The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

Description

A comprehensive collection of essays on various aspects of Ferdinand Tönnies’s thought.

The volume is a comprehensive collection of essays on various aspects of Ferdinand Tönnies’s thought. Each of the essays has been written by a distinguished expert on Tönnies. The contributors include Niall Bond, Kenneth C. Bessant, David Inglis, Stefan Bertschi, Efraim Podoksik, William Stafford, Slavko Splichal and Mathieu Deflem. [NP] This companion is a major contribution to our understanding of one of Germany’s greatest social theorists and who was a major founder of sociology, a significant cultural critic, and an important political thinker. The essays contained in this volume are written in a clear style in order to be easily understood by non-specialists yet they are comprehensive enough to appeal to the specialist. The international collection of authors represents a range of disciplines, thus providing a fuller appreciation for the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies.

Introduction; Ferdinand Tönnies and the Development of Sociology; Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel; Whither Gemeinschaft: Willing and Acting Together as Community; Tönnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology; From Metropolis with Love: Tönnies, Simel and Urban Social Architecture; Ferdinand Tönnies: Hobbes Scholar; Gender and Family; The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will; The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies; Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085422
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand T nnies
ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY
Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological traditions, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Series Editor
Bryan S. Turner-City University of New York, USA, and Australian Catholic University, Australia
Forthcoming titles in this series include:
The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt
The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu
The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte
The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes
The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim
The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
The Anthem Companion to Robert Park
The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons
The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff
The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch
The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen
The Anthem Companion to Max Weber
The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand T nnies
Edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
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2016 Christopher Adair-Toteff editorial matter and selection; individual chapters individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adair-Toteff, Christopher, editor.
Title: The Anthem companion to Ferdinand T nnies / edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff.
Description: London; New York, NY : Anthem Press, [2016] | Series: Anthem companions to sociology | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002466 | ISBN 9780857281821 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: T onnies, Ferdinand, 1855-1936. | Sociologists - Germany. | Sociology - Germany - History.
Classification: LCC HM479.T59 A58 2016 | DDC 301.092-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002466
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 182 1 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 182 8 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Christopher Adair-Toteff Chapter One Ferdinand T nnies and the Development of Sociology Christopher Adair-Toteff Chapter Two Ferdinand T nnies and Georg Simmel Niall Bond Chapter Three Whither Gemeinschaft : Willing and Acting Together as Community Kenneth C. Bessant Chapter Four T nnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology David Inglis Chapter Five From Metropolis with Love: T nnies, Simmel and Urban Social Architecture Stefan Bertschi Chapter Six Ferdinand T nnies: Hobbes Scholar Efraim Podoksik Chapter Seven Gender and Family William Stafford Chapter Eight The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will Slavko Splichal Chapter Nine The Politics of Ferdinand T nnies Niall Bond Chapter Ten Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft Mathieu Deflem
Contributors
Index
INTRODUCTION
Christopher Adair-Toteff
Any list of the most important sociologists is bound to include Ferdinand T nnies. This is because he was so instrumental in developing sociology as a separate and important discipline in Germany and because his influence on sociology has been virtually worldwide. The fact that he did not hold a faculty position in sociology is irrelevant, not the least because sociology as an academic discipline had not yet been established in Germany. That it did happen around 1920 is due in large measure to T nnies s growing reputation and increasing influence.
T nnies s reputation rests primarily on his now famous distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . As will become clearer toward the end of this introduction, these two concepts are neither easy to comprehend nor to translate. Briefly, Gemeinschaft is the traditional, rural, organic community whereas Gesellschaft pertains more to the modern, urban, individualistic society. T nnies s conceptual opposition has become one of the enduring contributions to sociology; people have tended to pay less attention to T nnies because they erroneously believe that this was his only contribution. Unfortunately, this mistaken impression is not held just by laypeople; even some important sociologists have held this belief. For one important example: in 1957 Charles Loomis published his translation of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. In his foreword to this edition Pitirim A. Sorokin insisted that Like many an eminent thinker Ferdinand T nnies was a man of one central idea (T nnies 1988 [1957], vii). In 2001 Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis published a new translation of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. This volume appeared in the illustrious series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought and Harris and Hollis, like Charles Loomis before them, believed that it was an acknowledged classic and that it legitimately belonged in the sociological-political canon (T nnies 2001, xxix; 1988, xii). Both Loomis s and Harris and Hollis s opinions about T nnies continue to be borne out, but Sorokin s claim has lost some currency. One goal of this volume is to demonstrate how important and relevant T nnies s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft remains, but a second goal is to show that T nnies s importance is not just based on that one central idea, but that he had much of importance to say on a variety of topics, including many aspects of sociology and social theory.
The T nnies Chapters
The chapters in this volume were written with the intention of covering many of the major aspects of T nnies s sociology. The authors were invited to submit their chapters because of their important and recent contributions to the study of T nnies s thinking. They offer different analyses of older topics and provide explorations of newer subjects. T nnies s masterwork is of course covered, but most of the chapters in this book focus on many different themes, thus disproving Sorokin s insistence that T nnies was a man of only one central idea.
The volume opens with my chapter ( Chapter 1 ), which is intended to explore the three ways T nnies helped sociology to develop as a major discipline in Germany. I begin by discussing Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and by noting that while T nnies made minimal changes to the various editions, he did include new introductions. These are highlighted to demonstrate the ways his perspectives on the books and on sociology in general underwent changes. The second major section is intended to show how T nnies fostered the Deutsche Gesellschaft f r Soziologie (German Society for Sociology). While others were involved with him in first establishing it, T nnies was the one who persevered and ensured that it overcame many obstacles. While books such as Die Sitte , Das Eigentum and Einf hrung in die Soziologie have never achieved the iconic status that Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft has, they are nonetheless important contributions to sociology. Reading these volumes will significantly add to one s understanding of T nnies and will help undermine the notion that he was a man of one central concept. The final section is devoted to exploring T nnies s relationships with his fellow German sociologists. These sociologists included Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, Ernst Troeltsch and especially Max Weber. The general point of my chapter is to detail the various roles that T nnies played in the development of sociology and to show that he was indispensable for its existence as a respectable scholarly discipline.
In his first contribution ( Chapter 2 ) Niall Bond explores the relationship between T nnies and Simmel. He explains how they both moved from philosophy to social theory to sociology. T nnies based much of his thinking on Thomas Hobbes and his preoccupation with security while Simmel founded his thinking on Immanuel Kant and his concern with epistemological forms. Bond contrasts T nnies s rural conservatism with Simmel s urbane progressivism and he delineates how the former largely regarded society as organic whereas the latter focused more on the individual. Furthermore, T nnies was tempted to make moral statements while Simmel preferred to maintain a critical distance. But T nnies and Simmel both were fundamentally concerned with the question of how society was made possible. Bond stresses that while they focused on the same thing, their approaches differed fundamentally; T nnies s sociology is characterized as solid while Simmel s was agile ; T nnies sees society as a substantial whole, while Simmel regards society as a massive series of interconnected relations. T nnies concentrated on the peaceful, organic whole whereas Simmel investigated continuous, everyday struggles between individuals. Simmel may have regarded T