Ferdinand Tonnies Essay Example

Ferdinand Tonnies Essay Example Ferdinand Tonnies Paper Ferdinand Tonnies Paper Ferdinand Tonnies BY TCIutch A) Toennies is most famous for his analysis on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft which translate to community and society, preferring to focus on the bindings of social relationships of traditional society. His work reflects the division between folk society and urban society, which is like the intimate relationships of family, friends, and community versus the impersonal alliances of polity, economic exchange, and state power. The reason this is his most popular work is because these two worlds are still here with us and may never leave the human existence. So what Toennies studies re the relationships that people have with society, whether it is an intimate society or an impersonal society. Toennies believes that there are cases of a Gemeinschaft being able to turn into a Gesellschaft and a Gesellschaft turning into a Gemeinschaft. This transformation can only be made in two ways, the first being that people of a Gesellschaft really get along well and they like being with each other and are efficient when they work. When people begin to build a relationship with their team members they are able to make the transition from Gesellschaft to a pseudo-Gemeinschaft and eventually into a full-fledged Gemeinschaft. Over time this Gemeinschaft will fall apart because people will begin to start trying to get personal achievements as opposed to working for the groups benefit as a whole, this will turn the Gemeinschaft into a pseudo-Gesellschaft and back into a Gesellschaft completing the cycle. Toennies develops in his essay, Gemeinschaft is associated with common ways of life, Gesellschaft with dissimilar ways of life; Gemeinschaft with common beliefs, Gesellschaft with dissimilar beliefs; Gemeinschaft with concentrated ties and frequent interaction, Gesellschaft with isolated ties and uncommon interaction. : Gemeinschaft with small numbers of people, Gesellschaft with large numbers of people; Gemeinschaft with distance from centers of power, Gesellschaft with proximity to centers of power; Gemeinschaft with familiarity, Gesellschaft with rules to overcome distrust; Gemeinschaft with continuity, Gesellschaft with temporary arrangements; Gemeinschaft with emotional bonds, Gesellschaft with regulated competition. Family life is the general basis of life in the Gemeinschaft. It exists in village and town life, the village community and the town themselves can be considered as large families, the various clans and houses representing the lementary organisms of its body; guilds, corporations, and offices, the tissues and organs of the town. Here original kinship and inherited status remain an essential, or at least the most important, condition of participating fully in common property and other rights. Strangers may be accepted and protected as serving-members or guests either temporarily or permanently. They can belong to the Gemeinschaft as objects, but not easily as agents and representatives of the Gemeinschaft. Children are, during minority, dependent members of the family, but according to Roman custom hey are called free because it is anticipated that under possible and normal conditions they will certainly be masters, their own heirs. This is true neither of guests nor of servants, either in the house or in the community. But honored guests can approach the position of children. If they are adopted or civic rights are approved for them, they fully acquire this position with the right to inherit. Servants can be esteemed or treated as guests or even, because of the value of their functions, take part as members in the activities of the group. It also happens sometimes that hey become natural or appointed heirs. In reality there are many gradations, lower or higher, which are not exactly met by legal formulas. All these relationships can, under special circumstances, be transformed into merely interested and dissolvable interchange between independent contracting parties. In the city such change, at least with regard to all relations of servitude, is only natural and becomes more and more widespread with its development. The difference between natives and strangers becomes irrelevant. Everyone is what he is, through his personal freedom, through his wealth and his contracts. He is a servant only in so far as he has granted certain services to someone else, master in so far as he receives such services. Wealth is, indeed, the only effective and original differentiating characteristic; where in Gemeinschaft property it is considered as participation in the common ownership and as a specific legal concept is entirely the consequence and result of freedom or ingenuity, either original or acquired. Wealth, to the extent that this is possible, corresponds to the degree of freedom possessed. In the city as well as in the capital, and especially in the metropolis family life is dying. The more and the longer their influence prevail the more the residuals of family life acquire a purely accidental character. For there are only few who will confine their energies within such a narrow circle; all are attracted outside by business, interests, and pleasures, and then separated from one another. The great and mighty, feeling free and independent, have always felt a strong inclination to break through the barriers of the folkways and mores. They know that they can do as they please. They have the power to bring about changes in their favor, and this is positive proof of individual arbitrary power. The mechanism of money, under usual conditions and if working under high pressure, is means to overcome all resistance, to obtain everything wanted and desired, to eliminate all dangers and to cure all evil. This does not hold always. Even if all controls of the Gemeinschaft are eliminated, there are nevertheless controls in the Gesellschaft to which the free and independent individuals are subject. For Gesellschaft (in the narrower sense), convention takes to a large degree