groups. Confucius spoke of fundamental social relationships between friends, family members, and rulers and subjects. Similarly, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other great thinkers produced clear-cut classical outlines of the two groups.More recently, Ferdinand Tönnies examines the clash between small-scale neighborhood-based communities and the large-scale competitive market society. In doing so, he considered all aspects of life — political, economic, legal, and family; art, religion, and culture; construction of "selfhood" and "personhood"; and modes of cognition, language, and understanding.One of the first major studies of sociology, this republication of an important work will introduce Tönnies thoughts to a new generation of English-speaking students of sociology, political theory, and the history of European ideas.

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