, “ Geist der Modern times ”to be completed. And in Hans Buske from Leipzig he found a publisher who was brave enough to publish the book. In the same year Buske also published the 8th edition of “Community and Society”. Buske also published the commemorative publication “Pure and Applied Sociology” for his 80th birthday, with which friends and companions paid tribute to Tönnie's work. He sent a copy of it to the old sociologist by courier because he knew of his now critical health. The book reached the recipient on April 7, 1936. Ferdinand Tönnies died two days later. His wife Marie, who was ten years younger than him, followed him on November 19, 1937. Both graves are on the Eichhof in Kiel .

Gravestone inscription, grave site of the married couple Ferdinand and Marie Tönnies on the Eichhof in Kiel

Tönnies had ordered in 1935 that his brain and skull should be given to the Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch and examined there. That happened, any findings have not been preserved. It was not until May 1998 that his rediscovered brain parts were buried in the Oldenswort cellar grave of the Tönnies family.

Ferdinand and Marie Tönnies left five children, four of them left Germany, and five grandchildren, including Sibylle Tönnies , Jan Peter Toennies and Klaus Hinrich Heberle .

The extensive Tönnies estate is looked after by the Schleswig-Holstein State Library in Kiel .

plant

Philosophical Influences and Research

Thomas Hobbes (detail from a painting by John Michael Wright , circa 1669–1670)

The sociology of the habilitated philosopher Tönnies is based on the thoughts of various classical thinkers. In the field of epistemology , methodology and the construction of his basic concepts he oriented himself on Spinoza , on whose work he published several times. He saw Spinoza's thoughts of man as a natural being and of society as a natural product as fundamental to sociology as a science. Schopenhauer's theory of the will had an influence on the conception of beings - and wills , whereby Tönnies removed Schopenhauer's thoughts on the will from their metaphysical context. In the construction of his concept of society, he closely followed Thomas Hobbes. In analyzing the development of the modern social world and the relationship between capital and labor , he followed the ideas outlined by Karl Marx in Das Kapital .

At the suggestion of his friend Friedrich Paulsen , Tönnies had started reading Hobbesian Leviathan at the age of 22 and obtained writings on the English philosopher. He concluded that the usual descriptions in the textbooks were inadequate and began his research in German, British and French archives. This made him a pioneer of newer Hobbes research. He not only published The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic in its original form, but also found a whole series of other manuscripts, letters and testimonies, which he edited and made accessible through publications. His book Thomas Hobbes. Life and teachings showed loud Willms "the first time clearly that those infamous' Hobbes one of the fundamental thinkers of modern times." As a disreputable and monstrous Malmesburry was Hobbes the clerics of his time and even later because of his criticism of the theocracy.

Hobbes' discovery and appropriation by Tönnies took place at the same time as his work on the main sociological work, Community and Society . As far as natural law and political science are concerned, there are striking parallels between Tönnies and Hobbes. At one important point, Tönnie's hobbes did not follow suit. Contrary to the view of the war of all against all , Tönnies said that peace with all is the natural state. This is the basis of his principle of affirmation . The war of all against all only came about in the artificial social form of society.

According to Albert Salomon , the entire Tönnies work can be read as a confirmation that for him the basic ideas of historical materialism were the most productive method for understanding social processes. His agreement with Marx, however, is limited to the interpretation that economic development determines the forms that political institutions and intellectual life take. But Tönnies saw the economy neither concretely nor abstractly as the basis of society. Social existence can be explained from its natural foundations. The economy plays an overwhelming role in social life, but economic behavior patterns themselves are an expression of natural life functions.

Tönnies' sociological system

Even before Georg Simmel and Max Weber , Tönnies created a sociological system that claims to represent the entire historical and current culture in its being and becoming and to make it understandable. Therefore he is referred to as the founder of sociology in German-speaking countries. In the International Sociological Lexicon it says: "With T. the individual scientific sociology and with it a new epoch of social science begins."

“Community and Society” is the basic text in which Tönnies unfolds his sociological system. All subsequent scientific publications are ultimately additions, explanations, in-depths or applications. This is indicated by the subtitle of the second edition from 1912: "Basic concepts of pure sociology". Tönnies published his comprehensive systematics in 1925 in the essay The Division of Sociology .

Without knowledge of his conceptual architecture (Bammé), Tönnies' sociology invites misinterpretations and misunderstandings, because many of the terms he uses meanwhile have a completely different meaning within the subject. The naming system originates from a time when there were no established sociological categories.

General sociology

In the current use of the term, general sociology means the categories and hypotheses with which social behavior is explained in different areas of life. By contrast, Tönnies understood general sociology to mean all relationships between people in space and time, regardless of whether they are related to one another or not, whether they live in a primitive or developed cultural state. He subdivided general sociology into social biology , social psychology and the three-part special sociology (which corresponds to what is now generally referred to as sociology and not what is meant today by special sociology ). The Practical sociology is not part of the original triad, was described by Tonnies but separately.

Social biology: The social biology at Tönnies does not correspond to today's sociobiology and also not to social Darwinism , as it was represented by his contemporaries Ammon , Ploetz and Schallmeyer , some of whom were members of the DGS he headed and whose position he vehemently rejected. For him, the social and cultural development of people was in the foreground, which could not be imagined without their biological prerequisites and framework conditions. Although social biology can also be extended to the symbiosis of plants and so-called animal societies , it can only be considered as part of his general sociology insofar as it investigates human coexistence. That is one thing in space and time, as side by side, as with and for or in defiance and against one another, which is subject to the general natural laws of becoming and passing away. It would also happen if such coexistence was not accompanied or guided by feelings and ideas. Nevertheless, social psychology is a necessary addition to social biology .

Social psychology: Tönnies' social psychology only partially corresponds to the current use of the term. It looks at all objects of human coexistence from the inner, psychological or subjective side. People are thought of as individual will-bearers. In addition, however, social psychology deals with mental experiences that several have in common insofar as they feel the same thing together, feel the same way, want one and the same thing. Because of this difference, the sociologist Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg separated social psychology and psychosociology . Tönnies joined this differentiation and recognized in psychosociology the transition to the third department of general sociology of special sociology , which is a doctrine of social will . For him, "the sociological view is only a developed, independent expression of the psychological view."

Special sociology

What Tönnies called special sociology corresponds to what is now generally understood as sociology and not today's hyphenated sociologies , which are called special sociologies . Special sociology is again divided into three parts at Tönnies. The pure sociology is constructive, the applied sociology deductive, the empirical sociology inductive. The Practical sociology not part of the triad, but in his Introduction to Sociology also mentioned.

Pure sociology

The terms on which pure sociology is based are pure thought constructs, normal terms that are used in the sense of Max Weber's ideal types . Within pure sociology , Tönnies distinguishes five thematic focal points:

• the contradicting basic terms "community" and "society"
• the doctrine of connectedness or social beings
• the doctrine of social norms as the content of the will of social beings
• the doctrine of social values as the objects of possession of the social being
• the doctrine of the social structures of reference as the objects of action of social beings .

He names three types of social entities that are either more communal or more societal in nature: social relationships (such as marriage, entrepreneurs and workers, representatives and voters), social groups (such as society, people, nation, tribe, class), social corporations ( such as corporations, associations, cooperatives, state, church, empire).

Social norms are all general commandments and prohibitions emanating from an entity , i.e. regulations that bind the will. Tönnies distinguishes between three types of social norms :

• Order as the general complex of norms
• Law as the complex of norms that are determined and applied by judgments
• Morality as a complex of norms, the interpretation and application of which is incumbent on an ideal judge (like God, reason, conscience).

• Social values presuppose a social entity to which people's thoughts assign a common value. Tönnies differentiates between economic, political and ideal (spiritual) values.

• Social reference structures are the systems of services in which the social will is confirmed or all institutions and other areas of activity to which social beings relate. Tönnies differentiates between economic, political and intellectual-moral reference structures . They are either more communal or more social in nature. In the economic area this is expressed in the contrasts village versus city, small town versus big city, production versus trade, in the political area in the differences between popular life and state life, aristocracy and democracy, customary law and revolutionary legislation, in the intellectual and moral area in the differences between religion and scientific thought, church and sect, or art and science.

Tönnies' sociology is based on the theory of will. In contrast to Max Weber's theory of action , he emphasizes that “there is no action without willing”. For Tönnies, the basis of social relationships is the affirmation , the conviction that people are naturally inclined to establish contact with other people, mainly controlled by instincts, but also by nobler feelings and reason.

