Tönnies on the tension between community and society during the First World War

Tönnies, German nationalism and the First World War

Tönnies, while not having been predestined by origin to be a German nationalist, had become a writer and thinker of national import just as social theory was coming into its own in Germany. He received a different form of national recognition after the outbreak of WWI when the German government appointed him as an emissary to promote the German war cause in neutral Scandinavia, defending the violation of Belgian neutrality while denouncing the ultra-nationalist demands of the Alldeutschen Verband (All-German Association) to annexe territories, as borne out in Tönnies’ correspondence with the Imperial Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg between 1916 and 1919. ¹ It must be seen that during the war, Tönnies was propelled from the periphery, in terms of geography and power relations, to the centre. Tönnies benefitted from a new sort of peer recognition, and following its second edition in 1912, GuG, which had rarely been read or quoted, had become a success, notably among Germany’s youth. Tönnies’ dichotomy prefigured the “ideas of 1914” in the work 1789 und 1914, published in 1916 by the sociologist and nationalist Social Democrat Johann Plenge (1874–1963) (Gutsche et al., 1985: 70). Plenge denounced the “shopkeeper souls” (and liberalism) of the English, the superficiality (and democracy) of the French and the despotism of the Slavs while hoping the “community of the trenches” (Schützengrabengemeinschaft) would allow a German folk community to transcend class divisions (cf. Wehler, 1977: 211). Another caricature of the nations was to be found in Werner Sombart’s 1915 contrast between English merchants and German heroes (Sombart, 1915). While Plenge was inspired by Tönnies’ GuG, there is no evidence that Tönnies would have approved of Plenge’s equation of the Kaiser with Napoleon in leading his people in its “highest unity.” The Burgfrieden marked a remarkable consensus, when even pacificists and the Kriegssozialisten – Social Democrats in favour of providing the German government with credits to conduct the war – rallied to the cause of Germany’s victory. Tönnies’ espousal of Realpolitik came as a surprise to Weber, who had compared Tönnies to Tolstoy in a letter to his wife Marianne (Bond, 2012: 34). But from 1914 onwards, Tönnies was vociferously on the side of the Reich.

A split within the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party, SPD), the party with which Tönnies had the most sympathies and which he joined just prior to the takeover by the Nazis more than a decade later, first led the radical socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to establish the Spartakusbund in 1916, and then Karl Kautsky, the main SPD theorist, to found the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) in April 1917. While Tönnies was defending the Second Empire abroad and in his publications, Kautsky was debunking Tönnies, as Kautsky was convinced of Germany’s guilt for the outbreak of the war. During WWI, Tönnies found allies among conservatives, for whom Tönnies’ dichotomy was grist for the mill. Tönnies’ correspondence with Bethmann Hollweg shows his success as a public intellectual in wartime Germany. He also drafted a letter to Woodrow Wilson, imploring that Wilson, a historian before attaining the highest office of his land, cease to treat Germany’s merchant marine as would a public prosecutor rather than as a judge. ²

Tönnies was a cosmopolitan whose theory had emerged from British and French sources, but also the German romantic precursors of German nationalism. His theory, notably his philosophy of history, preceded Wilhelm Dilthey’s critique of (French and British) positivism, and Tönnies ignored the epistemological advances concerning subjective meaning and understanding (Verstehen) ushered in by Simmel and Weber. His theoretical position between romanticism, Marxism, and liberal individualism and his political position between socialism, liberalism, and conservatism explain misunderstandings among contemporaries of this cautious advocate of social reform whose concepts were so abused by conservatives and reactionaries. GuG had attempted to free German social theory from liberalism but also from Social Darwinism. When we compare it with earlier German-language publications presented as “Sociology” (e.g. Gumplowicz, 1883; Schäffle, 1896), we see that the work had transformed German-language sociology from the study of a struggle for supremacy among tribes into a general study of human relationships, their bases, and their meanings. Still GuG takes account of wars between nations, containing a passage (in book 1, §25) in which Gemeinwesen (common entities or polities, i.e. the political organisation of community) are depicted as animals in combat and presented as an army, in contrast to the plant-like self-absorbed existence of a Gemeinschaft or community (Tönnies, 2019, Buch 3, §25, Idee des sozialen Körpers).

