Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

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Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (German terms here meaning "communal society" and "associational society") refers to a theory by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. It was presented in his influential work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887).

History

Gemeinschaft (communal society) is typically rural and with interpersonal relationships based on direct face-to-face contact and traditional social rules, based on "Wesenwille" ("natural will"), natural and instinctively arising emotions and expressions of sentiment. Gesellschaft (associational society) is typically urban and non-traditional, with relationships being impersonal and indirect, weakening the traditional bonds of family, kinship, and communal organizations, being based on "Kürwille" ("rational will"), supposed rational efficiency and self-interest, but causing various negative effects such alienation.

Tönnies himself had certain leftist views, at least later in his life, was critical of both Imperial Germany and later the NSDAP, and eventually joined the socialist/Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Regardless, aside from its influence on sociology, the theory has influenced concepts such as the German Volksgemeinschaft and ideologies such as corporatism, and by extension fascism (broad sense) and National Socialism.

Gemeinschaft

Gemeinschaft (often translated as community) is an association in which individuals are oriented to the large association as much as, if not more than, to their own self interest. Furthermore, individuals in gemeinschaft are regulated by common mores, or beliefs about the appropriate behavior and responsibility of members of the association, to each other and to the association at large; associations are marked by "unity of will" (Tönnies, 22). Tönnies saw the family as the most perfect expression of gemeinschaft; however, he expected that gemeinschaft could be based on shared place and shared belief as well as kinship, and he included globally dispersed religious communities as possible examples of gemeinschaft. Gemeinschaft community involves ascribed status. You are given a status by birth. For example, an individual born of farmer will come to occupy the parent's role until death.

Gemeinschaften are broadly characterized by a moderate division of labour, strong personal relationships, strong families, and relatively simple social institutions. In such societies there is seldom a need to enforce social control externally, due to a collective sense of loyalty individuals feel for society.

Gesellschaft

In contrast, gesellschaft (often translated as society, civil society or association) describes associations in which, for the individual, the larger association never takes precedence over the individual's self interest, and these associations lack the same level of shared mores. Gesellschaft is maintained through individuals acting in their own self interest. A modern business is a good example of gesellschaft: the workers, managers, and owners may have very little in terms of shared orientations or beliefs, they may not care deeply for the product they are making, but it is in all their self interest to come to work to make money, and thus the business continues. Gesellschaft society involves achieved status. You reach your status by education and work, for example, through the attainment of goals, or attendance at University.

Unlike gemeinschaften, gesellschaften emphasize secondary relationships rather than familial or community ties, and there is generally less individual loyalty to society. Social cohesion in gesellschaften typically derives from a more elaborate division of labor. Such societies are considered more susceptible to class conflict as well as racial and ethnic conflicts. The sociological upheavals during the Reconstruction era of the United States complicated the sociological category of gemeinschaft because former slaves, whose kinship ties were complicated under slavery, forged new communities that shared aspects of both gemeinschaft and gesellschaft.[1]

Since, for Tönnies, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft are normal types, he considered them a matter of pure sociology, whereas he expected to find only a mix of them in applied sociology on doing empirical research. Nevertheless, following Tönnies, without normal types one might not be able to analyze this mix.

As said in the Essentials of Sociology- A Down to Earth Approach, an example of gemeinschaft community in the current world today would be the Amish community. The United States would play a part as being a gesellschaft society.

Talcott Parsons considered Gemeinschaft as representing a community of fate, who share good and bad fortune in common, as opposed to the pursuit of rational self-interest that characterised Gesellschaft.[2]

Globalisation

Eric Hobsbawm has argued that as globalisation turns the entire planet into an increasingly remote kind of Gesellschaft, so too collective identity politics seeks for a factitious remaking of the qualities of Gemeinschaft by reforging artificial group bonds and identities.[3]

Fredric Jameson highlights the ambivalent envy felt by those constructed by Gessellschaft for remaining enclaves of Gemeinschaft, even as they inevitably corrode their existence.[4]

Outside sociology

In business usage, Gesellschaft is the German term for "company", as in Aktiengesellschaft or Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH).

See also

External links

Encyclopedias

References

  1. ↑ See for example Kevin Gaines, "Assimilationist Minstrelsy as Racial Uplift Ideology: James D. Corrothers's Literary Quest for Black Leadership" American Quarterly September 1993 and Hollis Robbins Introduction to Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, Penguin Classics, 2010
  2. ↑ The Structure of Social Action (1949) p. 687-9
  3. ↑ Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007) p. 93
  4. ↑ M. Hardt/K. Weeks ed., The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 145
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