Tönnies' most important works on pure sociology are Community and Society (1887/1912) and Philosophical Terminology in Psychological-Sociological View (1906).

Applied Sociology

Tönnies' applied sociology also does not correspond to what is understood by it in specialist science today. For him, applied sociology represents the attempt to utilize the concepts of pure sociology for the understanding of current conditions and great historical changes. It is mainly a historical-sociological consideration.

Tönnies' most important works on applied sociology are Critique of Public Opinion (1922) and Spirit of Modern Times (1935).

Empirical Sociology

The empirical sociology of Tonnies also Soziographie shall be based on observation and comparison of the actual phenomena of social life. His empirical research focused on the following areas: crime , suicide , population movements, the situation in agriculture, political parties.

Practical Sociology

The Practical sociology says Tonnies 'interventions in the Hamburg harbor workers' strike and its commitment to the reform of the criminal law under the International criminalistic Association , whose member he was.

community and society

→ Main article : Community and society

Community and Society is Tönnies' early and main work, it can be seen as a prime example of pure sociology . In the first edition it had the subtitle "Treatise of Communism and Socialism as Empirical Forms of Culture", whereby communism was a synonym for community and socialism one for society. The second edition from 1912 was instead subtitled "Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology".

In the book, Tönnies assumes that there are two fundamentally different forms of human coexistence. Communities are organically grown systems, while societies are artificially created. Both go back to different forms of will. The essence will create community, Kürwillen society. The will of the being is expressed as acting according to instinct, feeling, habit and tradition. Purpose and means form a unit, like craft traditions, and always have their own intrinsic value. The Kürwillen creates society, it implies purposeful rational action, which means assigns the purposes below, provides a fundamentally instrumental relationship to the world and to be an analytical mind services such as care , decision , concept . A typical example of the will of the being is motherly love , which is unconditional and not calculating. Modern trade is typical of the Kürwillen , where calculations and analyzes are carried out and contracts are concluded. In the community, the whole precedes the parts (family, rural neighborhood, friendship). Society, on the other hand, is the space of interest-based calculation, of purposeful action. The big city (but also modern industry, politics, the media) is paradigmatic for this social form. In the area of ​​society there is a "war of all against all", albeit in civil competition. Tönnies uses the terms community and society in a double sense. First, there are abstract-typological categories with the help of which one can analyze all interpersonal relationships in different social groups independently of the historical context. Second, they are historical terms that describe certain stages of social development, with a special focus on the transformation of the class patriarchal into the capitalist social form.

Criticism of public opinion

→ Main article : Criticism of public opinion

Critique of Public Opinion is one of Tönnie's most important works; it can be seen as a prime example of applied sociology . According to this, public opinion is the expression of a social will, that is, of the bourgeois-modern, rational, goal- and purpose-determined spirit that has historically emerged from religion and against it. In this process, traditional beliefs and traditional institutions have been undermined and destroyed.

Public opinion affects the legal, economic, social, political and especially the moral life of a politically connected entity (such as a nation, but also of humanity) like an ideal, invisible court of law that judges and acts on publicly relevant actions according to ethically reasonable criteria sentenced. In her concrete statements (books, newspapers, magazines) she is always determined by the partisan and economic interests of the bearers of public opinion , which Tönnies calls opinion soldiers, who try to turn their partial opinion into an overall opinion . Opinions are weapons in class , corporate and party struggle. Only when reason emancipates itself from party and economic interests as well as intellectualism and the spirit of a truly social coexistence (as organically deepened reason ) works in it can public opinion take on the function of religion as a binding, unifying, integrative and normative power.

Spirit of the modern age

→ Main article : Spirit of the modern age

Geist der Neuzeit appeared in 1935 and is Tönnie's last great work. In his late work, he describes the upheaval from the European Middle Ages to the global modern age within the framework of applied sociology . He differentiates between antiquity , the Middle Ages and the modern age and emphasizes the respective characteristics and the unifying and dividing elements of these cultural epochs.

According to Tönnies, the Catholic Church took over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages and embodied both new and continuity with the Old World, to which it owes its religious tradition. The beginning of modern times, which coincided with the discovery of America, also grew organically out of the Middle Ages for him . Nevertheless, a number of successive revolutions are evident in the modern age, with which the Middle Ages and the modern age relate to one another like the spirit of persistence, tradition and preservation and the spirit of change, transformation and upheaval , like community and society .

One of the specifically modern revolutions that Tönnies particularly emphasizes is, in addition to the overseas expansion of Europe caused by scientific and technical progress , and the denominational division of the Roman Catholic Church, the emergence of a capitalist world market. That was only made possible by the specific economic behavior of foreign traders. Only a commercial ethos that treats business partners like non- religious and tribal aliens, regardless of the traditional ethics of brotherhood in the family, neighborhood and village community, could have initiated the economic upheaval that later led to the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. The historical origin of modern capitalism lies not in production, but in trade. He ensured the dissolution of the medieval guild constitution and the associated reorganization of industrial work.

For Tönnies, the essence of modern culture is identical to a progressive individualism . It is based not only on freedom of religion, thought and trade, but also on political freedom rights , the constitutional institutionalization of which has become a prerequisite for civic equality and has taken the place of the old corporate order. The modern nation-state is thus an artificial structure that, unlike the people, has all the properties of society and not of community .

Writings on the Hamburg port workers strike

Tönnies had already dealt with the social situation of workers before the Hamburg dockworkers strike in 1896/97 . In 1893 he gave a lecture on the modern employment contract and unemployment at a congress of the Free German Hochstift . This interest was re-awakened during the dock workers' strike and was expressed in empirical research on the living and working conditions of dock workers and seafarers as well as in journalistic interventions.

Tönnies viewed the strike as a characteristic of the capitalist economy. And the capitalist economic mode is the most important and most socially momentous form of the social form that he calls social . You enforcing strictly rational, from the Kürwillen springing, based on calculation and foresight of the pros and cons of human actions. From this arises the supra-local, national and international solidarity of people, which is based on affirmation . Strike is now an obvious disruption of this social bond, it consists primarily of elements of mutual negation and, depending on its extent, interrupts social life. Under certain social conditions, a strike could be seen as an attempt to restructure society, replacing the traditional type of social bond with a new, stronger and better one. In the labor dispute, the proletariat is not only concerned with the distribution of income, it also strives for instruction, education and political power and is thus the bearer of a new culture, mentality, worldview and morality.

Tönnies differentiates between two types of strikes and measures them against his criteria from community and society . A schedule prepared, performed and guided strike is accordingly based on the Kürwillen . A spontaneous strike (unprepared, careless, disorganized) is based on the will of nature . He viewed the failed Hamburg port strike as unprepared, unplanned, and spontaneous. This observation enabled him to reject two theses that were propagated by the press at the time: that the strike was initiated on the one hand by the German Social Democrats and on the other hand by the international, especially the British, trade union movement.

The chances of the large, systematically organized strike are only slim; it presupposes workers who are disciplined and obey common rules. In any case, the prerequisite for a strike must be a clear awareness of interests and goals. This is more the case in smaller companies, which employ highly qualified workers, some of whom come from the tradition of the craft. That is why there are some successful small strikes, while the big strikes in Germany lead to defeat. For the sociologist, such spontaneous and demonstrative mass strikes are of great importance: They always testify to deep-seated deficiencies in industrial relations. Tönnies suspects that as workers become more organized, not only will the number of spontaneous (wild) strikes decrease, but the number of strikes as a whole. "I had said that the less the workers were unionized and recognized, the easier it would be to find expression in the strike to improve their living conditions."

With empirical research into working conditions and wages, Tönnies determined the causes of the strike. He proved that the causes were strictly local and economic in character. He showed that the apparently high wage level compared to the German average wages was only relative under the given circumstances of the work in the port, because the daily expenses for ferry fees, the necessity of lunch outside the house and the generally higher price level in Hamburg had to be taken into account .

effect

Tönnies did not establish a scientific school such as Émile Durkheim in France. In 1925, on the occasion of Tönnies '70th birthday, Gustav Radbruch wrote : Tönnies was "someone of his own, who did not come from any school and did not actually set a course for widely spread and effective suggestions." According to Hans Freyer , Tönnies' effect was so general "that it is anonymous and almost subterranean."

He only had direct influence on his contemporary colleague Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg . Stoltenberg had studied with Tönnies and was then supported by him for over two decades. In his writings he strove to expand Tönnies' sociology, but remained ineffective, also because of the peculiar new word creations that characterize his entire work. What Tönnies took over from him as psychosociology in his system, Stoltenberg himself called the Seelgroup doctrine , sociology he called group science , he differentiated common will into mere awareness and cooperation .

