Ferdinand Tönnies was born into the rural, almost medieval environment of the Duchy of Schleswig in 1855, which was annexed by Prussia after the Second Schleswig War of 1864 when he was nine years old. He then pursued his education and academic career in Prussia, the most rapidly changing and industrializing polity in Europe. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society, 1887), his seminal work, expressed a vivid personal experience of transition from tradition to modernity, and it also captured the turn of European sociological interest away from future-oriented progress and toward historical and comparative reflections on the distance already covered by modernization.13