Gerneinschaft and Gesellschaft

bs
- E U G E N E KAMENKA

I
THE DICHOTOMY of Gemeinschuft and Gesellschaft is associated, in
modern times, with the sociological classic published under that title
by Ferdinand Toennies in 1887, at the beginning of his long and
influential career as a teacher of sociology.
Toennies takes his departure from the subtle differences between
the two German words. Both can mean a society, an association,
a community or a fellowship. But Gemeinschaft tends to be used
of an association that is internal, organic, private, spontaneous: its
paradigm is the Gemeinschaft of marriage, the communio totius uitue.
Gesellschuft- comparatively new as a word and as a phenomenon
-is, on the other hand, usually something external, public,
mechanical, formal or legalistic. It is not an organic merger or
fusion but a rational coming together for ends that remain individual.
The secret of the Gemeinschaft lies in the household and the
concept of kinship, in the ties of blood, friendship and neighbourhood.
The secret of the Gesellschaft lies in commerce and the conception
of contract, its ties are the ties created by the transaction between
(abstract) persons, its measure for all things is money. The
Gemeinschaft-type of society we find in the village and the feudal
system based upon the village. Here, ‘the idea of a natural
distribution and of a sacred tradition which determines and rests
upon this natural distribution, dominates all realities of life and
all corresponding ideas of its right and necessary order, and how
little significance and influence attach to the concepts of exchange
and purchase, of contract and regulations. The relationship between
community and feudal lords, and more especially that between the
community and its members, is based not on contracts, but, like
those within the family, upon understanding ’.
On the other hand, ‘The theory of the Gesellschaft deals with
the artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which
superficially resembles the Gemeinschaft in so far as the individuals
peacefully live and dwell together. However, in the Gemeinschaft
they remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas
in the Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all
uniting factors. In the Gesellschaft, as contrasted with the

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

4 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Gemeinschaft, we find no actions that can be derived from an

a priori and necessarily existing unity; no actions, therefore, which
manifest the will and the spirit of the unity even if performed by
the individual; no actions which, in so far as they are performed
by the individual, take place on behalf of those united with him.
In the Gesellschaft such actions do not exist. On the contrary,
here everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a
condition of tension against all others. Their spheres of activity
and power are sharply separated, so that everybody refuses to
everyone else contacts with and admittance to his sphere; i.e.,
intrusions are regarded as hostile acts. Such a negative attitude
towards one another becomes the normal and always underlying
relation of these power-endowed individuals, and it characterises
the Gesellschaft in the condition of rest; nobody wants to grant
and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be
inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not
in exchange for a gift or labour equivalent that he considers at
least equal to what he has given’.’
Gesellschaft, then, is the bourgeois commercial society described
in the Communist Manifesto, the society in which the cash nexus
has driven out all other social ties and relationships, in which men
become bound only by contract and commercial exchange. Where
Gemeinschaft is associated with the village, the household and
agricultural production directly for use, the Gesellschaft is associated
with the city, the factory and commodities production for exchange.
‘ The head of a household, a peasant or burgher, turns his attention
inwardly toward the centre of the locality, the Gemeinschaft, to
which he belongs; whereas the trading class lends its attention
to the outside world; it is concerned only with the roads which
connect towns and with the means of transit. This class seems
to reside in the centre of every such locality, which it tends to
penetrate and revolutionise. The whole countq is nothing but
a market in which to purchase and sell.’2
The ‘common sphere’ of the Gemeinschaft rests on a natural
harmony, on the ties of tradition, friendship and common acceptance
of a religious order; the common sphere of the Gesellschaft, in
so far as it exists at all, is based on the fleeting moment of contact
within the commercial transaction - the moment when the object is
leaving the sphere of influence of A but has not yet entered the
sphere of influence of B. At this moment, for the contact to be
successful, the wills of the two individuals need to be in accord,
there has to be what the law of contract calls ‘ a meeting of