Tönnies also had direct scientific influence on members of the Institute for World Economy (IfW), an independent institution of the University of Kiel, which was headed by Bernhard Harms . Harms had come to Kiel from Tübingen as a qualified lecturer in order to be able to work with Tönnies, whom he admired, and then became a full professor before him. Tönnies often stayed at the institute and was also an academic teacher for many institute members. His influence is particularly evident in the work of Annemarie Hermberg (1898–1990), who was married to Paul Hermberg , who also worked at the IfW. In various studies (especially by trade associations and Christian trade unions ) she came to the conclusion that it is impossible to re-create community through remnants of premodern wills .

Other IfW employees, such as Alfred Meusel , to whom he was on friendly terms, and Kurt Albert Gerlach helped Tönnies to start a career as a university lecturer through his contacts. They were among those students who further developed the opposition between community and society or who applied it to social and historical problems, but who later chose other scientific orientations.

German-speaking reception until 1933

Tönnies held a representative position in German sociology of the 1920s. His main work "Community and Society" became a bestseller in the new subject and far beyond. The works of other sociological classics are also shaped by the conceptual difference between community and society . Where Durkheim describes the emergence of a new social order in his 1893 work on the division of social labor , it appears “almost like a French retelling of community and society ”. Even Georg Simmel and Max Weber treated the subject, but the prozessualisierten Tönnies'schen categories. They replace the terms community and society with Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung .

The book's success was no coincidence; the title already expressed the youth movement's attitude towards life . In the long run, this success was fatally damaging to Tönnies; some later saw him as a spiritual pioneer of National Socialism . But the success of the book was largely based on misunderstandings. The youth movement and later the National Socialists appropriated the title in their own mind without doing justice to the actual intention of the book. Despite all the effort, the Tonnies conceptual separation from nature's will and Kürwille had dedicated, the internal and external scientific community served only the two terms and the punch line: In the living, genuine and permanent coexistence of the community follow its dissolution by the purely mechanical company .

A community that meets Tönnies' criteria, according to Arno Bammé , is at best conceivable for groups of up to a hundred people. Accordingly, the concept of the national community , which the National Socialists coined in order to create a sense of togetherness or group feeling, is misleading and pure ideology. With regard to the Tönnies system, Lars Clausen called Volksgemeinschaft a black mold .

However, according to Dirk Kaesler , Tönnies was not entirely innocent of this misinterpretation. If the Tönnies confidante Paulsen had misunderstood the basic idea of ​​the work and applied the categories intended as pure constructions too much to reality, how much more likely such misunderstandings could have "happened" to readers who were far further from the author. In a letter to his son Gerrit dated April 20, 1934, Tönnies looked back self-critically and wrote: “Some say… that it is the success of my theory of community and society that lies in the Nazi ideology, and there is some reason for it . "

In 1924, Helmuth Plessner tried in "an obvious but unspoken opposition to Tönnies" to refute the spreading community radicalism in a socio-philosophical way. Within the limits of the community , he explained that the human being is necessary both on community proximity and on social distance. The scope for individual self-development that was only gained after liberation from traditional narrowness should be defended. In spite of this "counter-writing" by Plessner, the definition based on Tönnies remained decisive, at least in the German-speaking area.

Theodor Geiger assigned the effect of Tönnies 'main work in 1931 in his contribution “Community” for Alfred Vierkandt's concise dictionary of sociology to “neo-romantic civilization pessimism”, on the basis of which Oswald Spengler's fall of the West flourished: “The same movement left Tönnies' work in become actual in a sense alien to the thoroughly unromantic author; it took possession of the antithesis community - society in the meaning found by Tönnies as a primal and end type, re-shaped it pragmatically and raised 'back to community!' about the program. ”Geiger, who taught at the Danish University of Aarhus after his emigration , intensified his criticism after the war and wrote that Tönnies' theory was full of ambiguities, conceptual overlaps, internal breaks and verbal metaphysics. It is very doubtful whether Tönnies would ever have come to the conceptual distinction between community and society had he not thought and written in German: “When I tried around 1934 to reproduce the content of Tönnies theory in Danish, I didn't have to only to find out that it was impossible to find Danish equivalents for the words, but that the conceptual difference with the German words disappeared. "

As early as 1922, Herman Schmalenbach , with whom Tönnies had a collegial acquaintance, added the charismatic covenant as a further category to the collective term. The reference to Max Weber's charisma term , which was noticeably missing in Tönnies' will theory, was thus established. Tönnies student and son-in-law Rudolf Herberle rejected this extension in 1925 in the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . The federal relationship is contained in Tönnies' category community .

In 1926 in the Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie , Leopold von Wiese criticized the constituent role of affirmation for communities . He recalled that historically not only affirmation , but also rule, coercion and violence had led to the formation and stabilization of collectives.

After his release from civil servant status, nothing more about Tönnies appeared in German besides the festschrift for his 80th birthday and a few obituaries in the years 1936 and 1937 until the 1950s.

German-speaking reception from 1945 to 1980

German post-war sociology did not tie in with the classics of the subject. According to Friedrich Tenbruck , the classical tradition "was lost in fog and was completely set aside by a new generation that first dedicated itself to social research and then to American structural theory." The only German-language representation of the classics Simmel, Tönnies, Weber (and others ) in an overview volume of the first post-war years came in translation by the French Raymond Aron . It was only on the occasion of the German Sociological Congress in 1964 that Max Weber's teaching and theory were revived. On the other hand, there was almost no Tönnies reception, a powerful criticism had ensured that.

René König , who, alongside Helmut Schelsky, was the most influential German sociologist of the 1950s, wrote an extensive article on Tönnies in 1955 for the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . Although he appreciates the "pure spirit", he says goodbye to the field of sociology: "(...) in the future we will have to get used to classifying Tönnies in the history of philosophy and no longer in the history of sociology." Tönnies had absolutely no adequate conception of society in the narrower sense, he merely presented it as a negation of all essential characteristics of community , whereby a positive definition was completely missed. König asks whether it made sense "to separate the two with so much effort and then to bring them back together again at the end." The question arises, "whether we should not only turn around in verbal pseudo-problems (...)" . The words community and society are neither opposite nor equal in German, but simply unclear and undecided.

Only a few studies of Tönnies appeared in the following quarter of a century. Alfred Bellebaum looked at the empirical work in 1966 , and in his dissertation in 1967 Norbert Blüm discussed the will-theoretical foundation of Tönnies sociology.The former Tönnies student and colleague Eduard Georg Jacoby, who now lives in New Zealand, published a detailed introduction to life and work in 1971 German language.

In 1967 Günther Rudolph submitted a dissertation on Tönnies in the GDR , which was only available as a hectographed typewriter manuscript until 1995 and was then reissued by Rolf Fechner. The dissertation was supervised by Kurt Braunreuther , who for ideological and political reasons made suggestions for the “ purification ” of the manuscript, which Rudolph also followed. As part of this purification, a 25-page chapter on Tönnies' view of the state was removed from the text. In his work, Rudolph Tönnies was one of the “democratic representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia” who, in the contradictory course of the social and ideological processes of decay and differentiation, “began to detach themselves from the ideological positions of the reactionary bourgeoisie (...) at an early stage, with more or less Success, in a more or less contradicting form. ”Therefore, he was able to do his doctorate with his work on the sociologist, who was basically disapproved of as a bourgeois in the GDR, and made an important contribution to post-war research on Tönnies, which, however, was hardly accessible until the new edition in 1995.

Reception in the sociology of the United States

Tönnies traveled to the United States in 1904 and gave the lecture "The Present Problems of Social Structure" on September 21, 1904 at a congress as part of the World Exhibition in St. Louis . The text of the talk was published in the March 1905 number of the American Journal of Sociology and Tönnies was named as co-editor of the journal, but American literature never referred to the text. It was European-born social scientists, especially Pitirim Sorokin , Robert MacIver, and Louis Wirth , who introduced Tönnies' work to American sociologists. However, according to Werner J. Cahnman , "in the minds of those who relied on their statements, they created a false image in many respects." Countless textbook authors copied comments about Tönnies from one another without ever having read the original texts. In 1926, Louis Wirth was the first to publish an article in the American Journal of Sociology devoted exclusively to Tönnies' sociology. According to Cahnman, there is a mistake in this that has been repeated throughout the American Tönnies reception: community , society , the will of the essence and the will of the curses would have limited expressiveness for the work. At the same time, Tönnies thought them to be comprehensive.