the place of the folkways, mores, and religion. It forbids much as detrimental to the common nterest which the folkways, mores, and religion had condemned as evil in and of itself. Toennies, in explaining Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft talked about two types of human will, one that goes with each of the societies the concept of human will, the correct interpretation of which is essential to the subject of this treatise, implies a twofold meaning (Toennies 1957: 103) Toennies is explaining how both of the two types of human will are absolutely essential to his works and theories. l distinguish between the will which includes the thinking and the thinking which encompasses he will. Each represents an inherent whole which unites in itself a multiplicity of feelings, instincts, and desires (Toennies 1957: 103). All three if these inherent wholes link themselves to the most natural forms of human life, I say this because these are all things that are beyond our control as humans. We may to some degree be able to control our feelings, bu t that is only of our feelings arent that extreme. When our feelings are extreme we essentially lose control and our hormones take over and cause us to feel happy, sad, angry, or any other type of expression. Everyone as instincts, we see it more commonly in animals, like when dogs get to excited they have a tendency to bite, this is because of their natural instinct. Humans, as cultured as we are, also still have instincts that we act on. The most basic example I can give is the instinct to flinch to avoid being hit by something, we flinch because it is our natural will to avoid unwanted contact of any form. Toennies also mentions desires, every human on earth has certain desires, whether it be climbing up a corporate ladder (this would be an example of a Gesellschaft), maybe their desire is to marry nd have children (this would be like starting or adding to a personal Gemeinschaft). All of these three links that Toennies mention are things that are wired into our core beings as humans and nobody is an exception. The will of the human being in the first form I call Wesenwille (natural will) (Toennies 1957: 103) this accompanies Gemeinschaft; it is determined by simple face to face relations with other people. This allows people to interact how they would like to interact, in a natural spontaneous way from arising emotions so they can express how they feel to a ertain sentiment. The three forms of this natural will or essential will are pleasure, habit, and memory. When you look at your own personal Gemeinschaft you will notice that all three of these forms are woven in somewhere. You have to express some level of pleasure because if you didnt enjoy the company that was in the community then you would not work for the benefit of the group as a whole which would cause it to be something other than a Gemeinschaft. So you have to enjoy the time in a Gemeinschaft, you also have to have some habits, these can be anything rom waking up and drinking coffee to praying before you go to bed, any sort of routine. Memory is tied in with pleasure because if you have a bunch of good memories with someone then you may not want them to leave your Gemeinschaft. Memories trigger an emotional response and cause you to act spontaneously based off of the memory, an emotional act of spontaneity is based purely off of your natural will. Toennies likens the idea of natural will to being the psychological equivalent of the human body (Toennies 1957: 103) or the principle of the unity of life. This eans that natural will involves thinking in the same way as the organism contains those cells of the brain which, if stimulated, cause the psychological activities which are to be regarded as equivalent to thinking. Natural will, can also only be explained in terms of the past because the future evolves from the past. The problem of will as natural will, according to this view, is manifold, like the problem of organic life itself. Specific natural will is inborn in the human being in the same way as in any species a specific form of body and soul is natural (Toennies 1957: 105). What Toennies is saying here is that the body and the soul of a person grow together, as one matures so does the other, by a gradual growth developing from a small embryo into a fully functioning organism. This is a brilliant comparison because the body and soul go through the same struggles, meaning that because they are together they are forced to grow together and through the challenges and struggles that both encounter during the human life they are developed and shaped. The development of natural will is self-generative to the same extent as is the development of the rganism (Toennies 1957: 105) here is Toennies saying that as the body grows, so does the natural will. The second type of human will that Toennies talks about is rational will (or kurwille). Rational will is prior to the activity to which it refers and maintains its s eparate identity (Toennies 1957: 104) this means that rational will only has an imaginary existence, while the activity is its realization. So the proof that this imaginary rational will exists is in the activity that was done, you might not be able to see rational will with your own eyes, but you can see someone acting on their will. The ego of both forms of will sets the body (otherwise conceived as motionless) into action by external stimulus (Toennies 1957: 107), Toennies is saying while you cant see will on its own, you can see the actions that it causes so in turn you actually can see will. The actions that you would see with rational will are actions that would further a persons individual goals, so it is purposeful and future oriented, because of this, rational will (Kurwille) is accompanied by Gesellschaft. This rational self-interest and calculating conduct act to weaken the traditional bonds of kinship, family, and eligion that permeate the Gemeinschaffs structure. Tonnies says that it is the human l in so far as it is conceived as stripped of all other qualities and as