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

 CEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT 5
minds’. It is a meeting which takes place only in connexion with
an offer and holds good only in return for a consideration.
The distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, for
Toennies, is intimately associated with the distinction between two
kinds of will, each characteristic of one of the two societies. The
Gemeinschaft is based on the Wesenwille, the natural or integral
will in which a man expresses his whole personality, in which there
is no developed differentiation between means and ends. Against
this type of will stands the Kurwille, the rational but in a sense
capricious will developed in the Gesellschaft, the will in which
means and ends have been sharply differentiated and in which
Max Weber’s zweckrationale behaviour prevails. Toennies emphasises
and develops this distinction in his paper ‘Zweck und Mittel im
smiulen Leben ’ ( 1923) and illustrates its application to property
in his short pamphlet Das Eigentum4 published in 1926. Property
that is the object of the natural will is so closely bound to the
essential nature of the person that any separation from it necessarily
produces unhappiness. The property of this kind and the person
tend to fuse together, it becomes part of him, loved as his own
creation. It is thus that men tend to behave toward living things
which they own, to their house and yard, to the ‘sod’ that they
and their forefathers have worked for generations, and toward other
persons who are the objects of their direct afhnation, the objects
of love, trust or of feelings of duty. In the relationships that result
from the natural w ill there is no sharp dichotomy of pleasure and
pain, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, but a unity of feelings in
which satisfaction and dissatisfaction, enjoyment and trouble,
happiness and sorrow, right and duty, feeling honoured and feeling
burdened are all bound together. The rational will, on the other
hand, finds its paradigmatic expression in the relationship to money,
to property that is expressed as credit or debit in a ledger, to
goods and commodities that one acquires with no other aim but
to be rid of them, as quickly as possible, at a profit. Its ultimate
consummation is the commercial share, which can be held by a
man who has never even seen the property it confers on him
and has no interest in it whatsoever except as an item of credit.
It is in such relationships that joy and sorrow, satisfaction and
dissatisfaction are sharply differentiated ; profit is plus, joy,
satisfaction ; loss is minus, sorrow, dissatisfaction. Everything is
abstracted, torn out of its living context, subsumed under an
inviolable end.

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

6 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft for Toennies are not close, accurate

descriptions of two different existing kinds of societies. They are
rather what he calls Normalbegrifle, a forerunner of Max Weber’s
conception of ideal types and of the present-day conception of
models. They are two opposed sets of connected presuppositions
on which societies can be based; feudal society tending toward
one, modern industrial society toward the other. Any particular
period, or any particular country, will fail to display either set
of presuppositions in its purity; it will be a mixture of both. But
the historical trend, Toennies believed, lay in the direction of
transforming a society primarily based on Gemeinschaft-relations
into a society primarily based on Gesellschaft-relations. Man was
passing from the primacy of the social unit, of custom, tradition and
religious order, to the primacy of the abstract individual, of trade,
rationalistic law and the arithmetical summation of ‘ public opinion ‘.
If there is much in Toennies’ work to suggest that he regretted
this transition, he was always careful, qua sociologist, to insist that
he was merely describing, that historical trends were primarily
to be observed rather than challenged. His task, as he saw it,
was not that of the moralist, but of the sociological analyst, of the
man who brought out the presuppositions on which a society rests
and their effect on its total life.

I1
The work of Toennies, as one might expect, has been ‘refined‘
-i.e., made more ‘precise’, narrow, often trivial and mostly
uninteresting - by several generations of American sociologists. In
contemporary academic sociology, one wiIl find what was meant
to be a radical critique of the contemporary social process discussed
under such headings as ‘ Operationalising a Conceptual Scheme:
The Universalism-Particularism Pattern Variable ’ and ‘Fixed
Membership Groups: The Locus of Culture Processes Toennies, ’.
it is true, does argue that the Gemeinschaft arises out of such
primordial relationships as those between mother and child, husband
and wife and brothers and sisters; American sociologists have
therefore associated his work with Charles Cooley’s studies of such
‘ primary ’, allegedly Gemeinschaft-like groups as neighbourhoods,
families and gangs of children playing. Others have linked Toennies
with the rural-urban dichotomy, or with Ernst Troeltsch‘s distinction
between church and sect. Parsons and Shils, bringing their own
peculiar type of order into the undoubted confusion, have ended

