Ferdinand Tönnies

Ferdinand Tönnies German: ; 26 July 1855 – 9 April 1936 was a German sociologist, economist, in addition to philosopher. He was the significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best so-called for distinguishing between two shape of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft community and society. He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and numerous other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy. Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel are considered the founding fathers of classical German sociology. Though there has been a resurgence of interest in Weber and Simmel, Tönnies has not drawn as much attention.

Biography

Ferdinand Tönnies TOHN-yehs was born on 26 July 1855 on the Haubuarg "De Reap," Oldenswort on the Eiderstedt Peninsula into a wealthy farmer's breed in North Frisia, Schleswig, then under Danish rule. Tönnies was the only sociologist of his generation who came from the countryside. He was the third child of church chief and farmer August Ferdinand Tönnies 1822–1883, and his wife Ida Frederica born Mau, 1826–1915, came from a theological family from East Holstein. His father, of Frisian ancestry, was a successful farmer and cattle rancher, while his mother hailed from a line of Lutheran ministers. The two had seven children, four sons and three daughters. On the day he was born, Ferdinand Tönnies received the baptismal produce of Ferdinand Julius and moved to Husum, on the North Sea, after his father retired in 1864.

Tönnies enrolled at the University of Strasbourg after graduating from high school in 1872. They took the time to utilize his freedom to travel, exploring the academic fields of the University of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin, and Tübingen. At age 22, he received a doctorate in philology at the University of Tübingen in 1877 with a Latin thesis on the ancient Siwa Oasis. However, by this time, his main interests had switched to political philosophy and social issues. After completing postdoctoral produce at the University of Berlin, he traveled to London to cover his studies on the seventeenth-century English political thinker Thomas Hobbes. Tönnies earned a Privatdozent in philosophy at the University of Kiel from 1909 to 1933 after submitting a draft of his major book, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, as his Habilitationsschrift in 1881.He held this post at the University of Kiel for only three years. Because he sympathized with the Hamburg dockers' strike of 1896, the conservative Prussian government considered him to be a social democrat, and Tönnies would not be called to a professorial chair until 1913. He described to Kiel as a professor emeritus in 1921 where he took on a teaching position in sociology and taught until 1933 when he was ousted by the Nazis, due to earlier publications in which he had criticized them. Remaining in Kiel, he died three years later in 1936.

Many of his writings on sociological theories furthered pure sociology, including Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 1887. He coined the metaphysical term Voluntarism. Tönnies also contributed to the examine of social change, particularly on public opinion, customs and technology, crime, and suicide. He also had a vivid interest in methodology, especially statistics, and sociological research, inventing his own technique of statistical association. After publishing Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Tönnies focused aspects of the social life such(a) as morals, folkways, and public opinion. However he is best call for his published work on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft because his later workings applied the same abstraction to aspects of social life.