This book surveys Ferdinand Tonnies' intellectual biography - Community and Society - and retraces the origins of a founding work of the modern social sciences and a classic of political thought to vital contrasts in Tonnies' early life, philosophers, natural law theorists, the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, the socialists of the lectern, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and 19th-century legal theorists. The book illuminates the (at times) obscure intent behind Tonnies' sociology, theory of history, and controversial ground-breaking concepts. (Series: Soziologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 26)