ABSTRACT
In his autobiographical account in Richard Thurnwald's symposium as well as in the second preface to GuG and elsewhere, Ferdinand Toennies traces the path of his intellectual development, as far as English sources are concerned, from Hobbes to Spencer and thence to Sir Henry Maine. Toennies hails Spencer as a man of many insights and as the initiator of sociology as a science, but he charges him with a lack of historical understanding and philosophical sophistication; besides, Spencer is said to have remained enmeshed in the prejudices of time and place. It is Spencer's glory, according to Toennies, that he has made the idea of evolution the cornerstone of his sociological theory. In Toennies's view, Spencer appears as one of the pioneers of modernity in that he derives man from raw beginnings and has him move toward greater complexity with the passage of time rather than make him descend from angels and sink into depravity.
