"...Despite its belated fame, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft continued to baffle and elude readers as much as it had done when first published. In his preface to the first edition Tönnies had claimed that the most important conclusion to be drawn from his work was that fashionable clichés about ‘individualism versus collectivism’ were meaningless: instead there were simply two distinct forms of ‘individualism’, the unself-conscious kind, which was created by and naturally flowed from Gemeinschaft, and the self-conscious kind which fostered and was manufactured by the culture of Gesellschaft. This was not, however, how the book’s message appeared to its readers, many of whom persisted in interpreting it either as an essay in Romanticism and mediaevalism or as a political tract. In defending himself against charges of utopian anti-modernism, Tönnies was consistently to maintain that the dichotomies he had identified were not time-specific or mutually exclusive, and that contrasting types of institution – and contrasting attributes within a single institution – would always co-exist in any historical setting. Thus a parliament or assembly might be the creation of a specific ‘artificial’ act, but it would at the same time be composed of people who were linked together to a greater or lesser degree by ties of kinship, neighbourhood, history, language and culture. Similarly, a human individual would simultaneously experience some degree of both Wesenwille and Kürwille, spontaneity and calculation, ‘selfhood’ and ‘personhood’, kinship ties and market forces. The crucial question in any ‘empirical’ setting was not whether a particular individual, institution, idea or action belonged to ‘Gemeinschaft’ or ‘Gesellschaft’, but where they were positioned on the continuum between the two. In this respect, Tönnies’s application of ideal types to real historical settings anticipated and closely resembled the methodology later developed by his famous contemporary Max Weber. The affinity with Weber was also apparent in his insistence that interpreting empirical data logically required the prior adoption of certain analytical categories, in a manner suggested by Kant. Thus in analysing social and political phenomena both abstract reasoning and the ‘stuff’ of everyday history were, in Tönnies’s view, not mutually contradictory but necessary and complementary. Both in the s and later, however, these themes were often obscured by the fact that throughout Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft so many levels General introduction xxviii of argument were so densely and to some extent discrepantly packed together. When Emile Durkheim reviewed Tönnies’s book in  he entirely missed the point that it was intended as an analysis of social organisation in general, rather than of a historical shift from a ‘solidarist’ past to a ‘mechanistic’ future; and the reader unfamiliar with the wider corpus of Tönnies’s work is more than likely to share Durkheim’s confusion. Such difficulties were not dispelled by Tönnies’s own recurrent attempts to make his position clearer. Despite his protestations of objectivity, the very language that he used to defend his ideas often suggested that he was very far from being indifferent to the value content of his two models and to their respective historical fates. These ambiguities were almost certainly rooted in the fact – inescapably conveyed by his own life and works – that Tönnies’s inner sentiments and convictions were in many repects much more complex, dualistic and difficult to harmonise than he himself cared to admit. Thus he was an archrationalist with a penchant for spirituality, a ‘universalist’ with a deep attachment to the culture of his homeland, a devotee of positivistic natural science who none the less deplored the corrosive impact of scientific culture upon intuition, custom and older forms of knowledge. On a more practical plane, his lament for modern woman (forced into market relations that were “alien and terrible to her basic nature”) co-existed with the hope (alluded to in the  edition) that modification of gender roles might help to reconstitute more harmonious social relations in the long-term future. And in his career as a social reformer Tönnies’s commitment to schemes for the re-making of Gemeinschaft was in latent conflict with his underlying conviction that Gesellschaft was irreversible and could not “jump over its own shadow”. Such tensions can be scarcely more than hinted at here, but they may be detected in many further spheres – in Tönnies’s views of logic, language, politics, culture and the very nature of human history. The result has been that admirers, critics and antagonists have found what they wanted to find in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, and even as an acknowledged classic it has been far more often referred to than read. Thus, over the course of more than a century, the book has been interpreted both as an exemplary text of nineteenth-century materialism, and as a paean to mediaevalism and anti-modernism; as an essay in enlightenment universalism, and as an exercise in racism and socio-biology. Having been initially viewed as a communist tract, it was taken up in the s by groups promoting militant ultra-nationalism (a link accidentally General introduction xxix fostered by Tönnies’s dedication of his post-First World War edition to the ‘youth of greater Germany’). In North America in the s it was interpreted both as an essay in consensual structural functionalism, and as a precursor of social phenomenology; whereas in post-Second World War West Germany it was to be identified as part of the heritage of ‘cultural despair’ that had fostered National Socialism. In more recent times its authority has been cited for ‘green politics’, for theories of ‘communitarianism’, for ‘idealist liberalism’, and for the current resurgence of debate about ‘civil society’. At the start of the twenty-first century its arguments may appear to some readers quaintly antiquarian – to others as perhaps even more pertinent to the culture of global capitalism than when it first appeared in . The book is presented here to Englishspeaking readers in no single political guise, but as an immensely rich, ambitious, difficult, and thickly textured work that defies onedimensional understanding. It invites, not crude type-casting, but much closer historical attention to its affinities with, and re-working of, many earlier themes and narratives in political and social thought. Its very imperfections and ambiguities mirror the dark labyrinth of a complex and peculiar epoch of European intellectual history."

Ibid