Ferdinand Tonnies 1855 – 1936

Ferdinand Tonnies was a German sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. His Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887, introduced the now-classic distinction between community and society, in which traditional bonds of common life are gradually displaced by deliberate association based on contract and exchange. He was a co-founder and the first president of the German Sociological Association and held a long professorship at Kiel. He refused to join the Nazi party despite considerable pressure and was stripped of his emeritus status in 1933. His work shaped Max Weber and the wider development of European social theory.