good or bad was pointless, according to Tönnies, who saw "in all this an interconnectedness of facts which is as natural as life and death." Yet the question was also inescapable, since his categories, in spite of his protestations, were unavoidably overlaid with all sorts of "normative overtones" and "ethical implications" that could hardly be "resolved," as Tönnies insisted they ought to be resolved, in the "contemplation of divine fate."

Consider some of the many contrasting typologies that Tönnies piled on the basic contrast between community and "society" or contractual "association." Community rested on feeling, association on intellect. Community appealed to the imagination and the emotions, association to calculating self-interest. Community encouraged belief; association, skepticism. The community was an extension of the family, whereas "family life was decaying" under the principle of association. People now confronted each other as "strangers." "Custom, habit, and faith" governed community life, "cold reasoning" the life of the modern metropolis. The community was feminine, the metropolis masculine. The contrast also corresponded to the contrast between youth and old age or, again, between the common people and the educated classes. Metropolitan life gave rise to a type of thinking and action characterized by the separation of means and ends and exemplified, in its prototypical form, by commercial exchange. Under community, on the other hand, means and ends were inseparable.

"Contrasting dichotomies," as Tönnies called them, cheerfully oblivious to their uselessness either as instruments of sociological analysis or as categories of moral judgment, could be extended ad infinitum, always to the same ethically ambiguous effect. Thus the merchant was the "first thinking and free human being," but he was also the first to make a career of treating other people as means to his own purpose. Gesellschaft transformed "culture" into "civilization" and replaced the "higher and nobler forms of human relations" typical of gemeinschaft into the exploitive relations typical of capitalism. But it also encouraged science in its "battle ... against ignorance, superstition, and delusion." Gemeinschaft meant intimacy and warmth, gesellschaft loneliness and alienation; but anyone who described "the former, as a period of youth, ... as 'good' [and] the latter, as a period of senescence, as 'bad'" had "certainly not been my pupil," Tönnies flatly declared, "for the simple reason that I consider such a way of putting it to be thoroughly erroneous." Often his contrasts

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