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Tönnies, Ferdinand (1855–1936) By Paravantes, A.J.
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Ferdinand Tönnies was central to the professionalization of European sociology, co-founding the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Society for Sociology) in 1909 along with Max Weber (1864–1920) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918) (Adair-Toteff 2005). He was born in 1855 in rural Schleswig (present-day Germany) to a family of Lutheran pastors and cattle breeders; he died in urban Kiel, Germany, in 1936. He is best known for proposing that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft form a constitutive binary of modernity (Tönnies 1957).