essential thinking (Toennies 1957:104). When you think like this it means you are imagining the results of possible actions taken by one and measuring such actions by a final result. The idea of which is taken as a standard, then sorting out and displaying the actions for future understanding. The three forms of rational will are deliberation, arbitrary choice, and conceptual thought. Unlike the three forms of natural will these re based solely on the idea of getting oneself ahead of others, which explains why it works so well in a Gesellschaft setting. B) Ferdinand Toennies grew up on a farm in Germany; from the micro level of forces that were influencing his theories was his mothers family who were Lutheran. Growing up in a small community he developed his framework of human perception and experience from a specific stand point. Toennies was the result of a unique form of social life that left a permanent wisdom of integration on him. This integration allowed him to view nature, the interaction of eople, the ways of culture, and all social life in a very distinguished way. Toennies says, every such relationship represents unity in plurality or plurality in unity. It consists of assistance, relief, services, which are transmitted back and forth from one party to another and are considered as expressions of wills and their forces (Toennies 1957: 37) Here Toennies is drawing off of his relationships that he had while growing up in a tight knit community to build assimilation to a Gemeinschaft. He later adds, the relationship itself, and also the resulting association, is conceived of either as real nd organic life- this is the essential characteristics of the Gemeinschaft (communityb- or as imaginary and mechanical structure- this is the concept of Gesellschaft (society) (Toennies 1957: 37) More concretely, Gemeinschaft is the strongest in the small scale and largely static rural milieu, whereas Gesellschaft is typical of the urban environment. Accordingly, Gemeinschaft (community) should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft (society) as a mechanical aggregate and artifact (Toennies 1957: 39), or put another way, Toennies is identifying a milieu of ife and locating it in the ostensibly genuine rural world and using it as the counterpoint and critique of the false, and therefore in some way inadequate or unsatisfactory, dwelling of the metropolis. The city is typical of Gesellschaft in general Thoughts spread and change with astonishing rapidity. Speeches and books through mass distribution become stimuli of far-reaching importance (Toennies 1957:266) From the macro level there were a few other things that came into play. At this time in Germany the population was rapidly growing and the German colonial empire was xpanding largely in part to its army and naw becoming among the strongest in the world. Toennies was seeing that the German empire was trying to unify the country through physicality and fear as well as industrialization, and population growth while expanding their empire. Living in Germany in a time like this is bound to have an impact on anyones life and it most certainly made an impression on Toennies. C) Toennies can help us better understand the scope of Hobbess intentions, and perhaps can give us some insight into why we are still wrestling with Hobbess political ideas. Toennies was interested in reviving Hobbess work because he thought it clearly exemplified his own belief that every political and social order is based in a particular understanding of human nature that is tied to an account of how human beings form associations. This insight, Toennies believed, had been lost in the course of the German political theory of the 19th century. Toennies emphasized Hobbess importance to political theory in order to prompt a rediscovery of political anthropology and a reevaluation of the links between the political order and the understandings and wills of its members. But Toennies did not think Hobbess account of human nature was complete, and he wanted to bring the incomplete quality of that account to the attention of his contemporaries. Toennies thought that Hobbes described a certain aspect of human nature as if it were the whole truth about human life in an effort to urge people to adapt themselves to a particular form of political association. The character of Hobbess work had been lost in the intervening centuries, Toennies believed, and people had begun to accept a Hobbesian-type account of human beings as absolutely true; they assumed that uman beings naturally thought of themselves as individuals without fundamental ties to others and were endlessly recalculating the means to their desired ends. Instead of rising to give a thorough and radical treatment of political problems, Toennies wrote, scholars were stuck within the Hobbesian universe without knowing it, chipping away at the model of man as an independent and rational actor without realizing its shortcomings or its ties to particularly modern forms of political and social life. While Toennies points†that every political order is based on an account f human nature, and that those accounts of human nature are usually partial (as is the description of man as an independent and rational actor)†have been picked up by other thinkers in the 20th century, they may continue to be useful reminders to political scientists today. One aspect of Toennies work is the report of a man living inside of Hobbesian society: feedback on which aspects of human life are fostered, and which are inhibited, by a system that is based on the understanding of human life that Hobbes offered. It turns out that Toennies work on Hobbes became central o a revival of German interest in Hobbes, and indeed sparked a series of studies that drove several innovations in German political thought. This fruitful recovery of Hobbes was possible because, according to Toenniess account, Hobbes had fallen into disregard in the 19th century in all of the major European countries. By the 19th century, according to Toennies, Hobbess work was beginning to suffer a worse