The most influential American sociologist of the interwar period, Robert Ezra Park , referred superficially to Tönnies, but chose his own names. In analogy of community and society , he spoke of sacred and secular societies. Immobility is characteristic of the sacred society , whereas the secular society is characterized by mobility . Wirth's article Urbanism as a Way of Life from 1938 is one of the most striking publications by Park students influenced by Tönnies and is an indication of the effect the German sociologist had on the Chicago School . There were also references to Tönnies' pair of terms in studies of rural communities ( Rural Sociology ), which tried to identify certain places and regions as communities and others as societies . Terms constructed by Tönnies as normal types were used for real types, which, as pointed out by Tönnies' son-in-law Rudolf Herberle, who emigrated to the USA, was a misinterpretation.

Talcott Parsons , who was the dominant figure in US sociology until the 1960s, according to Cahnman, kept Tönnies in the consciousness of American sociologists with a detailed note in the second volume of The Structure of Social Action . He and his students Robert Redfield and Howard P. Becker worked out the dichotomies of sacred versus secular society and of folk versus city . Parsons also expanded the two Tönnies basic forms to five pattern variables .

A translation of the Community and Society by Charles P. Loomis appeared in the United States in 1940 and was also published in Great Britain in 1955. Albert Salomon , Rudolf Heberle and Werner J. Cahnman wrote other works on Tönnies sociology . Cahnman characterized the Tönnies reception of the post-war decades in the USA with the reference, "that Tönnies is more often ritually evoked than that one knows him."

By Edward Shils , an early representative of Primordialismus , Tonnies 1957 violently because of his description of company criticized. For Shils, modern society is not a conglomerate of selfish and soulless individuals who are only held together by interests and chance. In his view, modern society is held together by an infinite number of personal bonds, moral obligations, pride, and citizenship. This Tönnies opposite approach was further developed by Clifford Geertz .

A renaissance of the Tönnies mentions in American social science literature took place in the 1980s in connection with the communitarianism debate, which was shaped by Amitai Etzioni and Robert N. Bellah . The Swiss Tönnies researcher Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz remarks that the Communinists had not made any reference to Tönnies "that would meet the systematic demands placed on the reception of a theory."

Tönnies research since 1980

Until the 1970s, the Tönnies estate was stored in the library of the Sociological Institute at Kiel University. Professor Lars Clausen then handed it over to the Schleswig-Holstein State Library . Clausen himself had not yet dealt with Tönnies at that time and offered courses on Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias . However, he encouraged the sociologist Jürgen Zander (* 1939), who was looking for a new occupation, to deal with the as yet unprocessed Tönnies estate. This was the beginning of the newer Tönnies research. Parallel to his archive work, he gave courses on Tönnies together with Alexander Deichsel at the University of Hamburg. Deichsel (a former classmate of Clausen's at the Hamburg Christianeum ) has been interested in Tönnies since school.

Student residence and office of the Ferdinand Tönnies Society in Kiel

The Tönnies research was accelerated by the activities of the Ferdinand Tönnies Society in Kiel (FTG). The company was founded in Kiel in 1956 as a counterbalance to the strong connections and has been running the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Haus since 1962, a student residence that also houses its office. According to the statutes, the FTG promotes studying and working young people and political education and cultivates the intellectual legacy of its namesake. She did not actually conduct Tönnies research until 1980; the first president of the society, Werner Kroebel , was a physicist. In the high time of the K groups in the 1970s, the FTG's political education activities had come to a complete standstill, only the dormitory was still in operation.

In 1977 the theologian Joachim Scharfenberg was elected FTG President and Lars Clausen was elected Vice President. After a year, Scharfenberg resigned from the presidency for health reasons, and Clausen became his successor. Looking back, he said, “In the first year of my presidency - it's 1979 - I said to myself, 'You can't be president of anything that's half done. There is the statute and Tönnies is really scandalously unknown. '"He organized the first Tönnies symposium in Kiel and remembered in his farewell lecture:" So in 1980, when we organized the first Tönnies symposium here, he was almost dead. ( ...) After the first congress Tönnies was revived, after the second he was known again, after the third the order came to publish his complete works. ”Up to and including 2019, nine more Tönnies symposia followed. The Ferdinand Tönnies Complete Edition has been developed since 1992 and is published volume by volume. Klaus Lichtblau assesses: “With these and the volumes expected in the near future, Tönnies finally joins Georg Simmel and Max Weber on an equal footing in that illustrious group of scholars who made a name for themselves in the German-speaking world a century ago as the 'founding fathers' of modern sociology to have (…)."

As chair holder and editor, Clausen suggested various anthologies in which individual aspects of the Tönnies work were examined by his students, members of the FTG and also external scientists. He himself emphasized several times that Tönnies, as is often misunderstood, had in no way romanticized community, and in his farewell lecture from the summer semester 2000, which was published in 2015 on the basis of recordings, pointed out: “Like all people who come from the community environment , Tönnies knows that real hatred and real hostility are only common in the community. Community not only has positive, cozy, nice, familiar, Christian-like references, community also means permanent hatred, permanent rejection, permanent fraud, permanent malice. "

Alexander Deichsel , President of the Ferdinand Tönnies Society and founder of brand sociology

The FTG President Alexander Deichsel, who has been in office since 2010, founded the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Arbeitsstelle (FTA) at the Institute for Sociology of the University of Hamburg in 1982, independently of the FTG, which was transferred to the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Research and Further Education at the University of Klagenfurt in 2003 was established under the direction of Rolf Fechner (1948–2011) in the Institute for Technology and Science Research . After Fechner's death, Arno Bammé took over the management of the FTA in Klagenfurt. The progress of research is accompanied by the journal Tönnies-Forum .

Current representatives of Tönnies research (as of 2018) include Arno Bammé (Klagenfurt), Uwe Carstens (Kiel), Cornelius Bickel (Kiel), Alexander Deichsel (Hamburg) and Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (Zurich). Merz-Benz, who is particularly concerned with sociological theory, the history of ideas and philosophy, completed his habilitation in 1994 with the thesis “Tiefsinn und Scharfsinn. Ferdinand Tönnies' conceptual constitution of the social world ”and was awarded the Premio Amalfi in 1995 for this . Deichsel developed a brand sociology , the basic assumption of which is based on Tönnies' principle of affirmation . Bammé emphasizes Tönnies' topicality. His groundbreaking realization of the sociological significance of the separation of the spirit from the immediate human organism (community) , which helped to constitute society , is only now becoming particularly clear. Today, society is conceivable and possible without active design intentions and interventions by the people it contains. They are increasingly held together by the transhuman communication processes of intelligent computer systems. The individuals, actions and events involved in social events are no longer linked by a common place. Therein lies the meaning of the distinction between natural-organic community and artificial-mechanical society , which is only becoming apparent today in its deeper meaning . Bammé concludes: “It is therefore not without a certain justification that it can be said that Tönnies needed another century to really be understood. It should therefore be the most up-to-date of the classics of sociology. "

Honors

Ferdinand Tönnies
monument bust in Husum

• 1916: Appointment to the secret government council
• 1918: Finnish Freedom Cross III. class
• 1920: Cross of Merit for War Aid
• 1921: Honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg
• 1927: Honorary doctorate from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
• 1956: Founding of the Ferdinand Tönnies Society (FTG) in Kiel
• 1962: Inauguration of the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Haus as a student residence
• 1990: A memorial designed by Raimund Kittl was inaugurated in Oldenswort for his 135th birthday .
• 1992: A Husum school is renamed the Ferdinand Tönnies school
• 2005: For the 150th birthday, a Tönnies bust, also created by Kittl, was erected in front of Husum Castle .
• 2008: The University of Kiel awards the Ferdinand Tönnies Medal for the first time
• In Eutin, Husum and Kiel streets are named after Tönnies.

Fonts

Work editions

→ Main article : Ferdinand Tönnie's complete edition

Two work editions are being published, the Ferdinand Tönnies complete edition ("Kieler Edition"), which is arranged in 24 volumes and is arranged chronologically. It has been published by Walter de Gruyter since 1998 . The “Klagenfurter Edition” has been published by Profil-Verlag (Munich / Vienna) since 2008 and is based on the principle of pertinence , it is structured in terms of content and topics.

Single fonts (selection)

Tönnies has around 900 printed texts, 45 of which are monographs.

