ABSTRACT
'Community' may be used to refer to any group, large or small, whose members live together in such a way that they share, not this or that particular interest, but the basic conditions of a common life. 'Society' to refer to the institutional organisation, political, legal, and economic, which may or may not be a feature of such groups. One further possible ambiguity should be mentioned, which is rather different from those considered so far, which consist in the currency of different descriptive senses of 'community'. 'Community' is often used with strong evaluative and emotive force, commonly signalled by the use of such intensifying adjectives as 'real' and 'genuine'. Even so, the sharp dichotomy between community as involving deep personal involvement and commitment, and an impersonal kind of association based on the rational will, and the application of this dichotomy in classifying social groups, can be misleading.