The positions that Tönnies took during WWI can only be seen against the background of his overall career and the position of his work in the public sphere. Throughout his life, he felt called upon to take a position for the struggles being fought out within his nation’s borders, notably between the working class and capital, or the struggles over his nation’s borders and position vis-à-vis foreign powers. His identification with a critical left who did not hesitate to quote Marx and defend the dockworkers during their strikes in Hamburg in the 1890s as well as his undisguised hostility to the Hohenzollern dynasty and his refusal to swear an oath on the monarchy had cost him prospects of a professorship and as noted above had made him irksome for the Minister of Culture, Althoff, who had played a significant role in the modernisation of Prussia’s university system. Tönnies’ writings, notwithstanding their difficulty, appealed to intellectuals who questioned the viability of an economic and social system based largely on market forces. Like contemporary German sociology in general, it had emerged from the historical school of national economics, with their sympathy for a social monarchy. While Tönnies’ jingoistic period is not representative of his thought as a whole and his contribution to critical social theory, it is important to study it to grasp how concepts that were designed to render reflections on human relations ethically could be recuperated in a tribalist conflagration the first time in modern history when the State engaged in the total control and manipulation of the population – a process that was facilitated by the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s establishment of a “Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst” (Central Office for International Service) which monitored the foreign press and sent academics as emissaries to neutral third countries (Mohr, 2000).

The German government sent Tönnies to Denmark and Sweden to promote the German cause as early as 1914. Tönnies’ publications of the time include the article “Der Friede” (The Peace), which appeared in the journal Deutsche Arbeit (German Work) (14. Jg., 1914: 93–97), and then in Ethische Kultur (23. Jg., 1915: 25–27; reprinted in Tönnies, 2000: 485–491). Here, Tönnies argued that over the previous 43 years of peace, Germany had made no attempt to make another state dependent through alliances and concessions (Tönnies, 2000: 506). He criticised British foreign policy and the British political system as nonrepresentative of the people (Tönnies, 2000: 501). Tönnies published pro-German war propaganda from 1914 onwards and no fewer than six major works on the causes of the war between 1915 and 1917 and 1919 and 1922. However, Tönnies’ wartime propaganda was limited in its success. The Danish scholar Valdemar Vedel debunked Tönnies’ argument that Germany had violated Belgian neutrality in an act of self-defence and criticised the German political system of servitude to the Kaiser and the inhuman invasion of Denmark (Tönnies Estate Cb 54:56, quoted Mohr, 2000: 6). According to the political scientist Michael Dreyer, contemporary German discussions of war guilt pointed (in isolated cases) to French chauvinism, but more frequently to the envy the English harboured over Germany’s economic success and the pan-Slavism movement of Russia. While the German Left attacked the oppressive tsarist regime, the Right attacked the hypocrisy of British liberalism. But while the ultra-nationalist political group Alldeutscher Verband was clamouring for annexing territories, Tönnies was opposed to a further expansion of the Reich; Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg expressed his gratitude in a letter of 16 June 1916. In Englische Weltpolitik in englischer Beleuchtung (English World Politics in English Light), Tönnies attributed the war to the aggressive commercial imperialism of England. In Deutschlands Platz an der Sonne (Germany’s Place in the Sun), Tönnies again criticised Britain. When Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg acknowledged that the violation of Belgian neutrality was a breach of law, Tönnies took his side, arguing that because Belgium and France had become tools of England’s foreign policy through the entente cordiale, Germany had been forced to violate Belgium’s neutrality, and that the good of the German citizenry outweighed the observance of international law (Tönnies, 1917: 21–22). Dreyer notes the “cynicism” of Tönnies’ argument that international law cannot be presented as being “more holy” than state law by powers which had supported revolutions (Dreyer, 1991: 488).

