Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/748

 732 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The state also, in so far as it exists for the protection of the property and the freedom of its subjects, is identical with society, and is accordingly a "capitalistic institution."

Our society, moreover, is approaching its dissolution along two paths ; first, in economic relations, inasmuch as laborers will finally gain the upper hand and will do away with produc- tion of 'goods after the social (capitalistic) fashion. Again, in social relations, through the emancipation of woman. When woman, who belongs exclusively in the home and the family, acquires also social independence, and marriage is reduced to a contract, the ground will be entirely removed from beneath human "community" life, for, says Tonnies, "the radical qual- ity of the race and of the family is vegetative life in the socio- logical sense as the substantial basis of human coexistence in general" (p. 247). With the fall of society "civilization also collapses. The strife of classes is destroying society and the state which it intends to reform. Since the aggregate of cul- ture is worked into social and civic civilization culture itself comes to an end in this its changed form" (p. 288).

What will come then ? Who can tell ? Tonnies can hear only the crashing of society. He construes the course of his- tory, up to date at least, as a movement "from the primitive, simple, domestic communism and the involved and consequent individualism of the hamlet or village to the independent individ- ualism, metropolitan or cosmopolitan in spirit, and the conse- quently posited state or international socialism. And here is the end of all!"

So much for the hopeless theory which Tonnies has set down in a book that at all events must be reckoned among the most profound and suggestive of all times. The undertone of this book is profound despair over the inevitable social fall. The whole reads like the last will and testament of society and of the author ! No issue can of course be made with the author's personal view point. Another more optimistic thinker is equally entitled to a contrasted point of view. One may see in the agita- tions of our time the signs of a new renaissance more splendid