Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- General introduction
- Chronology of Tönnies's life and career
- A note on the texts and further reading
- A note on translation
- Glossary
- COMMUNITY AND CIVIL SOCIETY
- Book One A general classification of key ideas
- Book Two Natural will and rational will
- Book Three The sociological basis of natural law
- Section 1 Definitions and propositions
- Section 2 The natural element in law
- Section 3 Inter-related forms of will – commonwealth and state
- Appendix: Conclusions and future prospects
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Section 1 - Definitions and propositions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- General introduction
- Chronology of Tönnies's life and career
- A note on the texts and further reading
- A note on translation
- Glossary
- COMMUNITY AND CIVIL SOCIETY
- Book One A general classification of key ideas
- Book Two Natural will and rational will
- Book Three The sociological basis of natural law
- Section 1 Definitions and propositions
- Section 2 The natural element in law
- Section 3 Inter-related forms of will – commonwealth and state
- Appendix: Conclusions and future prospects
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Summary
The human self or the ‘subject’ of human natural will is, like the system of natural will itself, a unity. That is to say it is a unit within a larger unit, as well as containing other lesser units within itself. Like an organism and its component parts, however, it is a unity because of its inner self-sufficiency, unum per se, and because its parts are all related to it as a living entity. It maintains itself by changing these parts, discarding old parts (robbing them of their life and their particular unity), and creating new parts or assimilating them from inorganic matter. Thus nothing is a unified system that is merely a ‘part’, and everything that is a ‘whole’ forms some kind of unified system. As a whole it is not just part of another whole and dependent upon it, but is also a representative of its kind or species, or of its ‘ideal type’, since all organic entities are ultimately included within the general conception of organic life. This latter can then itself be seen as simply a facet of the ‘infinite energy’ or ‘universal will’, from which it has managed to develop under certain given conditions.
For it is a fact that advanced scientific research has shown that all organic beings are also aggregations of more basic organisms, known as cells, which are determined both by inheritance and by the way in which they relate to each other.
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- Tönnies: Community and Civil Society , pp. 179 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001