From around the middle of WWI until the mid-1920s, Tönnies became preoccupied with asserting Germany’s innocence over the outbreak of the war, focussing initially on Britain and later on the Russian tsar. In Tönnies’ polemics on England, he opposed old allies of the Fabian Society, notably George Bernard Shaw, who had published “The last jump of the old lion” in 1915. Fearing that the Great Admiral Tirpitz’ expansion of Germany’s navy reflected a drive for supremacy at sea, Shaw wrote that the lion’s, that is, Britain’s, victory over Germany would be its most beautiful, provoking Tönnies (1915) response, in “Der letzte Sprung des alten Löwen” (The Old Lion’s Last Jump) that Shaw had succumbed to the childish understanding that the verse of the German anthem “Deutschland über Alles” (Germany above All) was a war-cry for supremacy rather than a simple declaration of loyalty (Tönnies, 2000: 507–510). In 1915, Tönnies wrote a letter to the editors of the New Statesman, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb (1915) defending Germany’s sinking of the passenger ship the Lusitania (Tönnies, 2000: 526–532), to which the Webbs retorted that when a “man of Professor Tönnies’ knowledge, ability, and breath of mind is driven to descend to such a level of controversy, his case must be bad indeed. The letter does not even convince the reader that the Professor himself really believes in that case.” ³ In Germany, where academia’s support for the war was overwhelming, Tönnies’ polemics on England led Kautsky to point to weaknesses in his argument. Tönnies was describing a period of English foreign policy, not England’s policy in general. Kautsky also dismissed Tönnies’ argument that armies could cross neutral states like Belgium, just as France could not cross Switzerland to get to Austria or Britain could cross Holland to get to Germany, which followed from Tönnies’ position (see Mohr, 2000). While Kautsky expressed his respect for Tönnies’ accomplishments in times of peace, he could only shake his head over Tönnies’ positions during the war.

In Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt), published in 1919 prior to the treaty of Versailles, Der Zarismus und seine Bundesgenossen (Tsarism and its Allies) of 1914, published in 1922, and in Kritik der Öffentlichen Meinung (Critique of Public Opinion) published in 1922 once the devastating impact of the Versailles Treaty had become clear, Tönnies appealed to the court of world public opinion, comparing Germany’s position to that of Dreyfus. Tönnies argued that Russia’s support for Serbia was aimed at distracting the population from the failed insurgency of 1905. He equated Russian mobilisation at the borders with a declaration of war and stated that the fact the tsarist propaganda did not argue that Germany was the sole culprit was proof in itself of Russia’s guilt. In Kritik der Öffentlichen Meinung, Tönnies argued that the Poincaré and the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sassonow had colluded in mobilising public opinion in France to reduce, humiliate and truncate the Reich (Tönnies, 1922: 558). In his postwar writings, Tönnies focussed more on Russia’s guilt than that of England and France, recusing any guilt on the part of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, though he acknowledged that the Habsburgs had sought to punish Serbia. Dreyer notes that Tönnies presented Germany as absolutely innocent, Austria less innocent, France more guilty, England rather guilty and Russia absolutely guilty. But rather than merely castigate Tönnies, Dreyer marvels at the defence of Germany’s wartime policies by German academics in general, most of whom merely summoned facts to substantiate foregone conclusions. When blaming Russia, Tönnies joined a phalanx of liberal and socialist authors. Tönnies’ defence of the Reich was so egregious that the German foreign office saw it as unfit for use in its propaganda, instead publishing Georg Bülow and Hans Delbrück. When Tönnies wrote that it was important to distinguish between cause and guilt, he did not practise what he preached. Dreyer points out that Tönnies’ war-time writings showed a third facet of his persona alongside those of a serious academic and a critical publicist who had taken career risks during the Hamburg dockworker strikes: that of a patriot enraged by enemies from within and without and an ostensible republican who was nonetheless whitewashing the monarchy and undermining the republic (Dreyer, 1991: 492–494).

