ABSTRACT
The emergence of industrial society in the nineteenth century led to a new interest in community as an expression of an authenticity that was supposedly lost with modernity. This chapter focuses on the debate about community and society as it developed in modern sociology and anthropology. It explains three major debates on community are critically examined: first, the notion of community as tradition, especially with regard to Tonnies; second, the idea of moral community, especially around the work of Durkheim; third, the theory of symbolic community, as proposed originally by Victor Turner and restated by Anthony Cohen. The equating of community with tradition and more generally with a premodern world that began to be lost with modernity was implicit in much of modern sociology, which inherited neo-romantic ideas, such as the notion of an authentic and organic model of communal life. The notion of solidarity is a modern creation.
