Marx, the "most remarkable and profound of the social philosophers." Unfairly attacked as a utopian, Marx provided him, Tönnies said, with one of his key ideas, "that the natural and, for us, past and gone, yet always basic constitution of culture is communistic, the actual and the coming one socialistic." Under socialism, which Marx showed to be the product not of a utopian pipe dream but of the necessary development of capitalism itself, primitive communism would achieve the higher form of functional interdependence—the dependence of all on all that was inherent in the very process of specialization and differentiation, which severed the patriarchal bonds of kinship but would eventually create new modes of integration, overcoming the "temporary limitation" of nationalism.

Whether Tönnies saw the course of history as benign or malignant remains curiously unclear and, he would have argued, irrelevant, since the course of history, in his view, was irreversible. He passed no judgment : such was his consistent claim. His contribution to social understanding, he said in 1925, was "for the first time" to have given a "theoretical foundation" to a "contrast... hitherto ... utilized unsystematically in ... poetry, biography, and history" and to have stripped it of "normative overtones," disregarding "ethical implications." In the preface to the first edition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Tönnies insisted that "moral sentiments and subjective inclinations ... must not be permitted to disturb the objective evaluation of facts as they are." The student of society had to take his stand "outside the phenomena and, as with telescope and microscope, observe structure and processes" in "the same way" that scientists observed the "course of heavenly bodies and the life processes of elementary organisms."

So stationed, Tönnies thought he could see a future in which the world would become "one large city," a "single world republic, coextensive with the world market, which would be ruled by thinkers, scholars, and writers and could dispense with means of coercion other than those of a psychological nature." Was this vision a reassertion of the utopian speculation Tönnies elsewhere disavowed or an eerie anticipation of the totalitarian state? The ostensibly reassuring remark (in the 1925 essay "A Prelude to Sociology") that his "pessimism" referred to the "future of the present civilization, not to the future of civilization itself," did not shed much light on the question. Again, the question of whether progress was

-141-