Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

CHAPTER TWO: COMMUNITY, SOCIETY, LOSS OF
INDIVI DUALITY
§ 1 Community and Society
In a broad sense, ‘society’ designates every form of lasting bond between people who jointly
strive to realize a value (or goal). Thus understood, society is conceptually the same as community.
To a large extent, Catholic social teaching employs both expressions synonymously,
adapting itself to the Latin text of the papal social encyclicals, which call every social structure
a societas, be it a question of the family (societas domestica), or a state (societas civilis),
or the social space between the individual man and the state (quae in eius velut sinu iunguntur
societates, Rerum novarum, 37).
2. On the other hand, in many word formations, linguistic sensibility separates the community
as a personal band based on convictions from society as a functional organization. We call
marriage a community of life, not a society of life. We speak of the domestic community, the
educational community, the community of grace, and the community of saints, but of the
stock corporation, the industrial society, and the like. Linguistic usage, however, is not unambiguous.
Although we speak, for example, of the monastic community, the Jesuits call themselves
the ‘Society of Jesus’ and the Steyler Missionaries the ‘Society of the Divine Word’.
3. The juxtaposition ‘community-society’ which is first found in Schleiermacher and in Romanticism
(Adam Müller), infiltrated into social science through Ferdinand Tönnies († 1936).
His book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft indeed remained virtually unnoticed until, prior to
the First World War, the youth movement rediscovered its own interest in the ‘communitysociety’
antithesis. In the year 1912 a second edition of the book appeared, and by 1935 the
eighth. Numerous sociologists of culture adopted Tönnesian thought, especially in the first
decades of the twentieth century. Max Weber spoke of „communalization“ and „socialization“,
Hermann Kantorowicz of „irrational vital relations“ and of „rational purposive relations“,
Wilhelm Helpach of „generative structures“ and „statutory structures“, and so on.
Under August Pieper and Anton Heinen, the special emphasis on the emotional and vital bond
of the community over against the fabricated functionalization of the organization exercised a
formative influence on the educational work of the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland
(People’s Union for Catholic Germany).
After the Second World War, Tönnies was pushed into the background again, since German
sociology was turning away from the speculative sociology of culture and, under the influence
of the American method, was pushing empirical social research into the foreground. Of the
„community-society“ antinomy, according to the judgment of Rene König in 1955, „not even
a heap of ruins, but only a single grand confusion“ which has nothing to do with „history and
reality“ is left. 1 It is, however, striking that the Tönnesian antinomy continues to exercise an
influence under a new name even today. Numerous sociologists are accustomed to setting the
‘primary orders’ of family, neighborhood, guild, and village over against the anonymous
‘secondary systems’ which no longer turn to the whole man, but only grasp him in a different
respect on each occasion as, for example, a member of the work force, a contributor to social
security, and so on.
4. Tönnies set out from the fact that intrinsically connected structures such as communities of
blood (family, clan, kinship, tribe), those of space (neighborhood, village, community) and
1 Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 7 (1955), 375f.