• De Jove Ammone questionum specimen. Ludwig Friedrich Fues, Tübingen 1877 (dissertation).
• Community and society . Treatise on communism and socialism as empirical forms of culture. Berlin, 1887 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive ); from the 2nd edition 1912 with the subtitle Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology . Eight editions during his lifetime, the last in 1935, then reprinted several times, most recently (reprint of the 8th edition) Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-534-23158-4 ; Profil, Munich 2017 (edited by Arno Bammé and Rolf Fechner), ISBN 978-3-89019-663-3 and De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2019 (edited by Bettina Clausen and Dieter Haselbach as Volume 2 of the Ferdinand Tönnies Complete Edition ), ISBN 978-3-11-015835-9 .
• Philosophical terminology from a psychological-sociological point of view. Thomas, Leipzig 1906; reissued in: Ferdinand Tönnies Complete Edition. Volume 7, edited by Arno Bammé and Rolf Fechner, De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-015840-3 , pp. 119–250; and published by Rolf Fechner, Profil, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-89019-661-9 .
• The custom. Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt am Main 1909; Reprinted by Keip, Frankfurt am Main 1970, without ISBN.
• The social question (until the world wars). De Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1907, most recently: The Social Question up to the World War , unchanged reprint of the 4th edition from 1926, De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1989, ISBN 978-3-11-012238-1 .
• Thomas Hobbes, the man and the thinker. Osterwiek, Leipzig 1912. Second, expanded edition of Thomas Hobbes - Life and Teaching , F. Frommann, Stuttgart 1896; reissued as Thomas Hobbes - Life and Teaching , edited by Arno Bammé. Profil, Munich / Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-89019-702-9 .
• Marx. Life and teaching. Lichtenstein, Jena 1921; reissued published by Arno Bammé, Profil, Munich / Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-89019-647-3 .
• Criticism of public opinion . Julius Springer, Berlin 1922; reissued in Ferdinand Tönnie's complete edition. Volume 14, edited by Alexander Deichsel, Rolf Fechner and Rainer Waßner , De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2002, ISBN 978-3-11-015349-1 ; also edited by Arno Bammé and Ingrid Reschenberg, Profil, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-89019-726-5 .
• Sociological Studies and Reviews. First collection. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1925; reissued in Ferdinand Tönnie's complete edition. Volume 15, edited by Dieter Haselbach, Berlin / New York 2000, ISBN 978-3-11-015847-2 .
• Sociological Studies and Reviews. Second collection. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1926.
• Sociological Studies and Reviews. Third collection. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1929.
• Spirit of the modern age . Buske, Leipzig 1935; reissued in Ferdinand Tönnie's complete edition. Volume 22, edited by Lars Clausen, De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1998, ISBN 978-3-11-015854-0 ; supplemented by Ferdinand Tönnie's complete edition. Volume 22, Part 2, edited by Uwe Carstens and Bärbel Carstens (Parts II, III and IV posthumously), De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046027-8 ; also published by Rolf Fechner, Profil, Munich / Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-89019-680-0 .
• The fact of wanting. From the estate edited by Jürgen Zander, Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 978-3-428-05242-4 .

Correspondence

• Ferdinand Tönnies, Friedrich Paulsen . Correspondence 1876–1908 (= publications of the Schleswig-Holstein University Society. New series, volume 27). Edited by Olaf Klose , Eduard Georg Jacoby and Irma Fischer. Hirt, Kiel 1961.
• Ferdinand Tönnies, Harald Höffding : Correspondence (= contributions to social research. Volume 4). Edited and commented by Cornelius Bickel and Rolf Fechner, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-428-06773-8 .

literature

Introductions

• Cornelius Bickel : Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed.): Classics of Sociology. Volume 1: From Auguste Comte to Alfred Schütz. 6th, revised and updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-64297-5 .
• Arno Bammé : Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7316-1373-2 .
• Eduard Georg Jacoby : The modern society in the social scientific thinking by Ferdinand Tönnies. A biographical introduction. Enke, Stuttgart 1971, ISBN 3-432-01679-4 ; New edition: Profil, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-89019-699-2 .
• Christopher Adair-Toteff (Ed.): The Anthem companion to Ferdinand Tönnies. Anthem Press, London / New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-85728-182-1 .

Biographies

• Cornelius Bickel: Ferdinand Tönnies. Sociology as a skeptical enlightenment between historicism and rationalism . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1991, ISBN 3-531-12110-3 (special edition Profil Verlag, Vienna / Munich 2020 with the title Sociology as a skeptical enlightenment between historicism and rationalism ).
• Uwe Carstens : Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. Completed and completely revised 2nd edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bredstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-88007-381-4 (first 2005).
• Uwe Carstens: Dear friend Ferdinand. The remarkable friendship between Theodor Storm and Ferdinand Tönnies. BoD, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8370-4762-2 .

Entries in dictionaries and manuals

• Ferdinand Tönnies, Kiel. In: The philosophy of the present in self-portrayals. Edited by Raymund Schmidt. Leipzig 1922 (2nd edition 1923), Volume 3, pp. 203–242.
• Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Werner J. Cahnman : Tönnies, Ferdinand. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf, Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 1: Articles on sociologists who died by the end of 1969. 2nd revised edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-432-82652-4 , pp. 442-447.
• Bernd Kettet: Tönnies, Ferdinand. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon . Volume 12, Bautz, Herzberg 1997, ISBN 3-88309-068-9 , Sp. 260-263.
• Rolf Fechner: Ferdinand Tönnies. In: Thomas Bedorf, Andreas Gelhard (ed.): The German philosophy in the 20th century. An author's handbook. 2nd edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2015, ISBN 978-3-534-74025-3 , pp. 288–290.

Festschrift

• Pure and Applied Sociology. A festive gift for Ferdinand Tönnies on his 80th birthday on July 26, 1935. Presented by Albrecht et al., Hans Buske, Leipzig 1936 (reprint, Keip, Frankfurt am Main 1989; reprint, profile, Munich / Vienna 2018, ISBN 978- 3-89019-730-2 ).
• Symbol, movement, rationality. On the 50th anniversary of Ferdinand Tönnies' death. Edited by Carsten Schlueter, Königshausen + Neumann, Würzburg 1987, ISBN 3-88479-333-0 .

Individual examinations (selection)

• Alfred Bellebaum : The sociological system of Ferdinand Tönnies with special consideration of his sociographic investigations. Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1966; identical reprint, profile, Munich / Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-89019-712-8 .
• Norbert S. Blüm : Will theory and social theory with Ferdinand Tönnies. A contribution to the understanding of “community and society”. Dissertation, University of Bonn 1967; reissued and provided with an afterword by Arno Bammé, Profil, Munich / Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3-89019-729-6 .
• Niall Bond: Understanding Ferdinand Tönnies' Community and society. Social theory and political philosophy between enlighted liberal individualism and transfigured community. Lit, Vienna / Zurich / Berlin / Münster 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-90138-5 .
• Uwe Carstens (Ed.): Ferdinand Tönnies. The welfare state between community and society (= series state understandings. Volume 70). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2014, ISBN 978-3-8487-1626-5 .
• Lars Clausen , Franz Urban Pappi (ed.): Arrival at Tönnies. Sociological contributions to the 125th birthday of Ferdinand Tönnies. Walter G. Mühlau, Kiel 1981, ISBN 978-3-87559-038-8 .
• Lars Clausen et al. (Ed.): Tönnies today. On the topicality of Ferdinand Tönnies. Walter G. Mühlau, Kiel 1985, ISBN 978-3-87559-047-0 .
• Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter [-Knauer] (Ed.): One hundred years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, ISBN 978-3-663-01368-6 .
• Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter [-Knauer] (Ed. With the collaboration of Rolf Fechner): "Perseverance, patience and calm". Questions and sources of Tönnies research. Fechner, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-9801498-8-9 .
• Alexander Deichsel : Conceived from Tönnies (= materials of the Ferdinand Tönnies workplace. Volume 5). Fechner, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-9801498-0-3 (reissued and with an afterword by Arno Bammé, Profil, Munich / Vienna 2020, ISBN 978-3-89019-749-4 ).
• Rolf Fechner: Ferdinand Tönnies. Catalog raisonné (= Tönnies in conversation. ). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1992, ISBN 3-11-013519-1 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz : Profundity and ingenuity. Ferdinand Tönnies' conceptual constitution of the social world. Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-58186-4 (the volume received the Amalfi Prize in the same year ).
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz: Knowledge and Emanation. Ferdinand Tönnies' theory of sociological knowledge. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-02287-7 .
• Günther Rudolph : The philosophical-sociological basic positions of Ferdinand Tönnies. Fechner, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-929215-07-1 (first published 1967).
• Carsten Schlüter [-Knauer] (Ed.): Symbol - Movement - Rationality. On the 50th anniversary of Ferdinand Tönnies' death. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1987.
• Carsten Schlueter-Knauer: Theory, empiricism, democracy. Impetus from Ferdinand Tönnies for political science. In: Wilhelm Knelangen , Tine Stein (ed.): Continuity and controversy. The history of political science at the University of Kiel. Klartext, Essen 2013, pp. 257–292, ISBN 978-3-8375-0763-8 .
• Swiss Journal of Sociology (Ed.): Community and Society in the Discourse of Modern Sociology: Essays in Honor of Ferdinand Tönnies on the Occasion of his 150th Birthday. Volume 32, 2005, Issue 1 (with contributions by Albert Salomon , Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz, Gerhard Wagner, Stefan Bertschi).
• Alexander Wierzock: Proximity and Distance of an Intellectual to Social Democracy. A forgotten report by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies on the revision of the Erfurt program , in: Archive for Social History , 55th Volume, 2015, pp. 321–342.

