Tönnies on the tension between community and society during the First World War

Ferdinand Tönnies’ main legacy in social theory, the community-society dichotomy developed in his work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society, GuG) of 1887, showed its potential for grasping but also for creating social reality during the First World War (WWI), a conflagration welcomed by some of the most prominent intellectuals throughout Europe. One the most important terms for mobilising support for the war effort in Germany was Gemeinschaft (community), which Tönnies had opposed to (capitalist, modern, western) Gesellschaft (society). Many German intellectuals came to defend the now notorious “ideas of 1914”, inter alia Volksgemeinschaft (folk community), the toxic potential of which was most clearly revealed later under National Socialism. This served to relativise the ideas of 1789 – liberty, equality, and fraternity. The folk community was evoked together with a national truce between the social classes over the distribution of material and symbolic capital, known as the Burgfrieden, literally, the peace of the citadel, mirroring the Union Sacrée (Sacred Union) called forth by President Raymond Poincaré in France in 1914. Volksgemeinschaft figured in much of the polemics of Germany’s intellectual class throughout the war. Tönnies’ dichotomy and his variations on the theme formed one of the most significant conceptual inventions to be mobilised in wartime public opinion, for instance when Thomas Mann asserted a fundamental difference between western European Zivilisation and German Kultur – a dichotomy already found in Tönnies’ work of 1887 – in Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), written between 1915 and 1918. While Tönnies did not claim Germany had a monopoly over culture, he had suggested in 1887 that the United States lacked national character, ushering in the notion that the degree of community depended on nationhood. Defining features of community – the sense of common appurtenance or the devotion of the individual to the Whole – characterised early German as opposed to Durkheimian social theory, which was more concerned with the division of functions and exchanges, as can be seen in the work of leading members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Sociological Association, DGS). While Tönnies’ GuG offered incisive concepts for social critique, his positions on WWI, like those of other early 20th century social theorists, raise the question of how such a perspicacious intelligentsia could have been won over by causes now viewed as calamitous, at a time when Europe’s belligerent nations’ intellectual elite were accusing one another of myopia and intellectual dishonesty.