Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is Ferdinand Tonnies's 1887 distinction between two ideal types of social bond. Gemeinschaft (community) is sustained by shared feeling, kinship and tradition as ends in themselves; Gesellschaft (society) is sustained by rational calculation and individual self-interest, most visible in modern market and bureaucratic relations. The pair became one of classical sociology's standard ways of describing the shift from traditional to modern social life. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/