Introduction

Conceptions of gender and of the family play a central role in Tönnies's elaboration and illustration of his theory of social relations and modes of identity in his early classic Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. He continued to think and write about them throughout his career. Not only are these conceptions interesting in themselves, at the very least as examples of attitudes in his time and place: also it is impossible to explain his theory as he wrote it without reference to them. Therefore this chapter will set out the way he employs these conceptions to explain his theory of human association and will formation. But from a later perspective, as a number of scholars have argued, these conceptions, and especially his conception of gender, may be judged ahistorical, limited and vitiated by commonplace late nineteenth-century German patriarchal assumptions and prejudices (Greven 1991; Meurer 1991). For a recent summary statement of the case against Tönnies and a list of the relevant secondary literature, see Niall Bond's article “Sexus und Tönnies” (Bond 2007).

I do not wish to deny that Tönnies is suspect from a modern feminist standpoint, nor that he on occasion makes grossly antifeminist statements. But I intend to argue that his critics have based themselves on a selective reading and the most unfavorable interpretation: a different selection, and a more sympathetic approach, which places him in the context of his own age and does not judge him exclusively by the standards of today, qualifies these charges. For his writings are complex and sometimes polysemic; on gender, traditional prejudices and progressive ideas mingle together in unresolved tension.

The most serious charge brought against him is that his prejudices on the topic of gender go to the very heart of his theory, and that therefore the exposure of them deprives that theory of value. His critics argue that his pure sociology, his ideal types of Gemeinschaft /Wesenwille (community/essential will) and Gesellschaft /Kürwille (association/ elective will) are based on conventional sex-role differences (taken as a model not only by him but by other contemporary sociologists) (Sydie 1987, 170), and that his conception of Gemeinschaft is modeled on the nineteenth-century bourgeois idea of a patriarchal family.