The German Genius

it “unlimited choice” and therefore absolute “self-sovereignty.” Tönnies thought both forms of will and freedom were latent in all human beings but tended to be expressed differently according to different social circumstances. Rational will was more characteristic of men than women, of adults than children, of city-dwellers than villagers, of traders than creative artists. He built on these differences to argue that there were in modern society two totally different types of human psyche. The “natural will” produced a “self” that was in harmony with its habitat and closely linked with others. In contrast, the “rational will” produced “subjects” (not selves) that invented their own identities and were in fact estranged from their natural selves, perceiving other people, moreover, as mere things or “objects.” 30
    This dichotomy of the human psyche was closely linked with social and economic organization. The “organic” community ( Gemeinschaft ) was characterized by ties of kinship, custom, history, and the communal ownership of primary goods. The converse was “society” ( Gesellschaft ), in which “free-standing individuals interacted with each other through self-interest, commercial contracts, a ‘spatial’ rather than a ‘historical’ sense of mutual awareness, and the external constraints of formally enacted law.” The dichotomy ran through everything. For example, in community material production was primarily for “use” not “gain.” In society, in contrast, “all personal ties were subordinate to the claims of abstract individual freedom.” In community, work and life were integrated in a “vocation” or “calling,” while in society business produced profit that was then used to provide “happiness.” “The entire civilisation has been turned upside down by a modern way of life dominated by civil and market Society, and in this transformation civilisation itself is coming to an end.” 31
    Tönnies’s arguments overlapped with at least some of the things the Social Darwinists and vulgar nationalists were saying. But his dichotomy didn’t catch on until the international temperature was on the rise before World War I. After the war, Tönnies was much better appreciated, and not just in Germany. Even in Europe and North America, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft became a canonical text of classical sociology.
    Tönnies always said that he emphatically wasn’t comparing individualism and collectivism. Rather, there were two distinct forms of individualism, “the unself-conscious kind, which was created by and naturally flowed from Gemeinschaft , and the self-conscious kind which fostered and was manufactured by the culture of Gesellschaft .” Most readers, however, interpreted his book as an attack on modernity.
    Simmel and Tönnies are important in the way that they identify aspects of “cultural lag” at the end of the nineteenth century that would have long-lasting consequences for the “belated nation” that was Germany in the twentieth century (see Chapter 41). As did Simmel, Tönnies identifies something that Riehl had categorized as “un-German” about modern society, and that was, through such writers as Julius Langbehn, Spengler, and Chamberlain, to drive conservative thinking into intellectual proximity with the Nazis, in the shape of the so-called Conservative Revolution (see Chapter 33). As Keith Bullivant, historian of the Conservative Revolution, has pointed out, the basic ideas behind Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft continued to play a central part in German thinking, even after the Second World War, as Chapter 9 of Ralf Dahrendorf’s 1968 Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland clearly shows: it is titled “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” (again, see Chapter 41).
    H EROES VERSUS T RADERS
     
    At the time, Werner Sombart was probably even better known than Tönnies, and not just in Germany. 32 He has come to be regarded as the “reactionary modernist” par excellence, best known for Der moderne Kapitalismus ( Modern Capitalism , in which he introduced the concept and the word “capitalism”), for Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben ( The Jews and Modern Capitalism ), and Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? ( Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? ). Many of the first generation of sociologists—Tönnies and Weber in Germany and Everett C. Hughes and Robert Park in America—regarded him as