you say mechanical and I say organic…you say organic and I say mechanical…let’s call the whole thing off!

Omar

While recently reading Pitirim Sorokin’s (unfortunately out of print) Contemporary Sociological Theories (the best theory “textbook” I’ve ever seen). I discovered an obscure classical theory factoid that struck me as pretty funny. In Gemmeinschaft und Gesellschaft, as everyone knows, classical German theorist Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished between two types of society: one a close-knit group united by bonds of blood, soil and tradition which was “natural” and therefore “organic,” (Gemmeinschaft) the other one an “artificial” society which was characterized by opportunistic contact and self-seeking behavior in which individuals only connected with one another for purely instrumental purposes (Gesellschaft), because this type of social arrangement is not natural but a product of man-made conventions, Tonnies referred to it as “mechanical.”

Now, as every undergrad sociology major fresh off their theory course knows, Durkheim also distinguished between these two types of social forms, only that he gave them opposite names! Tonnies organic society becomes “mechanical solidarity” and his artificial mechanism becomes “organic solidarity.” Sorokin (1928: 491) wryly notes “[o]ne cannot help thinking that Durkheim intentionally gave to his social types names which were opposite to those given by Tonnies” (italics added).

What probably is not as well known, is of course that Tonnies and Durkheim were of fairly opposite political stripes. Tonnies was a classic German “romantic conservative” who viewed democracy, capitalism, and everything which smelled of modernity as foul and despicable (a recent book by Dick Pels has a great section on this particular political tradition). Durkheim was on the other hand, a progressive, pro-big-government “liberal-democratic socialist” (in a moderate welfare state sense, not in a Marxist sense), who while acknowledging that modernity had its issues (anomie, etc.) viewed the contemporary world as a definite improvement over the past. No surprise therefore (not to get too Derridian) that they gave the “marked” (disliked) term of the binary the “mechanical” epithet and they gave their privileged term the nice “organic” compliment!