The theoretical impact of WWI on Tönnies appears at first sight negligible: postwar editions of GuG were only marginally revised. In the 1922 edition, Tönnies added that if calls for community had been becoming louder and louder, sometimes with reference to his work, following the terrible upheavals the capitalist world system of Gesellschaft had undergone, new community should be based upon a viable principle such as that of autarkical cooperatives, his latest cause, provided they did not succumb to a strictly commercial business model (Tönnies, 2019: Zusatz, Buch 3, Abschnitt 1, §14). But he saw no cause to revise his basic teleology of the unilinear shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft followed by the collapse of Gesellschaft, notwithstanding mass sacrifices on the altars of national or class communities, such as the Burgfrieden or the November Revolution. Revolution was an option Tönnies rejected, preferring “evolution,” and dismissing the idea that revolution, triggered by the defeat of the Reich, would spring across the borders, and seize France and Britain (Tönnies, 1919). Although experience had shown humans with all their minds and hearts embracing causes of community that surpassed the individual pursuit of happiness, Tönnies was not to revise his philosophy of history of a unilinear evolution from community to society (Bond, 2021). An argument that he did not himself develop during WWI is that the great Volksgemeinschaft so frequently evoked was not a community at all, but merely a pseudo-community instrumentalized by the powerful at the expense of the masses. This, of course, does not diminish the sense of sacrifice of those who risked life and limb. During the war, Tönnies reviewed works on the philosophy of war (by Theodor Gomperz) and statistics on epidemics during war (by Friedrich Prinzing) but did not put forward his own theory or any applied sociology of war (Tönnies, 2008).

Notwithstanding, in his largescale work Kritik der Öffentlichen Meinung of 1922 (Tönnies, 1981), Tönnies reflected on the impact of democratic governance on wartime governments and was not convinced that democracy attenuated bellicose sentiments. Instead, he presents instances of nations driven to war by Public Opinion writ large, fed by multiple currents of public opinion writ small, but presenting an inescapable social force. Public Opinion (Öffentliche Meinung) writ large is not determined quantitatively but can be regarded as the will of dominant discourse, based on intellectual acumen, financial strength, and literary influence. It is almost as though Tönnies was focussing his critical acumen on the wartime Public Opinion to which he had both succumbed and contributed in a sort of acte manqué. He decried Public Opinion in France as having been steered by journalists and the rabble (Tönnies, 1981: 159). Tönnies saw the danger of party and economic interests, but also of what he termed intellectualism, arguing that only by liberating itself from these dangers could Public Opinion take on the integrative and normative power which had formerly been the preserve of religion.

The First World War and social theory’s quest for perspectives

National loyalties created rifts between Europe’s social thinkers, among them progressives who had believed that social injustices could only be resolved through international cooperation. Outspoken opponents of the belligerent positions of their nations – such as Tönnies’ friend Bertrand Russell, Britain’s most prominent pacifist, or Kautsky, convinced of the Reich’s responsibility for the war – were few and far between, and we now wonder at the lack of discernment of our institutional forebears. The importance of culpability in the postwar settlement of Versailles fuelled a preoccupation among German academics such as Tönnies with disproving Germany’s guilt. The community-society dichotomy, which emerged in Tönnies’ readings not just of natural law, but also moral philosophy, had revealed a potential for tribalism in the modern world and fed into delusional belief systems. Members of the German intelligentsia were wont to believe that sacrificial heroism was as characteristic of German Gemeinschaft as the mercenary pursuit of self-interest was of western Gesellschaft. Tönnies’ official role as an emissary of the Second Empire was a move from the more fundamental critical opposition towards the power elite in capitalism that had informed his social theory and determined his marginal position for much of his life. His promotion to a professorship may have contributed to his reconciliation with the national cause. But at the end of the Weimar Republic, Tönnies was alienated by German nationalists with their “sich klug dünkende Nützanwendungen” (Would-Be Clever Applications) of his concepts, as he pointed out in the last foreword he wrote to an edition of his influential work (Tönnies, 2019) and, at a very advanced age, he stood out as one of the few German sociologists to oppose Hitler.

