ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the relationship of the small moral ideas of communards to the small social structures of communes—with what the author call the microsociology of knowledge. Most of the data in the book are drawn from the field work which the author did at the rural commune which he call "The Ranch". Like the hippie phenomenon in general, the commune movement never attracted more than a small percentage of its potential constituency, even at the height of its appeal between 1968 and 1971. But it did attract the mass media, which saw in it the apotheosis of counterculture "liberation", prominent among middle-class youth in the 1960s. Communes are not unlike political scandals—their disappearance from the headlines does not mean that governmental corruption has ceased.
