BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnold, Jeanne. “Complex Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of Prehistor-
ic California: Chiefs, Specialists, and Maritime Adaptations
of the Channel Islands” American Antiquity 57, no. 1 (1992):
60–84.
Blackburn, Thomas. December’s Child: A Book of Chumash Oral
Narratives. Berkeley, Calif., 1975.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif., 1980.
Johnson, John R. “Chumash Social Organization: An Ethnohi-
storic Perspective.” Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Santa Barbara, 1988.
Larson, Daniel O., John R. Johnson, and Joel C. Michaelsen.
“Missionization Among the Coastal Chumash of Central
California: A Study of Risk Minimization Strategies.” Ameri-
can Anthropologist 96, no. 2 (1994): 263–299.
Ortner, Sherry B. “On Key Symbols.” In Reader in Comparative
Religion, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt. New
York, 1973.
Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” Amer-
ican Sociological Review 5 (1986): 273–286.
DENNIS F. KELLEY (2005)
TÖNNIES, FERDINAND (1855–1936), German
sociologist. Tönnies provided elaborate definitions of
branches of sociology long before it was recognized as an aca-
demic discipline.
Ferdinand Julius Tönnies’s academic preparation for his
work as sociologist was uncommonly broad. In 1877 he re-
ceived his doctorate in classical philology. Beginning his
teaching career at the University of Kiel in 1881, he succes-
sively taught philosophy, economics, statistics, and sociolo-
gy, and meanwhile published many articles on public poli-
cies. From 1909 to 1933 he was president of the German
Sociological Society (founded by him along with Georg Sim-
mel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber). Having been pub-
licly opposed to rising National Socialism and anti-
Semitism, he was later illegally discharged from this post by
the Hitler regime.
In 1887 he published his most famous book, a typologi-
cal study, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (translated as Com-
munity and Society, 1957). Outside Germany the reputation
of this work overshadowed his other important writings such
as those on Thomas Hobbes, on Karl Marx, on custom and
morals, and on public opinion. Employing his dichotomous
ideal types, Gemeinschaft (“community”) and Gesellschaft
(“society”), he attempted to define fundamentally different
kinds of human relationships in their dimensions and struc-
tures. He took into account biological and psychological as
well as institutional perspectives, and he expounded the ty-
pology with impressive erudition and poetic imagination. He
leaned heavily on English literature from Hobbes to Herbert
Spencer and Henry Maine. He compared his typology to
Maine’s distinction between status and contract.
For Tönnies, all social groupings are willed creations
manifesting different kinds of human will. He saw these dif-
ferentiations in terms of another dichotomy. On the one
hand is a common “natural will” consisting of life forces asso-
ciated with instincts, emotions, and habits, forming personal
bonds and obligations that engender an unconscious sense
of organic unity and solidarity of persons and groups. On the
other hand is a deliberate, consciously purposeful “rational
will” manifest in the impersonal pursuit of individual and
group interests. In the rational will is a combination of mo-
tifs issuing from romanticism and rationalism. These differ-
entiations become evident also in religion. (In his later period
he envisaged the possibility of a nondogmatic universal reli-
gion to unite humankind.)
The “natural will” of community is integrative; the “ra-
tional will” of society is pluralistic and segmental, reaching
its peak in capitalism. Both kinds of will are always present
in some form or degree, but Tönnies favored a community-
oriented socialism.
Some critics have seen these typological dichotomies an
inimical to strictly empirical studies. Typology, they say,
should not replace historiography, though the latter requires
the former. Tönnies was aware of the danger of oversimplifi-
cation and reduction in one’s view of social reality. This be-
comes readily evident in his sharp critique of statisticians.
In his early essay on Spinoza, “Studie zur Entwicklungs-
geschichte des Spinozas” in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissen-
schaftliche Philosophie (1883), Tönnies spoke of the emphasis
on will as revealing a philosophy (stimulated by Arthur Scho-
penhauer) that he called “voluntarism,” which entails the
recognition of the primacy of will over intellect, and which
is applicable to psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics.
His old friend Friedrich Paulsen in his Einleitung in die
Philosophie (1892) spelled out the conception of voluntarism
in psychological terms. Paul Tillich in Socialist Decision
(1933) adapted Tönnies’s concepts of community and soci-
ety. William James was so enthusiastic about Paulsen’s book
that he provided a lengthy introduction for the English edi-
tion, and one can see voluntaristic elements in James’s con-
cept of the “will to believe.”BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cahnman, Werner J., ed. Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation;
Essays and Documents. Leiden, 1973.
Wirth, Louis. “The Sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies.” American
Journal of Sociology 32 (1926): 412–422.
New Sources
Bickel, Cornelius. Ferdinand Tönnies: Soziologie als skeptische Auf-
klärung zwischen Historismus und Rationalismus. Opladen,
Germany, 1991.
JAMES LUTHER ADAMS (1987)
Revised BibliographyTORAH. It is no exaggeration to claim that the term torah
is the quintessential symbol in Judaism. The present essay9230 TÖNNIES, FERDINAND