The German Genius

writers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Oswald Spengler with “a passionate hatred” of the modern city, one of those themes taken up in 1920s Weimar Germany, paving the way for National Socialism.
    Simmel was also an important influence on the Chicago school.
    T WO T YPES OF I NDIVIDUALISM
     
    Ferdinand Tönnies conceived sociology as part of an already-existing “cognitive continuum” extending from geometry at one end to narrative history at the other. Much influenced by Hobbes and Hume, he thought sociology was in principle no different from linguistics, mathematical physics, or the theory of law—it was a new form of logic or epistemology, brought about by modern life. 26
    With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Tönnies’s background was a heavy influence on some of his concepts. Born in 1855, in the marsh-lands of east Schleswig, where his grandparents had included Lutheran pastors, Tönnies was ten when the family left their country home for the nearby town of Husum, where his father—formerly a farmer—became involved in banking. All his life, right through to Nazi times, Tönnies seems to have found adjustment to metropolitan mass culture difficult.
    In his university education he followed the cosmopolitan model, studying at Strasbourg, Jena, Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Kiel, and Tübingen. 27 Between 1878 and the outbreak of World War I Tönnies visited England several times, and in 1905 went on to the United States. His attitudes to these countries was mixed. He found the contradiction of capitalism and poverty “hypocritical” but at the same time admired their constitutional liberties, a contradiction that was to remain at the heart of his theorizing.
    After his first doctorate, in philosophy, he formed a friendship with Friedrich Paulsen, the philosopher and educator, and under his influence Tönnies began to investigate the pre-Kantians. In the course of this he encountered the works of Thomas Hobbes, which led to those visits to England, where he gained access to original Hobbes material in the British Museum, St. John’s College, Oxford, and the country seat of the Duke of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. He discovered Hobbes documents that had been overlooked by other scholars, enough material to publish four papers, helping to make his name both north and south of the Channel.
    Hobbes led to an appraisal of Adam Smith, then to other economists, and this was the intellectual background that brought about Tönnies’s first “sketch” of what would become Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft ( Community and Civil Society ), in which he tried—seriously—to counterpose what he saw as two fundamentally contrasting models of human social organization. Tönnies formed the view that the traditional, small-scale village in which he had himself grown up was dying, and he felt the loss profoundly. At the same time, Bismarck’s high-handed repression of all opposition produced in Tönnies “a growing disenchantment with the much vaunted achievements of the new imperial German Reich.” 28
    There was, however, little sign as yet that his sketch would ever be expanded and he returned to England to work on Hobbes. It was only a series of mishaps, during the course of which his British publishers canceled Tönnies’s projected volume on Hobbes, that caused him to return his attention to Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft . It was 1887 and it was a fateful decision. There were to be eight editions of the book during his lifetime, the last in 1935, shortly before his death, and though it was ignored to begin with, it caught on in the run-up to World War I. 29
    The book was divided into three parts; the first compared small-scale “communities” and large-scale, market-based “civil societies.” The second examined the way these two types affect how people think and behave. The third looked at how all this affected politics, government, and law. Tönnies’s central point was that at one extreme, the will, or consciousness, was “natural,” spontaneous and unreflecting (what he called Wesenswille ); at the other extreme, the will was artificial, deliberative, limited to “rational calculation” ( Willkür to begin with, later changed to Kürwille ). For him, these were two kinds of freedom. One entailed “unselfconscious fulfilment of a function or duty within a predetermined social context,” while the other, the “rational will,” was more self-conscious but brought with