clever applications." Even here he wavered, however. The preface to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft carried the forbidding warning that the book was intended purely as a contribution to science and that "people who are not trained in conceptual thinking better abstain from passing judgment." But the same preface contained the cryptic admission that "such abstention" was "not to be expected in this time and age." Tönnies himself was hardly indifferent to politics. He was "fervently devoted to socialism in [those] years," he wrote later; nor does he ever seem to have given up the hope that socialism would somehow reestablish gemeinschaft on a new basis. He had no more to say than Marx, however, about the way in which this happy result would come to pass. The main impression left by his work was one of painful ambivalence, as he sought to balance the gains of progress against losses, the emancipation of intellect against the loss of emotional security, equality against the intimacy of the primary group—only to come round again and again to the irreversibility of social processes that rolled on without regard to human preference.

The same ambivalence ran through the work of Tönnies's heirs and successors. Emile Durkheim formulated the classic diagnosis of modern rootlessness, complete with clinical terminology (anomie) and statistical correlations between suicide and social disorganization; but Durkheim also observed that a man was "far more free in the midst of a throng than in a small coterie" and that modern society encouraged "individual diversities" and put an end to the "collective tyranny" likely to prevail in small, close-knit groups. Max Weber compared modern rationality to an "iron cage" but celebrated the liberating effects of science and made no secret of his contempt for intellectuals who retreated from the scientific vocation into religion, seeking "to furnish their souls with guaranteed genuine antiques." Sigmund Freud took much the same position: civilization exacted a mounting toll of repression but repaid mankind with a better understanding of itself. The gradual assertion of reason over appetite could be likened to the individual's growth from infancy to maturity. Both individuals and society paid an emotional price for maturity, but it was foolish to pine for the lost innocence of childhood. If the "disenchantment of the world" (in Weber's phrase) had deprived men and women of the childlike security of dependence, it had given them science, which had "taught [men] much since the days of the Deluge and ... will increase their powers still further." Religion, after all, was "comparable to a child

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