Web links

Wikisource: Ferdinand Tönnies  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Ferdinand Tönnies  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ferdinand Tönnies in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Ferdinand Tönnies  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Ferdinand Tönnies in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Ferdinand Tönnies Society
• Professor Dr. Ferdinand Tönnies , The University of Kiel and National Socialism: Expelled Personalities and Scientists.
• Ferdinand Julius Tönnies , Kiel directory of scholars, Kiel professors from 1919 to 1965, University of Kiel .
• Great researchers from the fjord: Ferdinand Tönnies , University of Kiel.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cornelius Bickel : Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed.): Classics of Sociology. Volume 1: From Auguste Comte to Alfred Schütz. 6th, revised and updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-64297-5 , pp. 132–146, here p. 132.
2. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, biographical information is based on Uwe Carstens : Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-88007-381-4 .
3. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 35.
4. ↑ On this in detail Rolf Fechner (Ed.): The poet and the sociologist. On the relationship between Theodor Storm and Ferdinand Tönnies . Fechner, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 978-3-9801498-3-9 .
5. ^ Arno Bammé : Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7316-1373-2 , p. 103 f.
6. ↑ Julius Tönnies: A most necessary answer to the most unnecessary question: “What is student reform?”. Karl Döbereiner, Jena 1895.
7. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 58.
8. ^ Olaf Klose, Eduard Georg Jacoby, Irma Fischer (ed.): Correspondence 1876–1908. Ferdinand Tönnies - Friedrich Paulsen. Hirt, Kiel 1961.
9. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 65 f.
10. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 77.
11. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7316-1373-2 , p. 106.
12. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 120 f.
13. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 106.
14. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 145.
15. ↑ Quoted from Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 108.
16. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 275.
17. ↑ Schlüter is the correspondent from whom most of the letters and postcards in the Tönnies estate have been preserved.
18. ↑ Christoph Knüppel: From anarchist to German crime thinker. Willy Schlüter's life and his friendship with Ferdinand Tönnies , part 2, in Tönnies-Forum , issue 1/1999, pp. 36–75, here p. 58.
19. ↑ Silke van Dyk , Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 20.
20. ↑ Uwe Carstens, Carsten Schlüter-Knauer (ed.): The will to democracy. Lines of tradition and perspectives. Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-428-08801-0 , p. 5 (foreword).
21. ↑ At the DGS's first sociologists' day in 1910, he said: “As sociologists, we only want to deal with what is, and not with what we believe should be for whatever reason.” Quoted from Otthein Rammstedt : Die Question of freedom from values ​​and the establishment of the German Society for Sociology. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 549-560, here p. 559.
22. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 198.
23. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 203.
24. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 213.
25. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 207.
26. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 215.
27. ↑ Alexander Wierzock: The ambivalences of a republican. Ferdinand Tönnies and the Weimar Republic. In: Andreas Braune, Michael Dreyer (Ed.): Republikanischer everyday life. Weimar democracy and the search for normality. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-515-11952-8 , pp. 69–86, here p. 69.
28. ↑ Quoted from Alexander Wierzock: The ambivalences of a republican. Ferdinand Tönnies and the Weimar Republic. In: Andreas Braune, Michael Dreyer (Ed.): Republikanischer everyday life. Weimar democracy and the search for normality. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 69–86, here p. 75.
29. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 265.
30. ↑ Unprinted manuscript from the estate, quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 281.
31. ↑ In detail: Jürgen Zander, Sie der Vernunft? Ferdinand Tönnies' misdiagnosis of National Socialism. In: Tönnies forum. Volume 11, No. 2/2002, pp. 18–43.
32. ↑ Silke van Dyk, Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2014, p. 149.
33. ↑ Silke van Dyk, Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2014, p. 49 ff.
34. ↑ Jürgen Zander: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). Estate, library, biography. Schleswig-Holstein State Library, Kiel 1980; and Alexander Wierzock: The estate of Ferdinand Tönnies in the Schleswig-Holstein State Library in Kiel. In: Stephan Moebius , Andrea Ploder (Ed.): Handbook of German-speaking sociology. Volume 2: Research Design, Theories and Methods. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-07607-8 , pp. 389-392.
35. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: Writings on Spinoza. Edited by Arno Bammé. Profil, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-89019-709-8 .
36. ↑ Manfred Walther, Community and Society with Ferdinand Tönnies and in the Social Philosophy of the 17th Century or From Althusius via Hobbes to Spinoza - and back. In: Lars Clausen , Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion . Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, ISBN 978-3-8100-0750-6 , pp. 83-106, here p. 85.
37. ↑ Cornelius Bickel: Ferdinand Tönnies. Sociology as a skeptical enlightenment between historicism and rationalism. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1991, p. 87 ff.
38. ↑ In detail: Eduard Georg Jacoby : The modern society in the social scientific thinking by Ferdinand Tönnies. A biographical introduction. Enke, Stuttgart 1971, ISBN 3-432-01679-4 , p. 9 ff.
39. ^ ^{A b} Bernard Willms : Thomas Hobbes. The realm of Leviathan. Piper, Munich 1987, p. 242 f.
40. ^ Bernard Willms: Monstrosity or womb? Comments on the importance of Hobbes research in Ferdinand Tönnies' work. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 393-404, here p. 393.
41. ^ Bernard Willms: Monstrosity or womb? Comments on the importance of Hobbes research in Ferdinand Tönnies' work. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 393-404, here p. 402.
42. ^ Bernard Willms: Monstrosity or womb? Comments on the importance of Hobbes research in Ferdinand Tönnies' work. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, p. 393-404, here p. 401 f.
43. ^ Albert Salomon : In memoriam Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). In: Albert Salomon works. Volume 2: Writings 1934-1942. Edited by Peter Gostmann and Gerhard Wagner, VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15697-2 , pp. 103-118, here p. 109 f.
44. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 9.
45. ↑ Lars Clausen : The Nestor of German Sociology: Ferdinand Tönnies. In: Bernhard Schäfers (Ed.): Sociology in Germany. Development, institutionalization and professional fields, theoretical controversies. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1995, ISBN 3-8100-1300-5 , pp. 91-97, here p. 91.
46. ^ Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Werner J. Cahnman : Tönnies, Ferdinand. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf, Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 1: Articles on sociologists who died by the end of 1969. 2nd revised edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-432-82652-4 , pp. 442-447, here p. 443.
47. ↑ So consistent Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 12 and Cornelius Bickel: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed. :): Classics of Sociology. Volume 1: From Auguste Comte to Alfred Schütz. 6th, revised and updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, pp. 132–146, here p. 138.
48. ↑ Ferdinand Tönnies: The division of sociology. In: Journal for the entire political science . Volume 79, Issue 1/1925, pp. 1-15; newly published as an encore in: Ferdinand Tönnies: Introduction to Sociology. Edited by Arno Bammé. Profil, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-89019-720-3 , 417-433.
49. ↑ The representation of the conceptual architecture is based, unless otherwise stated, on: Arno Bammé, Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, pp. 15–27.
50. ↑ Werner Fuchs-Heinritz , Rüdiger Lautmann , Otthein Rammstedt , Hanns Wienold (eds.): Lexicon for Sociology. 4th edition. VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 635: Lemma Sociology, general.
51. ↑ In the lexicon of sociology it says on social psychology that it deals with the analysis of individual behavior under the influence of social factors, in particular the interaction between individuals, between individuals and groups as well as among groups; Werner Fuchs-Heinritz , Rüdiger Lautmann , Otthein Rammstedt , Hanns Wienold (eds.): Lexicon of sociology. 4th edition. VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, Lemma Sozialpsycologie , p. 631.
52. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: Sociological writings 1906-1909. Edited by Arno Bammé. Profil, Munich / Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-89019-665-7 , p. 156.
53. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: Introduction to Sociology. Enke, Stuttgart 1931: new edition, hrgg. by Arno Bammé, Profil, Munich 2018, p. 459.
54. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 28.
55. ↑ The breakdown follows Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 23 ff.
56. ↑ Quoted from Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 22.
57. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 28 and p. 40 ff. See also Angelika Zahn: Der Wille und die Vernunft. Social ties with Ferdinand Tönnies and Jürgen Habermas. In: Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (Ed.): Public opinion and sociological theory. Thinking ahead with Ferdinand Tönnies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-09446-1 , pp. 93–122, here p. 96.
58. ↑ In the lexicon of sociology , under the heading applied sociology, reference is made to the lemma hyphenated sociology , ie to special sociology , which analyzes sub-areas of society using general sociological theories; Werner Fuchs-Heinritz , Rüdiger Lautmann , Otthein Rammstedt , Hanns Wienold (eds.): Lexicon of sociology. 4th edition. VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 635, Lemma Sociology, general , and p. 102.
59. ↑ For example: Ferdinand Tönnies: The crime as a social phenomenon. In: Sociological writings 1891–1905. Edited by Rolf Fechner. Profil, Munich / Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-89019-640-4 , pp. 119-134; first appeared in the Archives for Social Legislation and Statistics. Volume 8, 1895, pp. 329-344. See Jürgen Oetting: Ferdinand Tönnies - a forgotten criminal sociologist. In: Tönnies forum . Volume 27, No. 1/2018, pp. 45–51.
60. ↑ Ferdinand Tönnies: The suicide in Schleswig-Holstein. A statistical-sociological study. Ferdinand Hirt, Breslau 1927.
61. ↑ ^{a b} Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 126.
62. ↑ The presentation of the main work follows Volker Kruse : History of Sociology. 3rd edition, UVK, Konstanz and Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-8252-4936-6 , p. 123 f.
63. ↑ The presentation follows Rainer Waßner : Critique of Public Opinion. In: Sven Papcke , Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (Ed.): Key works of sociology. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 978-3-531-13235-8 , pp. 491-493.
64. ↑ The presentation is based on Klaus Lichtblau : The peculiarity of the cultural and social science concept formation. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-16188-4 , p. 93 ff.
65. ↑ The following presentation is based on Andrzej Przestalski: Tönnies' conception of the strike. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 471-482.
66. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: Writings on the Hamburg port workers strike. Edited by Rolf Fechner. Profil, Munich / Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-89019-660-2 .
67. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: The truth about the strike of the dock workers and seamen in Hamburg 1896/97. Hamburg 1897, p. 29, quoted from Andrzej Przestalski: Tönnies' conception of the strike. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, p. 471-482, here p. 474 f.
68. ↑ ^{a b} Cornelius Bickel: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed.): Classics of Sociology. Volume 1: From Auguste Comte to Alfred Schütz. 6th, revised and updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, pp. 132–146, here p. 139.
69. ↑ Gustav Radbruch , Ferdiand Tönnies' 70th birthday . In: Gustav Radbruch Complete Edition , Volume 16, Biographische Schriften , CF Müller, Heidelberg 1988, ISBN 3-8114-3387-3 , pp. 49–52, here p. 50.
70. ^ Hans Freyer: Sociology as Reality Science. Logical foundation of the system of sociology. BG Teubner, Leipzig et al. 1930, p. 185.
71. ↑ On this Arno Mohr: Ferdinand Tönnies and Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg. An intellectual relationship . In: Tönnies-Forum , vol. 25, 2/2016, pp. 7–32, here pp. 25 ff.
72. ↑ Alexander Wierzock, Sebastian Klauke: The Institute for World Economy and Maritime Transport as a pioneer of a political science from Kiel? In: Wilhelm Knelangen , Tine Stein (ed.): Continuity and controversy. The history of political science in Kiel. Essen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8375-0763-8 , pp. 293–323, here p. 298 ff.
73. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 191 f.
74. ↑ Alexander Wierzock, Sebastian Klauke: The Institute for World Economy and Maritime Transport as a pioneer of a political science from Kiel? In: Wilhelm Knelangen, Tine Stein (ed.): Continuity and controversy. The history of political science in Kiel. Essen 2013, pp. 293–323, here p. 306 ff.
75. ↑ Alexander Wierzock: Tragic awareness and social pessimism as a prerequisite for scientific knowledge. Alfred Meusel and Ferdinand Tönnies . In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , issue 11/2014, pp. 901–920.
76. ↑ Lars Gertenbach, Henning Laux , Hartmut Rosa , David Strecker: Theories of the community for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-667-5 , p. 47.
77. ↑ Durkheim and Tönnies use a dichotomous formation of terms, which, however, is contrary. For Tönnies the organic world of the premodern community , which is not produced according to plan, but developed by itself , is mechanical, on the other hand the society based on the conclusion of contracts . For Durkheim, on the other hand, the premodern, little differentiated society (in Tönnie's community ) is the mechanical one. For him, modern society based on the differentiated division of labor is organic . He has a positive image of her, while Tönnies regards her with skepticism; Cornelius Bickel, Tönnies and Durkheim. Proximity and distance . In: Tönnies forum. Volume 20, No. 1/2011, pp. 28–38, here p. 28.
78. ↑ Lars Gertenbach, Henning Laux, Hartmut Rosa, David Strecker: Theories of the community for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, p. 47 f.
79. ^ ^{A b} Lars Clausen: The Nestor of German Sociology. Ferdinand Tönnies. In: Bernhard Schäfers (Ed.): Sociology in Germany. Development, institutionalization and professional fields, theoretical controversies. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1995, pp. 91-97, here p. 95.
80. ↑ Volker Kruse: History of Sociology. 3rd edition, UVK, Konstanz and Munich 2018, p. 123.
81. ↑ Dirk Kaesler: Success of a misunderstanding? On the history of the impact of “community and society” in early German sociology. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion . Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 517-526, here p. 521.
82. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 111 f. In detail on misinterpretations of the Tönnies term community Lars Clausen: The Janus head of the community. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, ISBN 978-3-8100-0750-6 , pp. 67-82.
83. ↑ Dirk Kaesler: Success of a misunderstanding? On the history of the impact of “community and society” in early German sociology. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 517-526, here p. 519.
84. ↑ Quoted from Dirk Kaesler : Success of a misunderstanding? On the history of the impact of “community and society” in early German sociology. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 517-526, here p. 526.
85. ↑ Lars Gertenbach, Henning Laux, Hartmut Rosa, David Strecker: Theories of the community for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, p. 44.
86. ↑ Lars Gertenbach, Henning Laux, Hartmut Rosa, David Strecker: Theories of the community for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, p. 45.
87. ↑ Quoted from Dirk Kaesler: Success of a misunderstanding? On the history of the impact of “community and society” in early German sociology. In: Lars Clausen, Carsten Schlüter (Ed.): Hundred Years of “Community and Society”. Ferdinand Tönnies in the international discussion. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, pp. 517-526, here pp. 524 f.
88. ↑ Theodor Geiger : Ideology and Truth. A Sociological Critique of Thought. Humboldt, Vienna 1953, p. 106.
89. ↑ Cornelius Bickel: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed.): Classics of Sociology. Volume 1: From Auguste Comte to Alfred Schütz. 6th, revised and updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, pp. 132–146, here p. 141.
90. ↑ Jürgen Zander, Victory of Reason? Ferdinand Tönnies' misdiagnosis of National Socialism. In: Tönnies forum. Volume 11, No. 2/2002, pp. 18–43, here p. 35.
91. ↑ Lars Gertenbach, Henning Laux, Hartmut Rosa, David Strecker: Theories of the community for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, p. 40.
92. ^ Friedrich H. Tenbruck : German Sociology in an International Context. Their history of ideas and their relation to society. In: Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . Special issue 21/1979: German Sociology since 1945 , pp. 71–107, here pp. 73 f.
93. ^ Raymond Aron: The German Sociology of the Present. Systematic introduction to sociological thinking. Translated and edited by Iring Fetscher . Kröner, Stuttgart 1953, on Tönnies pp. 16–21 (Original: La sociologie allemande contemporaine. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1950).