Almost as a premonition, the DGS had chosen as the topic of its second Congress, held in Berlin under Tönnies’ chairmanship in 1913, Nations and Nationality. During the war, the DGS ceased to function, only resuming activities in 1919. The third Congress of the DGS, held in Jena in 1922, focussed on “the essence of revolution” (Verhandlungen, 1923). While it took some time for sociology to remobilise on a national scale, international exchanges in the field of sociology took yet more time to recover. Internationalism in social theory had been on the agenda of the lesser-known French sociologist, René Worms, founder of the Institut international de sociologie, which after its establishment in 1894 included such leading German-speaking scholars as Simmel, Tönnies, Robert Michels, Werner Sombart, Gustav Schmoller, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Jerusalem, and Weber, who became an associate member as late as 1913. It has recently been suggested that the eclectic and inclusive international approach had done not just Worms but sociology in France a disservice, inasmuch as Worms juxtaposed theories from abroad without creating a synthesis or refuting contrary positions at the time when Durkheim sought to promote sociology as a specifically French science (Mosbah-Natanson, 2008: 36). Readings of early German and French social theory show how bound schools were to premises that dominated the discourses promoted by national institutions. Influenced by Tönnies’ discussion in GuG, constitutive features of community in its opposition to society figured prominently in the intellectual and political agenda of early German as opposed to French sociologists. The Institut international de sociologie paused its activities during the war, only resuming them in 1926, when Gaston Richard took over the institute’s reins following Worms’ death.

It can be fairly said that Tönnies’ engagement in WWI long overshadowed his courageous opposition to extreme German nationalism following the seizure of power by the National Socialists. Postwar German sociology commenced on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tönnies in 1955 with a scathing critique of Tönnies by René König, the opinion leader in sociology in Germany, whose Durkheimian sociology marked an attempt at ideologically steering sociological reflection in Germany away from its moorings in ideals of community (König, 1955). For decades, Tönnies was largely ignored in the two German Republics. It was only in the 1980s that research on Tönnies supplanted succinct laudations of the “Nestor of German sociology” in the Federal Republic, and academics began to revive Tönnies in the GDR as well. Due to the chronic injustice of the association with German irrational nationalism of someone who had for the better part of his life been a cosmopolitan rationalist and who made sacrifices in resisting National Socialism at the end of his life, research on Tönnies has at times been on the defensive. ⁴

Use of the concept of folk community became yet more toxic under the race regime of National Socialism. Tönnies’ name so associated with opposition to the Nazis that Nazis sought to obscure his seminal role in coining the community-society dichotomy, while appropriating it in the service of its racist regime (Dietze, 1936). When Tönnies was expelled from the German Civil Service and stripped of his pension by the Nazis at the end of his life, he wrote in vain to the authorities to remind them of his patriotic prestige during WWI. The engagement for Imperial propaganda during WWI on the part of such an impassioned social critic drives home just how readily a large part of Europe’s intelligentsia could be seduced during periods of national crisis, a crisis of legitimation and identity that in Germany was compounded by social crisis. When the November revolution pitted the Spartakus Bund against the government in 1918, Tönnies spoke out for evolution rather than revolution, advocating not castles in the air, but a temple of the mind and morality (Wierzock, 2018). Against the background of Kiel’s radical intellectuals, Tönnies was among the cautious reformers, presiding however over students with more radical ambitions (Siegfried, 2004).