Ferdinand Tönnies Beneath and Beyond Post-Colonial Sociology. Or: Das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten

It is unwise ‘to throw the baby out with the bath water’, as an old saying goes. Critics have for a long time been throwing the baby out with the bath water as far as Ferdinand Tönnies is concerned, and this continues today. This essay is focused on potential postcolonial dismissals of Tönnies’ sociology. It seeks to show that Tönnies and his sociological thought are more subtle, complex, and interesting than any caricatured negative appreciation of his ideas can grasp. He should not be ejected from the sociological canon on simplifying and spurious grounds. The essay makes a case for Tönnies’ sociology not as an enemy of postcolonial concerns in sociology but as a potential ally of them. This is done by considering Tönnies as a creative post-Kantian cosmopolitan thinker, one whose categories can be applied in sensitive ways to non-Western and post-colonial contexts, such as in India, and one whose concepts can potentially continue to animate interpretations of imperial and colonial phenomena.