On page one of his 1887 essay Gemmeinschaft and Gessellschaft, Ferdinand Tønnies distinguished two sorts of relationships resulting in associations conceived of as things or beings: “The relationship itself, and also the resulting association, is conceived of either as real and organic life—this is the essential characteristic of the Gemeinschaft (community); or as imaginary and mechanical structure—this is the concept of the Gessellschaft (society).” Whether Benedict Anderson was making specific reference to the passage in the title of Imagined Communities (1983), it is in any case a passage critical to specifying the significance of his evocative phrase. Reading Anderson through Tønnies we can see that an imagined community would not simply be a group that is not real in the conventional sense, whatever real might mean in this case. According to Tønnies' logic, an imagined community would be a formalized abstract translocal social-system conceptualizing itself as a concrete face-to-face local group, like, say, a family. The phrase would not delineate an evolutionary phase according to the logic of classic social thought (community[rarrtl ] society[rarrtl ] imagined community); it would identify the figure in terms of which an “association” is conceived of as “a thing or being,” which is to say, it would identify a metaphor. One thing Anderson is apparently saying, then, is that this particular metaphor, society conceived as community, and not the concept of society alone, is of primary significance for understanding political representation, sentiment, and mobilization in late modern times.