Community and Society

This extraordinary prescient work by Ferdinand Toennies was written in 1887 for a small coterie of scholars, and over the next fifty years continued to grow in importance and adherents. Its translator into English, Charles P. Loomis, well described it as a volume which pointed back into the Middle Ages and ahead into the future in its attempt to answer the questions: "e;What are we? Where are we? Whence did we come? Where are we going?"e; If the questions seem portentous in the extreme, the answers Toennies provides are modest and compelling. Every major field from sociology, to psychology, to anthropology, has found this to be a praiseworthy book. The admirable translation by Professor Loomis did much to transfer praise for the Toennies text from the German to the English-speaking world. Now, outfitted with a brilliant new opening essay by John Samples, the author of a recent full-scale biographical work on Toennies, 'Community and Society' is back in print; a welcome reminder of the glorious past of German social science.