fate: people were no longer trying to shout down his ideas in order to prevent them from taking root, but to shun them for allegedly having proven dangerous. One indication f the lack of scholarly interest in Hobbes at that time is the simple fact that Toennies was quickly able to discover several manuscripts that could substantially correct published versions of Hobbess works, including Elements of Law and Behemoth, which had only been published in a very corrupt version (even the title was mistaken). Toennies discovered and published the Short Tract on First Principles and a series of letters that were significant to understanding Hobbess philosophical work. All this was found in the British Library and at Oxford, where it had been lying ignored by scholars for centuries. Toennies was therefore central to the revived interest in Hobbes both for his arguments for Hobbess relevance and for his efforts to provide more materials for those curious to study Hobbess philosophy. Toennies, who had written Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in 1887 at the age of 32, despised the use to which his book was put after World War l. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is an attempt to look critically at the realities of life in the modern state. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is also directly related to Toenniess studies of Hobbes; indeed, it is an effort to critique and correct Hobbess political anthropology. Toennies is a critic of modernity, but one who neither wants to turn back the clock, nor believes it can be turned back, and one who deeply appreciates the contributions that founders of modernity like Hobbes made to the understanding of politics. First, I want to explain Toenniess critique of Hobbess political anthropology; next I will explain how Toennies felt his work was indebted to Hobbes and in what respect he thought other political theorists could learn from Hobbes. The most interesting contribution that Toennies made to the understanding of Hobbess account of human ature is his contention that Hobbess account is not a description of how men are but how they must become if they are to form lasting commonwealths. Toennies urges his readers to recognize that political forms have their root in human will and understanding. He argued passionately against contemporaries who described Gemeinschaft literally as organisms because he thought that it was mistaken to look for the existence of a community outside of the minds of its members. According to him, politics is rooted in the way we think about ourselves and the way that we choose to relate to others based on this understanding. This was the most important lesson that Toennies learned from his attempt to think through the development of Hobbess thought. The same insight also convinced Toennies of the need for a discipline like sociology, one that would recognize that political forms are appropriately considered as ideal types because they exist primarily in the minds of the members. I have found that reading Toennies can helpfully remind one that there is a more fundamental task than working out the details by which the Hobbesian contract is sealed. After we comb through Hobbess theory, we should take ime to think about, first, whether the political forms modeled on Hobbess theory have fostered a certain view of human nature in modern citizens, and, second, how we modern citizens should evaluate that inheritance D) The shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft may be compared with Emile Durkheims conception of society undergoing a transition from mechanical to organic solidarity. What Toennies described as societal will is similar to what Durkheim described as collective consciousness, a collective soul or conscience that guides the behavior of the individuals. Both Toennies and Durkheim tied social change to ncreasing specializations in the division of labor and differentiation in the body social. They recognized the fading of primary bonds of kinship, ritual, and community life, suspended by the growth of secondary bonds of association linked with occupation, law, and politics with the expansion of capitalism and urbanization. T? ¶nniess breakthrough was to detach himself from the constant debates concerning the superiority of village and urban ways of life; to detach these ways of life abstractly from their familiar backgrounds; and to attempt to identify the dominant features and qualities of each way of life. Durkheims work represents the most important alternative to Toennies typological approach. Like Toennies, Durkheim was impressed by the importance of community relations for equipping human beings with social support and moral sentiments. Durkheims conceptual breakthrough was to see community not as a social structure or physical entity but as a set of variable properties of human interaction that could be found not only among tradition-bound peasants of small villages but also among the most sophisticated residents of modern cities. The two most famous examples of Durkheims disaggregating pproach are found insuicide ([1897] 1951) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1911] 1965): first in the ties that stand as a protection against the dangers of egoism in Suicide and then in the ritual experiences that knit together those with common definitions of the sacred in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In both cases, Durkheim extracts an element or process associated with communal relations and shows its influence on behavior and consciousness. Toennies has traditionally been viewed as having a romantic view of the loss of Gemeinschaft but in fact he saw Gesellschaft as rational and necessary vehicle for uiding a more specialized and diverse society. The transition of village to city could be related to the shift from a simple to complex organism, from infancy to maturity. Toennies outlook on an urban society of rational specialization and interdependency is a contrast from Marxs view that class conflict and worker revolt would arise with the growth of