Community and Society Book

A classic in its field, Community and Society was not the first work to explore the composition of, and relationships between, these two types of social groups. Confucius spoke of fundamental social relationships between friends, family members, and rulers and subjects. Similarly, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other great thinkers produced clear-cut classical outlines of the two groups. Tönnies, more recently, explores the clash between small-scale neighborhood-based communities and the large-scale competitive market society. In so doing, he considers all aspects of life--political, economic, legal and family; art, religion and culture; construction of "selfhood" and "personhood," and modes of cognition, language, and understanding. One of the first major studies of sociology, this book introduces Tönnies' thoughts to a new generation of English-speaking students of sociology, political theory, and the history of European ideas. Unabridged republication of the translated edition, published by Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1957, of the 1887 German publication of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.Read More