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

 GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT 7
by analysing Toennies’ Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy into five
separate and distinct dichotomies: aff ectivity/affective neutrality,
ascription / achievement, self-orientation / collectivity-orientation,
specificity/diff useness, universalism/partic~larism.~ On all this,
I should like to have little to say; I have little competence and
less inclination to follow Toennies’ work down these narrow by-ways
of modern academic life. No doubt, some results of the detailed
studies based on these pattern variables affect the general conclusions
that Toennies wants to draw, but the vast majority of such studies
are sadly beside the point. It is to the social philosopher and
the political moralist that Toennies’ message is primarily addressed.
The main line of sociological thinking between 1850 and 1950,
I should argue, is that represented by Marx-Weber-Schumpeter.
The significance of Toennies lies in the place which he occupies
in that progression, in the closeness with which he had read and
the sympathy with which he had understood the available writings
of mar^.^ Marx’s work is the first and greatest theoretical analysis
of that competitive, nakedly economic, bourgeois society that
arrogantIy sought to impose its image upon the world in the period
between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. It was
Marx who emphasised that money had consummated the self-
alienation of man, had destroyed all human bonds and relationships,
had divorced man’s work and man’s creation from man and
converted the entire person into a mere means for the attainment
of abstract ends. It was Marx who contrasted the misery and
intense social atomisation of the new industrial towns with the
comparative brotherhood and security of the feudal agrarian past.
Capitalism, for Marx and for tens of thousands of the new industrial
workers, had decomposed and atomised man. It had torn him
out of the bondage but security of feudalism, in which his material
and political life were welded together, in which he was oppressed
but also protected, and thrown him into an arena of wild animals,
into a society in which the liberation of man’s mind and status had
also meant the complete liberation, from all restraints, of man’s
greed, acquisitiveness and economic power over others.
It was only in the Nineteenth Century that capitalism achieved
self-consciousness; it was in this century that the economic
presuppositions of capitalism were developed into a seemingly
coherent political programme capable of confronting traditional
political arrangements and theories of society as a viable alternative
system. Economic life, as Marx never tired of putting it in his
earlier writings, had burst forth from its political bondage under

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

8 POLITICAL SCIENCE

feudalism and threatened to swallow, through economic power, all

aspects of social life. It was on t h i s moment - both in the temporal
and the Hegelian sense - that Marx built his economic interpretation
of history; it was on the same moment that Toennies founded his
great social dichotomy, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft.
From the stand-point of the Twentieth Century, the moment has
proved in important respects short-lived. The historical process,
for reasons best described by Weber and Schumpeter, has once
more restored the balance between the economic and the political,
and closed, or at least bridged, the political and social chasms of
the Nineteenth Century. The servitude and atomisation of man
have not proceeded to the bitter lengths expected by Marx and
feared by Toennies ; money no longer seems so nakedly the only god
of our society, all human relations have not been completely replaced
by the cash nexus. Toennies’ conception of the Gesellschaft is not
the plain image of our contemporary society and it would be
mistaken to beat it as such. It is rather, as I have stressed, a
model or ideal type that enables us to pull together and understand
the relationship between certain tendencies in our society. It also
enables us, perhaps above all, to stand outside these tendencies
and see the influence which they have on our own and our
contemporaries’ thinking. I should like now to turn to some
examples of the way in which the Toennies’ distinction can help
us to do this.

