This extraordinary prescient work by Ferdinand Tonnies was written in 1887 for a small coterie of scholars and has continued to grow in importance and adherents. Its translator into English, Charles P. Loomis, well described it as a volume which pointed back into the Middle Ages and ahead into the future in its attempt to answer the questions: "What are we? Where are we? Whence did we come? Where are we going?" If the questions seem portentous in the extreme, the answers Tonnies provides are modest and compelling. Every major field from sociology, to psychology, to anthropology, has found this to be a praiseworthy book.