By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the historical movement from the village to the metropolis, from the organic solidarity of the preindustrial community to modern individualism and anomie, had established itself as the central preoccupation of social theory and social criticism. The contrasts that evoked this transition now served as the common coin of the social sciences, providing new disciplines with an endlessly suggestive set of categories and defining the problem that, in one way or another, absorbed almost every social theorist of the age: could the old solidarity be revived on a new basis, or would modern society become so deeply fragmented that only a unitary state, armed with frightening powers of coercion and surveillance, could impose order?

The view of history underlying all this was so widely shared and apparently so inescapable, yet so elusive and amorphous, that it was difficult to criticize it effectively. It is difficult today even to reconstruct its own history—to trace its emergence or to explain how it came to be taken for granted. We can best begin with its classic formulation, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, published in 1887 by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Since Tönnies, a modest and unassuming scholar, in various writings furnished a full account of his intellectual obligations (constantly revised, like his central categories), his work provides us with a genealogy of sorts, against the background of which this deceptively sketchy and unpretentious little book can be seen both as the founding charter of modern sociology and as a gathering up of ideas already familiar. Indeed the book's immediate appeal and subsequent renown probably derived from the feeling that everything it said had been said many times before, though never with quite such a charming mixture of conviction and vagueness. Less an argument than an appeal to common knowledge, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (usually translated as Community and Society) was relentlessly abstract and schematic, in the style of Germanic scholarship, but for that very reason allusive and evocative, allowing the reader's imagination to play over the dazzling, glinting surface of its shifting typologies, wave after wave, without the check of anything solid or sub

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