Ferdinand Tonnies
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Tönnies, Ferdinand
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 1968
COPYRIGHT 2008 Thomson Gale.
Tönnies, Ferdinand
System of sociology
Applied sociology
Contributions and influence
WORKS BY TÖNNIES
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), German sociologist, spent his childhood on a prosperous farm in Schleswig-Holstein and, after his father’s retirement, in the town of Husum. In 1872 Tonnies enrolled with patriotic enthusiasm at the University of Strassburg, but making use of the German student’s freedom to move, he transferred successively to the universities of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, and Tubingen, where he finally received his doctorate in classical philology in 1877. Even then his interests had shifted to political philosophy and social problems. His father’s means, which later made it possible for him to devote his time to private scholarship, later enabled him to pursue postdoctoral studies. Tonnies went to the University of Berlin and to London, beginning his Hobbesian studies and Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. In 1881 a draft of the latter served as his Habilitationsschrift when Tonnies became a Privatdozent for philosophy at the University of Kiel. He made but little use of the venia legendi (license to lecture). Relatively unencumbered by academic duties, Tönnies contributed extensively not only to professional journals but to political periodicals as well, commenting on the important problems of his time and often taking sides on political issues. Despite his detachment from the university, he was appointed to a chair for economics and statistics in 1913, from which post he retired in 1916. He had lived outside Kiel during most of his academic life, but in 1921 he moved into the city and resumed teaching as professor emeritus in the field of sociology.
Tönnies was president of the German Sociological Society from 1909 to 1933; it had been founded by him together with Georg Simmel, Werner Som-bart, and Max Weber. He also participated in the organization of the Hobbes and Spinoza societies and was active in the Society for Ethical Culture. Although he lived all his adult life in the region where he was born, Tönnies liked to travel and felt quite at home in England, where his studies and publications gained him many friends. He visited the United States in 1904, at which time he read a paper at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. He was a corresponding member of the American Sociological Society.
Conservative by temperament, Tönnies nevertheless took an active interest in the socialist and trade union movements, in consumer cooperatives, and in a variety of other progressive movements. He supported the independence movements in Finland and Ireland. In spite of his opposition to the imperial regime, he endeavored to defend Germany’s cause in World War i and after the war investigated the “war guilt question.” In protest against the rising National Socialist movement, he joined the Social Democratic party. This and his public denunciation of Nazism and anti-Semitism in the winter of 1932/1933 led to his illegal discharge by the Hitler government from his position as professor emeritus. He died in 1936, nearly 81 years old.
Tönnies’ mother came from a family of Lutheran pastors, and although he himself was an agnostic, he never ceased to concern himself with problems of religion. In his old age he came to believe in the possibility of an adogmatic universal religion that would unite all mankind. All his life he had a great love of poetry, and many of his own writings reveal a poetic vein.