stantial. Like the sea, the book reflected the mood of those who gazed into it. Looked at in one light, it evoked lost innocence; in another, a golden future illuminated by mature understanding. It embodied not so much a theory as a mythology of social change.

Tönnies's list of his predecessors included practically all the major social theorists of the nineteenth century. Maine's Ancient Law, he said, provided the immediate inspiration for his own study. Other legal historians, notably Otto von Gierke, helped him to grasp the difference between a "rationalistic and individualistic philosophy of law" and a historical philosophy more interested in customs and institutions than in individual rights. The "rivers and rivulets of economic and legal history" combined with the work of anthropologists like Johann Bachofen and Lewis Henry Morgan to reveal the "indissoluble relationship between law and culture." Hegel and his successors Lorenz von Stein and Rudolf von Gneist clarified the distinction between society and the state, the former based on custom and common interests, the latter on "association," as Tönnies put it. ^* Jacob Burckhardt contributed the concept of the state as a work of art (in contrast to the community, a spontaneous growth); Tocqueville, that of individualism. Comte and Saint-Simon showed how an appreciation of the "positive and organic order" of the Middle Ages could be attained "without repudiating science, enlightenment, and freedom." Above all, Tönnies acknowledged the influence of

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This distinction was firmly established in German sociology by the I860s, well before Tönnies began to write. Indeed it furnished the intellectual justification for a separate science of sociology. Lorenz von Stein noted that the state regarded men and women as individuals, whereas "society" rested on the "subjection of individuals to other individuals," on their mutual dependence. Robert von Mohl argued that political science was the study of individuals and the state; sociology, the study of groups. Society grew out of a "shared sphere of life, common interests, the same customs, moral standards, and sentiments." As such, it was to be clearly distinguished from the state. According to Mack Walker, "the almost inevitable consequence of separating 'society' from both state politics and from individual life was to conceive 'society' in the image of the home town," so closely identified (now that German towns were fast losing their corporate powers) with the "ubiquitous yearning for organic wholeness." The separation of sociology from the science of politics had the consequence, in other words, that "society" was conceived in the image of gemeinschaft.

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