ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that communes and encounter groups represent responses to the waning of spontaneous community, and that they have a particular role to play in the gradual replacement of spontaneous residential communities by organized residential communities within American society. Communes and encounter groups were only the most dramatic aspects of a generally hightened concern with community as a dimension of lifestyle during the period 1965-1975. The crucial point to realize about the solutions attempted by both encounter groups and communes is their mixed religio-familio-neighborly functions. Encounter group attempters are well aware of the similarity of their goals to those of communes members and vice versa. Communes are distinctive among the alternative lifestyles, both in the tremendous variety of alternatives that have been experimented with and in the degree of divergence from modal patterns of valuation which the isolation and mutual reinforcement of communal living make possible.
