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public life – it is the world itself. ‘One goes into Gesellschaft (society) as one
goes into a strange country’ (38).
In contrast to Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft (society) is transitory and
superficial. Whilst Gemeinschaft, should be understood as a living organ-
ism, Gesellschaft (society) [is] a mechanical aggregate and artifact’ (39).
Gesellschaft (association) is always by way of contractual arrangement, or
cooperation towards a specific aim. Gesellschaft is well suited to
Durkheim’s principle of individualism. ‘In Gesellschaft every person
strives for that which is to his own advantage and affirms the actions of
others only in so far as and as long as they can further his interest’ (88).
For Durkheim, the onset of what Tönnies calls Gesellschaft created a
weak overall sense of a conscience collective for any given society as a
whole, and for him, the division of labour was not a sufficient unifying
force to overcome the loss of an ideational bond. Instead, the conscience
collective contracts to institutions, in which solidaristic attachments can
become feverishly strong. It is as though, as compensation for the absence
of any kind of overall integration into society, that ‘strange country’ which
has now become the world itself, individuals seek refuge in the private
and closed environments of institution and family. This ‘miniaturization’
of community can also realize itself in the workplace, subcultures and, as
we shall see, television and the Internet (Fukuyama, 1999).
The change from traditional to modern societies is therefore a trans-
formation in the architecture of community. In Durkheimian terms it does
not mean that individuals in modern societies are more weakly integrated
than they were in traditional societies; it is just that such integration is
concentrated into sub-systems of the social order.
It is, however, true to say that in modern societies individuals do not
look to the ‘social whole’ for a sense of integration, and generally feel a
sense of anomie in relation to such an entity. But such a general condition
of anomie is not a prescription for a romantic return to close-kit commu-
nity, which communitarian movements espouse, a movement which was
at its most salient in the nineteenth century, precisely when the bourgeois
and industrial revolutions of Europe were experienced most bluntly and
starkly.
Rather, unlike Tönnies, Durkheim saw the kind of solidarity exhib-
ited by traditional societies as having its own particular problems, to do
with over-integration and over-regulation. The close-knit community
might well be intimate and highly connected, but it can also be suffocat-
ing, oppressive and imprisoning.
These problems of over-integration have today been transferred to
those institutions which have miniaturized community – the workplace
and the family being obvious ones. To take the workplace, the rise of worka-
holism, and the phenomenon of people living to work, rather than the
other way around, can create enormous pressures, leading to permanent
stress, depression, even suicide. Similarly, the modern nuclear family is
experienced by many teenagers as too suffocating. They look to ways of