He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (community and society).

[2] Ferdinand Tönnies was born on 26 July 1855 on the Haubarg "De Reap", Oldenswort on the Eiderstedt Peninsula into a wealthy farmer's family in North Frisia, Duchy of Schleswig, then under Danish rule.

He was the third child of church chief and farmer August Ferdinand Tönnies (1822–1883), and his wife Ida Frederica (born Mau, 1826–1915), came from a theological family from East Holstein.

He took the time to utilize his freedom to travel, exploring the academic fields of the Universities of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin, and Tübingen.

After completing postdoctoral work at the University of Berlin, he traveled to London to continue his studies on the seventeenth-century English political thinker Thomas Hobbes.

Tönnies earned a Privatdozent in philosophy at the University of Kiel from 1909 to 1933 after submitting a draft of his major book, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, as his Habilitationsschrift in 1881.

Because he sympathized with the Hamburg dockers' strike of 1896,[4] the conservative Prussian government considered him to be a social democrat, and Tönnies would not be called to a professorial chair until 1913.

He returned to Kiel as a professor emeritus in 1921 where he took on a teaching position in sociology and taught until 1933 when he was ousted by the Nazis, due to earlier publications in which he had criticized them and had endorsed the Social Democratic Party.

The equilibrium in Gemeinschaft is achieved through means of social control, such as morals, conformism, and exclusion, while Gesellschaft keeps its balance through police, laws, tribunals, and prisons.

[11] Tönnies' theory appears to consign him to a nineteenth-century view of the public world belonging to males, while women are relegated to the private realm, as it links together Gemeinschaft/home/woman as opposed to Gesellschaft/marketplace/man.

Tonnies believed that one of the most important ways to resurrect Gemeinschaft in the modern world would be to improve and prolong family life.

[11] The demise of the family is caused by modern capitalism and its consequences: low pay, excessive hours of labor for men and women alike, and terrible living conditions.