Richard Thurnwald, “Funktionelle Soziologie” (1931)

This single-author theoretical journal essay closes a symposium on the aims of sociology. Thurnwald writes as the “host,” but the piece is a programmatic statement: sociology should study Gesellung, human association, as process, sequence, and functioning interdependence. He rejects both a priori speculation and mere fact-collecting; empirical breadth and conceptual analysis must discipline one another.

Die Soziologie will und muß die Vergesellung der gesamten Menschheit zu erfassen suchen. Daher muß sie auch ihre Verallgemeinerungen von allen Völkern und deren Schicksalen gewinnen.

English translation: Sociology wants to, and must, seek to grasp the sociation of the whole of humankind. Therefore it must also derive its generalizations from all peoples and their destinies.

This gives the essay its ethnosociological scope. Sociology must not generalize from the Euro-American present alone; it needs comparison across peoples and histories in order to gain distance from parochial values. That comparative demand is joined to a temporal one.

Die Gesellung ist etwas Veränderliches im Kleinen wie im Großen.

English translation: Sociation is something changeable, both on the small scale and on the large.

Families, firms, parties, churches, states, and nations endure at different rhythms, yet all are altered by succession, leadership change, generational replacement, and changing surroundings. What appears as a stable condition is often only a slow process. Thurnwald therefore shifts sociology from classifying forms toward analyzing Vorgänge—courses of action and transformation.

Against any undifferentiated idea of “society,” he emphasizes overlapping units. A person belongs at once to locality, language, family, occupation, party, class, church, clubs, state, and friendship circles. Because the same persons carry these affiliations, they unintentionally connect them: political domination may color family authority, state style may shape manners, and artistic currents may echo public moods. “Culture” is thus not a self-contained essence but a social-psychic structure emerging from material, social, and intellectual processes.

Die Voraussetzung für jede Gesellung ist der Umstand, daß eine Person auf die andere angewiesen ist, daß sie einander ergänzen oder unterstützen.

English translation: The precondition of every sociation is the circumstance that one person is dependent on another, that they complement or support one another.

This is Thurnwald’s core micro-sociological move. Association rests on Verzahnung and Verhakung: personal meshing, functional hooking, mutual support, rivalry, imitation, and shared striving. Family joins sex and age; work divides abilities; neighborhood and travel create temporary solidarities among strangers. Even chance gatherings quickly develop roles, ranks, and smaller groups. Since persons change through age, work, travel, family fate, and experience, their relations also change; the “chemistry” of association remains in flux.

Leadership is treated as a product of this chemistry, not as an isolated trait. In crowds, emergencies, associations, parties, and states, leaders emerge where others recognize situational superiority—speech, courage, imagination, competence, or initiative.

Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.

English translation: Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.

To analyze leadership formation, Thurnwald introduces “Siebung,” or sifting, reserving “Auslese” for biology. Natural sifting works through prestige, imitation, voluntary recognition, and practical need; institutional sifting works through offices, elections, inheritance, appointments, statutes, and constitutions. Modern organization tries to replace living recognition with formal mechanisms, but the two cannot remain harmonized indefinitely.

Die institutionelle Siebung muß immer früher oder später in einen Konflikt mit der natürlichen Siebung geraten, Je größer die Spannung, desto stärker der Konflikt.

English translation: Institutional selection must sooner or later come into conflict with natural selection; the greater the tension, the stronger the conflict.

The essay’s final section sketches a typology of association. Masses are brief and weakly bounded but prone to panic and media-amplified emotion. Ballungen arise from spatial co-presence, such as neighborhood, workplace, settlement, or geopolitical situation. Kristallisationen are free followings around a person, book, or idea. Bünde, including marriage, family, and friendship, rest on personal meshing. Organizations are the most rigid form: they depersonalize relations into offices, statutes, duties, and procedures, yet still “live” through changing persons and oppositions.

Thurnwald’s relevance lies in refusing both individualism and mass theory. Social forms arise from the reciprocal functioning of persons and collectives, and every institutional form must be read with the psychic processes of its participants.

Weder „Individuum“ noch „Masse“ allein ist entscheidend, sondern jede soziale Gestaltung ist nur denkbar als das Ergebnis eines Ineinanderwirkens der beiden.

English translation: Neither "individual" nor "mass" alone is decisive; rather, every social formation is conceivable only as the result of an interplay between the two.

Functional sociology is therefore a processual sociology of overlapping units, leadership sifting, organizational conflict, and temporal rhythm: institutions are not fixed categories, but mechanisms through which persons and groups constrain, use, and remake one another.