ABSTRACT
A social change theory of considerable distinctiveness emerges from an analysis of the totality of Ferdinand Toennies's writings, from Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft to his posthumous fragment Geist der Neuzeit, but the pieces were never systematically brought together by Toennies himself. By 1912 Toennies's thinking had developed to the point where he had come to discern between pure, applied, and empirical sociology. According to Toennies, both the Aristotelian statement that man is a social being and the Hobbesian thesis that man is by nature asocial, are correct. In the context of Toennies's conception of society, individualism, or the state of being an individual, provides the lever for social change because individualism is derived from the nature of thought itself, which forever questions the world of facts and thereby dissolves it. Toennies develops a number of typologies to describe and analyze the rise of individualism out of more communally defined social entities.
