Summary
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, usually translated as ‘community’ and ‘society’, are two kinds of social tie distinguished by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in a book first published in 1887. Gemeinschaft is the bond of personal relationships and the roles, values and beliefs that grow from them, as in a family or village. Gesellschaft is the bond of indirect, impersonal dealings and formal rules, as in a company or a modern state.
Tönnies linked Gesellschaft with modern life and rational self-interest, which weaken the older bonds. Max Weber, replying to him, rooted Gemeinschaft in a “subjective feeling” and Gesellschaft in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, such as a contract.
Rationale
Tönnies’s two kinds of tie remind us that relationships and institutions form people differently. We’d resist reading it as community good, society bad: Part 2 notes that a community garden “can still reproduce exclusion”.