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The article provides information on German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and his views on rural sociology. Ferdinand was born in 1855, at his parental farms in Eiderstead in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. A symposium has been organized on the 125 birth anniversary of Ferdinand by the "Institut für Soziologie" of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, the "Ferdinand Tönnies Gesellschaft" and the "Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliotek Kiel." The most important outcome of the symposium was a volume of essays "Ankunft bei Tönnies. Contributions to the volume have been prepared by fifteen scholars with varied backgrounds and interests. The concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as analytical tools are discussed by Alexander Dreichsel. Ralph Segalman writes about the use and misuse of the concept of Gemeinschaft. Sybille Tönnies considers the part played by Tönnies' personal values in his conceptualization of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft typology. Finally, Klaus Heberle, Horst Rode and Ekkehart Klug examine where Tönnies stood politically when nazism emerged in Germany.

In this paper an effort is made to explain some of the dynamics behind evolving rural social systems in terms of their comparatively smaller or greater openness or closure. It is argued that rural social systems can be called comparatively open or dosed in various respects : (a) factually, formally and/or normatively; (b) to the outside and/or to the inside; (c) socio-structurally and/or culturally. The author applies these distinctions in a discussion about the difficult position of many social systems in present-day rural Europe between the extremes of complete isolation and complete external integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the contents volumes I to X of Sociologia Ruralis (1960-1970), with the understanding that only the (75) English written papers are being reviewed. The main starting points have been derived from Article 4 of the Constitution of the European Society for Rural Sociology. After having proposed a number of critical remarks on the subject that have been dealt with in the papers concerned, a tentative evaluation has been made of the practical, theoretical, and methodologic relevance of these papers. In the final section, some ideas are suggested which might be used in order to remove several shortcomings brought to light in to previous sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]