I11
There is a widespread tendency, in contempor9 political theory
and ethics, to accept as hallowed presuppositions the concepts
characteristic of Gesellschaft. We seek to interpret both moral
and political life in terms of interests and the demands of the
individual; we tend increasingly to describe the political process
in the language of the factory (the concepts of input and output
and of ‘the process’ itself); the favourite example of moral
theorists is the duty to keep promises and the whole content of
their conception of a moral life is that of rational obedience to
universal principles. All of these presuppositions, I have striven
to show elsewhere,’ are profoundly mistaken - they lead, as the
young Marx saw, to necessary contradictions and instabilities, they
are incapable of serving as the foundations of a coherent social
or ethical theory, they significantly falsify the facts of social and
moral life. It is no accident that John Stuart Mill felt forced

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

 GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT 9
to abandon the pure (i.e. commercial, Benthamite) utilitarianism
and to distinguish the satisfaction of a cultured human being from
that of a pig; it is no accident that many modern philosophers
feel impelled to search for some way of distinguishing those human
‘interests’ they feel drawn to from what men merely want.* The
consummate atomistic, contractual, commercial presuppositions of
much modern social thinking call for an abdication of social and
ethical judgment, for a neutrality and resultant abstraction, that
consistently hinder the illumination of social and cultural life.
Nowhere can the disastrous results of these presuppositions be felt
more obviously than in the attempt to apply them to education,
to reduce everything to the measurable and the quantifiable, to
remove the opportunities for evaluation of character and the exercise
of particular, ad hoc, judgment.
The contradictions and limitations of the presuppositions enshrined
in Gesellschaft have been brought out in an interesting way in the
field of law by the Marxist legal theorist and one-time Dean of
Soviet jurisprudence, E. B. Pashukani~.~Pashukanis, like Toennies,
sees law as the expression of the commodities-producing society,
as the projection of the laws of the market on to social life. Its
primary unit is the abstracted right-and-duty-bearing individual ;
its primary principle is the quid pro quo of contractual life. Criminal
law and the recent development of public law, it is true, do not
readily fit into this picture; but then it seems to me no accident
that the vast majority of able private lawyers have a deep-seated
contempt for those primarily occupied with public or criminal law.
There, they say, there are no principles capable of coherent
development, but a hopeless tension between system and policy.
In general terms, they are right; just as English law could not
develop a law of contract until it had freed itself from conceptions
of status, so the detailed and comparatively coherent structure
that has been developed around the concepts of individual rights
and duties cannot cope with those questions where men are concerned
to vindicate or establish some form of ‘social interest’ above
the rules of the market economy. The concept of public law,
one might well say in Hegelian language, is the dissolution of law;
it is the lawyer come to vacillate between political-moralism and
political science.
All these, of course, are but sketchy examples, signposts or
indications on the way to perceiving what seems to me one of
the fundamental contradictions in social thinking today. We have
emerged from the period of bourgeois society holding dear some

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

10 POLITICAL SCIENCE

of its basic presuppositions, glorifying the ‘open society’ of

commerce and competition, and yet seeking to elaborate the
justification for a partial return to the preordained harmonies of
social planning and guided development. The theory of
Gesellschaft alone can provide no such justification.

Iv
The ideal of Gemeinschaft did not originate with Toennies, though
it had a peculiarly strong appeal to several generations of German
thinkers from the middle of the Nineteenth Century onward right
down to the Nazis - a period throughout which Germany felt herself
hovering on the borderline between feudal tradition and modem
industrial society. The contrast between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft is the distinction between Confucius’ ‘ Great Similarity ‘
and ‘Small Tranquility ’, between Socrates’ conception of the
State founded on justice, which unites people, and Glaucon’s sketch
of the State founded only on self-interest, where all alliances are
temporary and unstable. It is the distinction between Augustine’s
City of God and his Society of Man, between Hegel’s family society
and civil society.
One of the main weaknesses of classical political philosophy, and
of Toennies’ own work, I should argue, has been the failure to
examine at all closely the possible different relationships that these
thinkers associate with the harmony of Gemeinschaft. The crucial
issue is that of hierarchy, of the authority-relations within a society.
Confucius, not unlike Toennies, sees the harmonious political society
based on the wu-lun, the five relationships: those of governor and
governed, parents and children, husband and wife, elder brother
and younger brother, friend and friend. In the first four, and
in Confucius’ general conception of the sound society, the concept
of hierarchy is essential; the senior partner must rule devotedly
and justly, the junior obey loyally and wholeheartedly. Yet this
is not the relationship between friends, and it is this relationship,
and not the four others, on which Confucius bases his picture of
the perfect society.
The possible conceptions of Gemeinschaft were dichotomised
for us, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century; by the quarrel
between romantic conservatives and romantic socialists, between
those who wanted the restoration of the old community ruled by
the strong and able and those who wanted the inauguration of
the new community in which all men were brothers, caught up

