ABSTRACT
A point has been reached in this book where community as communication must be discussed. Until now the main conceptions of community were those of classical sociological theory and political philosophy. In all of these there is a view of community as largely affirmative of the prevailing society. Mainstream, classical sociology stressed the integrative capacity of community, seeing community as a legitimation of the established society and of the identity of its members (although identity was not a concept familiar to the classical sociologists). In this tradition, community has been very centrally conceived in terms of tradition. Although there have been some important departures from this, as in Victor Turner’s idea of the confluence of liminality and communitas, a post-traditional conception of community has not been accompanied by a view of community as transformative of society. This conservative view of community has also been reflected in the idea of community in political philosophy. In the American tradition of communitarianism, community has been seen largely as appropriate to a modern urban society in its retreat from the social ills of modernity. However, despite this search for a modern kind of community that may be capable of offering an antidote to the malaise of modernity, communitarianism has reflected a very anti-political view of
community. As noted in Chapter 2, in its civic republican formulations, it is a view of community that is very much disengaged from the state, locating community in the voluntaristic domain. Other versions of communitarianism stress the importance of the state to give some official status to particular cultural communities in order to foster a civic patriotism. This is clearly not a view of community as a basis of an alternative vision of society, but an accommodation of groups within the larger framework; it is a consequence of the confluence of rights and identity.
