Competing Visions of the Mennonite Gemeinde: Examples from Early Modern Krefeld in Their Dutch Context

In this scholarship on rural North American separatist Anabaptism, Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society) has been an occasional point of inspiration. In an entry on “Rural Life” from The Mennonite Encyclopedia Michael Yoder argues that:

According to Yoder, Tönnies’ distinction between communitarian and cosmopolitan forms of social organization-that is, between “community” and “society”—has great potential for improving our understanding of Anabaptist communities.