ABSTRACT
The most fundamental and far-reaching of sociology's unit-ideas is community. The idea of community holds the same pivotal importance in the nineteenth century that the idea of contract had held in the Age of Reason. Both economism and calculated politicization were required for the gigantic task of sweeping away the communal debris of the Middle Ages. For Auguste Comte, restoration of community is a matter of moral urgency. Along with kinship and local community, Le Play was interested in other modes of communal association, especially those which the peasantry had founded for accomplishment of technical or economic ends that the family or local community was unable alone to meet. Emile Durkheim's thinking was deeply affected by the whole revival, in the nineteenth century, of the values and properties of community—community in the sense of groups formed by intimacy, emotional cohesion, depth, and continuity.
