The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) pioneered sociology as an academic discipline of rigorously scientific character on a broad base of original studies in the history of ideas, epistemology, political science, economics, and social anthropology.

Ferdinand Tönnies was born on July 26, 1855, on a farm homestead in the North Frisian peninsula of Eiderstedt, then still under Danish sovereignty. One of seven children, he received his high school education in Husum, where he became deeply attached to the novelist and poet Theodor Storm. After studying classics at different German universities and taking his doctoral degree in 1877, Tönnies turned to philosophy, history, biology, psychology, economics, and ethnology as his ideas on scientific sociology began to take shape.

In Berlin in 1876 Tönnies began at the suggestion of his lifelong friend Friedrich Paulsen a study of the much-neglected philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. On his first...