Community and Society

2017 Reprint of 1957 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. A classic in its field Community and Society was not the first book to explore the composition of and relationship 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. Ferdinand Tönnies examines the clash between small-scale neighborhood-based communities and the large-scale competitive market societies. In doing so he considered 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.