While Ferdinand Tönnies is recognized as a founding father of German sociology primarily because of the importance of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work he published in 1887 at the age of 32, and because of the leading role he played as president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) from its founding in 1909 until his ousting by National Socialist Hans Freyer and the subsequent deactivation of the DGS in 1933, he is among other things a preeminently political thinker. Tönnies has enjoyed the status as a founder of German and thus global sociology alongside other members of the sociological canon such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber mainly because he called himself a sociologist during a period in which sociology was identified as a source of threats to the existing order of the Second Empire–paradoxically, both liberalism in its relationship to the western European, positivist tradition, and socialism, of which Heinrich von Treitschke had warned more than a decade before the publication of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. These political contestations of sociology's legitimacy were backed up with epistemological arguments advanced by practitioners and philosophers of history opposed to “western European” social theory, for instance, Tönnies's rival at the University of Kiel, Wilhelm Dilthey, whose disdain for sociology was attenuated when Georg Simmel introduced Dilthey's philosophical insights to the field, or Heidelberg Neo-Kantians around Heinrich Rickert, who saw the redemption of the sociological project in Max Weber's sociological categories and comments on “regularities.”

Although Tönnies has long been linked almost exclusively to sociology, when Tönnies first wrote Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, sociology constituted only a third of his disciplinary identity. While the first book was dedicated to concepts he called sociological, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Bond 2009a, in Bond 2013b), the second dealt with concepts of psychology, Wesenwille and Kürwille, and the third with concepts of natural law that fall into the domain of political theory. The decision by intellectual historian Quentin Skinner and political philosopher Raymond Geuss to include Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in Cambridge University Press's Texts in the History of Political Thought shows that it is as much a work of “political thought” as of “sociology.”