ABSTRACT
The emotions involved in this feeling of solidarity are complex, and writers on society understand little about them. At the opening of this century, the German social thinker Ferdinand Tönnies tried to sketch out the differences between a community life, in which people felt emotional ties with each other as full human beings, and group life, in which men felt their ties in terms of emotionally neutral, specialized tasks they performed together. The generation Tönnies taught tended to view this split between community and group as opposite poles of social experience. In the great flowering of sociology at the University of Chicago in the decades following the First World War, writers such as Robert Park, Louis Wirth, and Robert Redfield began to cast the differences between the two as the differences between
village and city. While in village life men felt they belonged together and shared with each other in the full range of human activity, in the city, said these writers, men came to feel a part of each other’s lives by virtue of functional tasks performed in common; the tasks were themselves so specialized that men’s feeling of relatedness was split into innumerable fragments. In the city, complex emotional interactions between men would only get in the way of doing the specialized tasks.