capitalism. Toennies concern was that Gesellschaft not be sabotaged or kidnapped by corrupt or totalitarian political interests such as fascism. Durkheim, in contrast, was more concerned with moral consequences of the rise of a Gesellschaft ociety. Like Durkheim, Toennies examined social phenomena with regard to their functioning producing or facilitating social cohesion. An example of this would be choosing a political party; this simple act is stating your opinion, which in turn damages social cohesion. This is true because there is always going to be someone that disagrees with you so there will be a wall between you two and true social cohesion could never be fully achieved because of this wall. Nonetheless the important role played by the ideological elements encompassed in natural will and ational will, Toennies, like Marx, was addicted to the economic interpretation of history. Toennies believed that with the development of trade, the modern state, science, the natural will and Gemeinschaft-like characteristics of social entities, norms, and values gave way to rational will and Gesellschaft like characteristics. Unlike Marx, who believed technical conditions and progress to be the prime mover in change, Toennies ascribed this role to a large scale trade involving the desire for the profitable use of money, which led to the development of capitalism. According to Toennies the introduction of this type of trade into the integrated communities of agrarian and town societies liquidated the old ideologies and brought about the capitalistic age with its rationalistic intellectual attitude. In this interpretation, Toennies was influenced by 17th and 18th century social science of England and France, as well as by Marx. Toennies talked about his affinity for Marx in several passages throughout his writings, but in the process of incorporating Marxian notions into his pure as well as his applied sociology and combining them with ther elements in his total system of thought, he has transformed them drastically. While Toennies admired Marx he did not fail to criticize him where he felt it was needed. Both agree that commerce and commercial capital are older than the capitalistic mode of production and that profit is created in circulation, not only in production, but Toennies misses in Marx the clear recognition that productive, or industrial, capital is not different Just more effective then lending capital. Toennies went on further than Marx and determined that labor and commerce are opposed et complementary functions of social life, representing concrete and equal value versus abstract and surplus value. This is similar to spontaneous (natural) will and Gemeinschaft versus calculating rational will and Gesellschaft. This idea is brought into light by explaining that the worker and the artist are men of Gemeinschaft while the merchant as a trader or production manager is a man of Gesellschaft. Ferdinand Toennies determined the future course of German sociology with his Marxist analysis of capitalist society in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. He published a biographical ntroduction to Marx in 1920 and produced ideas influenced by Marxism throughout his life. Notwithstanding his admiration for Marx and his interest in fixing biases in distribution, he differs with Marx inter alia over the contribution of production factors to wealth, the qualification of the proletariat to rule and the place for ethics in analysis. Toennies, whose cautious nature kept him clear of revolutionary movements in Germany and abroad, supported Ethical Culture and the cooperative movement, the criticism of commercialism by Marx and Toennies and the teleology of Toennies and Marx are compared and contrasted. Toennies pessimistic narrative of rationalization and alienation, based upon nineteenth-century assumptions related to the human sciences vocation to project societal developments, may today appear more founded than Marxist conjectures as to a socialist future. Toennies and Weber are both typologists, even if their conceptualizations of ideal-typical procedure are not identical. Both were strong proponents of sociological research, they both partook in important empirical investigations, especially regarding the conditions of working class, and they advocated the establishment of institutions in support of such nvestigations. Toennies and Weber felt that social sciences, like all sciences, need to be value free and must not have any biases. Toennies in the preface to Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft says that ones conception of what ought to be determines ones recognition of what has been, and even ones expectation of the future, he insists that the deliberate avoidance of this ever present danger is the very essence of scientific attitude (Toennies: X) . Weber would have agreed with this idea of keeping political or moral Judgments separated from scholarly evaluation and analysis. E) The concepts for which he is best known in English are of course community and society Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. ) These are differentiated partly by their mode of communication traditional handed-down beliefs verse public opinion that is more rationally and scientifically based and grows out of reflection and discussion. He used the central concept of public opinion and related forms to generate a way of thinking about societies and social change that is still useful. Unlike most contemporary scholars, he Joined intellectual and moral questions and believed that normative ideals could be found within the empirical. He was hopeful that under the right conditions (that is as practiced by the well-educated and divorced from one- sided and self-interested media accounts), public opinion would serve as a guide for social betterment. He appreciated the intimate and intricate link between public opinion and democracy. In Toennies usage an opinion expressed in public is not public opinion. Nor are opinion polls which reveal many publics with diverse opinions the same thing as general public opinion. The