RICHARD SENNETT
343
can have much of a relationship . An authentic social relationship must thus
progress through mutual self-revelation; inauthenticity in social relation–
ships is identified with what used to be called discretion . The ideal, authen–
tic social bond is today alluded to in many familiar code words that posit a
society in which people are "open" to each other, "responsive to each
other's needs," ready to "interact freely." All of these code words convert
social relationships into psychological transactions; the model underlying
all of them is a bizarre form of canasta in which each of the players competes
to show the others the cards of identity he holds.
There is a technical sociological word whose changing meaning captures
this conversion of social relations into psychological terms : it is
Gemein–
schaft.
The sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies at the end of the nineteenth
century used the word to mean full and open emotional relations with
others. In opposing
Gemeinschaft
to
Gesellschaft
he wanted to create an
historical, rather than a purely analytic contrast.
Gemeinschaft
relations
existed in the precapitalist, preurbanized world of the
ancien regime;
gesellschaft
relations, in which people split up their emotions according
to the principle of the division of labor, Tonnies depicted as characteristic
of the modern world. Much as he mourned the loss of
gemeinschaft
rela–
tions, he never thought they could be revived, for that would mean reviving
the hierarchic, personalistic world of the
ancien regime.
The longing for
Gemeinschaft
he in fact criticized as' 'displaced pastoralism."
Today,
Gemeinschaft
has been redefined, shorn of the historical
meaning Tonnies gave it, and converted into a moral absolute-a condition
of authenticity, of good faith. The celebration of
Gemeinschaft
as a pure
state is captured in the ordinary English translation of the word : community.
When people are open with each other and expose their feelings to each
other, they create a community. An encounter group is the most obvious
example of a community conducted on psychological principles of openness,
but these principles enter into ideas about other kinds of communities as
well. In the debates about centralization and decentralization in urban
planning, for instance, the proponents of decentralization often argue that
local communities should take precedence over the needs of the city as a
whole, because in the local community people have real human relation–
ships, in which they can be open with each other, get to know each other,
and share their feelings , while strangers in the city at large don ' t. And this
notion of community is connected with disclosure: thus, in the literature
on the family as a community, full interaction is often presented as an
optimum condition , and the insistence on one 's right to keep things back
from those one loves is seen as a form of bad faith which threatens the family
as a whole .