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

 GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT 11

as equal partners in tasks and interests of common concern. Today,

there are few of us in Western society prepared to advocate the
former or to believe in the possibility of the latter. It is, I believe,
true that men can be caught up in such fellowships in the course
of production, of artistic and scientific creation and appreciation,
or in times of danger and adversity. But few of us believe that
such a spirit of fellowship can pervade an entire society; it
occurs rather in sectional groups, in dedicated companies and in
unusual moments of wider crisis and effort.
Dedication is a dangerous term; large areas of the world have
learnt to fear the dedication of men committed to fascism,,communism
and various varieties of religious and non-religious puritanism ;
the influence of the rule-conscious Gesellschaft still makes us
reluctant to distinguish one dedication from another, to ask what
motives are dedicated to what ways of living. In the end, I should
argue, the concept of Gemeinschaft can be clarified only by seeing
it in its ethical and not merely political context, by our being
prepared to abandon the ethical neutralism of so-called social science
and devoting our attention to the differing psychological motives
and social traditions to be found operating in people, to distinguishing
ethically between different ways of living and different human
interests. To such ethical distinctions, Toennies’ opposition between
Wesenwille and Kiirwille seems to me an important and illuminating
contribution.

FOOTNOTES

1 Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Association (Gemeinschuft und

Cesellschaft), translated and supplemented by Charles P. Loomis, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp. 67-8 and 74; also published (with slight
variations) as Community and Society by the Michigan State University Press
and Harper and Row, New York, 1957 (paperback), pp. 59 and 64-5.
2 Toennies, op. cit., p. 90 (paperback, p. 79).
3 ‘Ends and Means in Social Life’ published in Hauptprobleme der
Soziologie, Errinerungsgabe fur Max Weber, 1923, vol. 1, pp. 235-267.
4 Das Eigentum -Soziologie und Soziulphilosophie, Schriften der
soziologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, V, Wilhelm Braumiiller, Wien und Leipzig,
1926, esp. pp. 19-22.
5 Parsons & Shils (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action, Harvard U.P.,
Cambridge, Mass., 1951, esp. Parts 1 and 2.
6 Toennies refers to Captial in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and in a note
added in 1911 discusses his relationship to Marx. See Community and
Association, pp. 115-16 (also paperback, pp. 101-2).

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016

12 POLITICAL SCIENCE
7 Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, London, 1962.
8 See, e.g., Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, London, 1964.
9 In his chief work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism: An Essay
in the Critique of Fundamental Legal Concepts, published (in Russian) by
the Communist Academy, Moscow, in 1926. A two-volume German translation
appeared in 1929; there is no English translation. Hans Kelsen’s The
Communist Theory of Law (Stevens & Sons, London, 1955) gives an account
of his theory and brief quotations from his work; there are longer excerpts
in John Hazard’s collection Soviet Legal Philosophy (Harvard U.P., Cambridge,
Mass., 1951).

BRITISH, EUROPEAN, AMERICAN,

AFRICAN, ORIENTAL BOOKS AND JOURNALS,
NEW AND SECONDHAND

Hefer’s
A CAMBRIDGE BOOKSHOP
THAT I S A MARKET-PLACE
OF THE WORLD

3-4 PETTY CURY, CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

Downloaded from pnz.sagepub.com at The University of Auckland Library on June 5, 2016