latter is defined by its consensual nature. It may be strong or weak. A firm public opinion is more haracteristic of values and broad principles than of current events. Firm opinion has a normative quality and exerts social pressure. Toennies writing of the dispersed audience and the large public consisting of spiritually, rather than spatially, connected individuals reminds us that many of the themes now associated with cyberspace have origins in the emergence of national mass societies and earlier technologies such as the printing press, telephone and film which link scattered individuals. He noted the potential of the modern press system to eviscerate national borders and create a world culture and single market. Current national states were but a temporary phenomenon in light of a truly international Gesellschaft. Toennies was alert to the factors that effected audience reception of a message including the sound of words as well as content and anticipating the concept of reference group, he wrote of the opinion circles of recipients. He identified an embryonic concept of opinion leader and he also noted the strong impact the personality of the message deliverer could have. His analysis of propaganda stressing slogans, the sharpening of contrasts and the importance of repetition anticipates work that was to ome several decades later. His work is an early example and implicit call for critical studies of the media. He directs attention to the role of opinion leaders in helping to inform and thus form public attitudes. He saw the pernicious effects unrestrained advertising and profit-seeking could have on media. He foresaw the growth of the public relations field and alienated Journalists in observing that some paid writers follow, like all mercenaries, the flag whose bearer feeds him and promises booty. He notes that the offer and sale of ones own opinion, while a form of personal reedom for the seller, converts the opinion directly into impersonal merchandise. He discusses some of the means by which inauthentic opinions may be elicited (e. g. , persuasion, flattery, future rewards, threats, and orders). He argues that the unreliability of the media of his day was not because of direct lies, but rather (in offering what could be a Job description for a contemporary spin master) because of their tendency to, inaccuracy, distortion, and conjecture as reality or high probability, addition or exaggeration. He also rallied against deception in ommunication in the form of hidden advertisements in which a brand name is unobtrusively slipped into an unrelated feature story. Here shamelessness grows with the completeness of the disguise. With todays visual media this has been taken to a new level with product placement (e. g. , slipping brand name consumer items into film and television dramas) and there are continual efforts to improve various forms of subliminal communication. His consideration of opinions as commodities and of deception leads to the observation that expressed opinions are not necessarily reflective of inner convictions. As with celebrities who endorse products, the publicly expressed attitude, becomes marketable regardless of whether this or an opposite opinion is really harbored or adopted. Implicit here, although not developed, is the idea that would gain important currency from later research regarding the importance of context and the degree of independence between attitudes and behavior. In noting that the person behaving in ways inconsistent with inner beliefs may come to adjust beliefs to behavior, he hints at the idea of cognitive dissonance and reverses the popularly assumed direction of the causal relationship (e. g. he suggests that behavior can cause attitudes rather than the reverse). This was an absolute Joy for me to write about as it is combining both of my majors, communication (specifically advertising) and sociology. F) Modern theorist Mathieu Deflem has incorporated Ferdinand Toennies work into his ideas on crime and society. He offers a discussion of the criminological sociology of Ferdinand T? ¶nnies (1855-1936). While T? ¶nnies is generally well known for his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, his elaborate contributions to the sociological study of crime have been almost entirely neglected in the history of sociology. Situated within Toennies general theoretical perspective, he presents the central themes of Toennies study of crime and discusses its conceptual and methodological characteristics as a distinct approach in criminological sociology. He also centers on the importance of Toennies criminological work for the reception and status of his sociological theory. He argues that the neglect of Toennies crime studies has led to overlook Toennies aspiration to integrate sociological theory and empirical inquiry, which has contributed to misconstrue his unique conception of social order. While criminology isnt what Toennies is generally known for, Deflem is able to incorporate his ideas and put them to work in new ways because Toennies theories covered such a broad range of aspects. Another way that Toennies works are being used by modern theorist Niall Bond is in the area of law. We are convinced not Just that the founding work of German sociology, Ferdinand Toennies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft can only be understood against the backdrop of preceding legal theory and the debates on methodology, land reform and distinctions between family and contract law from hich that theory emerged; we are further convinced that legal philosophy and theory may draw benefits from the logical and philosophical considerations to be found in that work. Toennies advances a debate of legal theory of his day. He rejects strict utilitarian ideas and the assumption that human action can be fully explained through purposive rationality. He argues that Gesellschaft can be described through analogy to a mechanism and Gemeinschaft through analogy to an organism. The fact that humans act neither as a mechanical unit nor as an organism, may explain why