94. ^ Günther Lüschen : 25 Years of German Post-War Sociology - Institutionalization and Theory. In: In: Bernhard Schäfers (Ed.): Sociology in Germany. Development, institutionalization and professional fields, theoretical controversies. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1995, pp. 11–33, here p. 11.
95. ↑ Lars Clausen: My Introduction to Sociology. 15 lectures in free speech. Edited by Jan-Frederik Bandel and Klaus R. Schroeter , with the collaboration of Bettina Clausen , Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main 2015, p. 274; The great influence of Frankfurt sociology around Theodor W. Adorno did not develop until the 1960s.
96. ^ Reprint René König : Ferdinand Tönnies. In: ders .: Sociology in Germany. Founder, advocate, despiser. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14888-8 , pp. 122-197.
97. ↑ René König: Ferdinand Tönnies . In: ders., Sociology in Germany. Founder, advocate, despiser. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14888-8 , pp. 122–197, here p. 122.
98. ↑ René König: Ferdinand Tönnies. In: ders .: Sociology in Germany. Founder, advocate, despiser. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14888-8 , pp. 122–197, here p. 189.
99. ^ Alfred Bellebaum : The sociological system of Ferdinand Tönnies with special consideration of his sociographic investigations. Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1966 (new edition published and with an afterword by Arno Bammé. Profile, Munich / Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-89019-712-8 ).
100. ^ Norbert Blüm : Will doctrine and social doctrine with Ferdinand Tönnies. A contribution to the understanding of “community and society”. Dissertation, University of Bonn 1967 (new edition published and provided with an afterword by Arno Bammé. Profile, Munich / Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3-89019-729-6 ).
101. ^ Eduard Georg Jacoby: The modern society in the social scientific thinking by Ferdinand Tönnies. A biographical introduction. ISBN 978-3-432-01679-5 (new edition published and with an afterword by Arno Bammé. Profil, Munich / Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-89019-699-2 ).
102. ^ Günther Rudolph : The philosophical-sociological basic positions of Ferdinand Tönnies. A contribution to the history and criticism of bourgeois sociology. German Academy of Sciences, Berlin 1967 (new edition: Fechner, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 978-3-929215-07-6 ).
103. ^ Günther Rudolph: The philosophical-sociological basic positions of Ferdinand Tönnies. A contribution to the history and criticism of bourgeois sociology. Fechner, Hamburg 1995, p. 13 ff. ( Unscientific preliminary remarks on a scientific paper ). The removed chapter was published in 1997: Günther Rudolph: On the state conception of Ferdinand Tönnies. In: Tönnies forum. Volume 6, No. 1/1997, pp. 1–22.
104. ^ Günther Rudolph: The philosophical-sociological basic positions of Ferdinand Tönnies. A contribution to the history and criticism of bourgeois sociology. Fechner, Hamburg 1995, p. 38.
105. ↑ Sebastian Klauke, Günther Rudolph, Tönnies researcher in the GDR. In: Tönnies forum. Volume 25, No. 2/2016, pp. 39–42, here p. 39.
106. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the information in this section is based on Werner J. Cahnman : Tönnies in Amerika. In: Wolf Lepenies (Ed.): History of Sociology. Volume 4, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 978-3-518-07967-6 , pp. 82-114 (original in English) in History and Theory. Volume 16, 1977, pp. 147-167.
107. ^ Werner J. Cahnman: Tönnies in Amerika. In: Wolf Lepenies (Ed.): History of Sociology. Volume 4, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 82-114, here p. 90.
108. ^ Louis Wirth : The Sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies. In: American Journal of Sociology . Volume 32, 1926, pp. 412-432.
109. ^ Werner J. Cahnman: Tönnies in Amerika. In: Wolf Lepenies (Ed.): History of Sociology. Volume 4, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 82-114, here p. 92.
110. ^ Louis Wirth: Urbanism as a Way of Life . In: The American Journal of Sociology , Volume 44, No. 1, July 1938, pp. 1-24.
111. ^ Werner J. Cahnman: Tönnies in Amerika. In: Wolf Lepenies (Ed.): History of Sociology. Volume 4, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 82–114, here p. 101.
112. ^ Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Werner J. Cahnman : Tönnies, Ferdinand. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf, Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 1: Articles on sociologists who died by the end of 1969. 2nd revised edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 442-447, here p. 446.
113. ↑ René König: Ferdinand Tönnies. In: ders .: Sociology in Germany. Founder, advocate, despiser. Hanser, München / Wien 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14888-8 , pp. 122-197, here p. 123 and p. 452, note 3.
114. ^ Werner J. Cahnman: Tönnies in Amerika. In: Wolf Lepenies (Ed.): History of Sociology. Volume 4, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 82-114, here p. 103.
115. ^ Johan Eichhorn: War in Europe. The Yugoslav Civil War (1991-1995) from the perspective of conflict research . ABI (Arnold Bergstraesser Institute), Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-928597-44-9 , p. 28 f.
116. ↑ Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz : Overcoming individualism and the theorem of community and society - Ferdinand Tönnies and communitarianism. In: Swiss Journal of Sociology. Volume 32, 2006, No. 1, pp. 27-52, here p. 28.
117. ↑ The information in the following sections and the quotation come from an interview that Uwe Carstens conducted with Lars Clausen on April 7, 1992, unless otherwise stated. In: Uwe Carstens: Chronicle of the Ferdinand Tönnies Society. For the 30th anniversary of the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Haus 1962-1992 . Kiel 1992, pp. 224-228.
118. ↑ Jürgen Zander, In heavy seas. Remembering Lars Clausen , In: Tönnies-Forum. Volume 19, No. 2/2010, pp. 38–42, here p. 38.
119. ↑ The he continued (not only Tonnies) until retirement as an employee of Landebibiliothek.
120. ↑ Lars Clausen, For Jürgen Zander . In: Tönnies forum. Volume 13, No. 1/2004, pp. 3–4, here p. 3.
121. ^ Note in Die Deutsche Universitätszeitung united with Hochschul-Dienst , Volume 33, Verlag Dr. Josef Raabe, 1977, p. 536.
122. ↑ Lars Clausen: My Introduction to Sociology. 15 lectures in free speech. Edited by Jan-Frederik Bandel and Klaus R. Schroeter , with the collaboration of Bettina Clausen , Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main 2015, p. 274.
123. ↑ Ferdinand Tönnies Society / Science / Symposia , accessed on August 25, 2020.
124. ↑ Klaus Lichtblau: The peculiarity of the cultural and social science concept formation. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, p. 87.
125. ↑ Lars Clausen: My Introduction to Sociology. 15 lectures in free speech. Edited by Jan-Frederik Bandel and Klaus R. Schroeter, with the collaboration of Bettina Clausen. Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main 2015, p. 273; The intermediate sections in the book before that, Kieler Hausgeist: Ferdinand Tönnies (pp. 265–268) and Community and Society (pp. 268–262) can be read as a very brief introduction to Tönnies' life and work.
126. ↑ Before Fechner switched to the University of Klagenfurt as a research assistant in 2003 , he had been a scientific advisor to the Ferdinand Tönnies Society in Kiel and then worked in Hamburg for the Tönnies office and made special efforts to obtain a complete Tönnies catalog raisonné. In his Rolf Fechner Verlag he published the new edition of Günther Rudolph's dissertation; Günther Rudolph: The philosophical-sociological basic positions of Ferdinand Tönnies. Fechner, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-929215-07-1 .
127. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 318 f.
128. ↑ According to Tönnies-Forum (6th year, issue 2, 1997, p. 37), Merz-Benz presented the first ever habilitation thesis on the work of the classic with his work.
129. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 100 f.
130. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction. Metropolis, Marburg 2018, p. 100.
131. ↑ Information on honors is based, unless otherwise documented, on Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 318 ff.
132. ^ Ferdinand Julius Tönnies. In: Kiel List of Scholars , University of Kiel , Honors section . In contrast to the information given by Carstens, the award of the title of Privy Councilor is given here for 1917.
133. ↑ Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography. 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 216 f.
134. ↑ That Tönnies was the holder of this award was certified on January 24, 1920 with a certificate of ownership from the General Order Commission. See facsimile from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies. Frisians and citizens of the world. A biography . 2nd, extended edition, Nordfriisk Instituut, Bräist / Bredstedt 2013, p. 217; It is unclear whether the certification date coincides with that of the award.
135. ^ Arno Bammé: Ferdinand Tönnies. An introduction , Metropolis-Verlag, Marburg 2018, p. 127.
136. ^ Rolf Fechner: Ferdinand Tönnies. Catalog raisonné. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1992, ISBN 978-3-11-013519-0 .

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