ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, sociologists have often lost sight of this precious criticism; and when the term community comes into the technical vocabulary of sociology, in the title of Tönnies’ famous book, it is condemned to be found lastingly associated with the most awkward confusions. To characterize the classic, if not vulgar, conception of community, we shall point out some features borrowed from Tönnies. For him, community is opposed to society, as if men could establish their relationships only in two types of situation. To society (Gesellschaft) based on the strict individuality of interests, which suggests the Hobbesian conception of the conflict of all against all, is opposed community (Gemeinschaft) established through the substantial, but often unconscious identity of wills which derives from sharing the same origin and the same destiny. This romantic antithesis between ‘the icy waters of selfish motives’, to echo the Communist Manifesto, and the warmth of the primary group, where social relations are personalized, assumes historicist and evolutionist tinges. The community is the good old days, this world we have lost (Peter Laslett) of which we have been deprived by machines, money, profit. Society is the future promised us by big industry, production, and ‘mass’ consumption. Thus understood, the society-community opposition acquires an evident ideological connotation. It is true that it cannot be reduced to the capitalism-socialism opposition, except at the price of a caricatural simplification. Politically, it is ‘over-determined’, since the ‘community’ in the manner of Tönnies can feed reactionary dreams about the preindustrial order, as do the socialist utopias about a classless society.
