Tönnies und Plessner über Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten

Abstract

Tönnies and Plessner on community and society. Differences and commonalities. With his theory of “community and society”, Tönnies seeks to sociologically capture the two fundamentally possible forms of social life and trace their historical succession. Considering the political situation of the 1920s, Plessner seeks to reject community radicalism and promote an ethos of society based on distance.

Both Tönnies and Plessner are committed to the Enlightenment and acknowledge modern society as a historical fact, though for different reasons. For Tönnies, despite acknowledging its progress, it is a necessary evil. For Plessner, it is the stage for human self-realization in the dialectic between distance and closeness.