ABSTRACT
There are shared understandings between members of all socially organized groups. It clearly makes a difference, if, on the one hand, the shared understandings are formally enunciated or plainly stated, and on the other, if they remain in an unenunciated form in the sense of Llewellyn and Hoebel's "felt" norms. As commitment to the original ideological precepts waned, the tests of reasonableness also watered down some of the original doctrines. The point of departure in this chapter concerns the Israeli kibbutz movement, which has survived for almost eighty years in its original organizational format. One of the conclusions has to be that any spontaneous notions of what may have originally constituted standards of reasonableness are, in the long run, fighting a losing battle against the dominant ethos of individualism that has developed in the kibbutz and is reinforced by outside influences. In this respect the intentional societies reflect the same overall trend toward the demise of shared understandings over reasonableness.
