Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

Gemeinschaft: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a foundational construct Nearest construct by meaningGesellschaftcompare the meanings
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Every construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to Gemeinschaft is Gesellschaft.

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Gemeinschaft1 CONSTRUCTGemeinschaftTÖNNIES · COMMUNITY

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Sociology

Community bound by kinship, tradition, and personal ties

Ferdinand Tönnies introduced Gemeinschaft in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft to name a form of social bond rooted in kinship, shared place, tradition, and personal familiarity, the kind of belonging found in a family, a village, or a close-knit religious congregation. He set it against Gesellschaft, the more impersonal association held together by contract, calculation, and self-interest that he saw spreading with cities, markets, and the modern state, and he treated the two as ideal types, analytic constructs that real societies only approximate rather than fully embody. The modern scholarly edition translated as Community and civil society (Harris and Hollis, 2001) preserves this contrast and its influence on later work on solidarity, urbanization, and social change. Its scope is what makes it a reference point in the field: it names a whole category of relationship whose logic is loyalty, custom, and mutual obligation rather than exchange, and the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft pairing became one of sociology's founding typologies for classifying how people are bound to one another.[1][2][3]

Unit
An ideal type of social bond, one pole of the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft typology
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Treated analytically as an ideal type, and operationalised in empirical work through indicators of community attachment, network density, and reliance on kinship and traditional ties

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Nearby constructs

community5 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, five constructssolidarity5 fields · 8 citationsjingle · one word, several solidaritiesanomie5 names · 8 citationsjangle · one word, five constructs

References

  1. Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen. Fues's Verlag.
  2. Tönnies, F. (1957). Community and society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) (C. P. Loomis, Ed. & Trans.). Michigan State University Press. (Original work published 1887)
  3. Tönnies, F. (2001). Community and civil society (J. Harris, Ed.; M. Hollis, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1887) ISBN 9780511039676

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