Introduction

Community is one of the political concepts that launched the modern age.1 When the French Revolutionaries invoked "fraternity" alongside liberty and equality as part of their rallying cry, and when nineteenth-century radicals called for "solidarity" as crucial to social reform,2 they appealed to the communitarian values of shared fate, intimate connection, and sociality. However, discourse about community in modernity has often revolved around decline, or even loss, and the difficulty of recovery.3 So skeptical have we become about the possibility of community that one influential account argues that "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" (Anderson 2006: 6; for discussion, Blackshaw 2010: 5-6). In the era of the metropolis, the market economy, and liberal individualism, we often yearn for the closer connections that community signifies yet doubt the possibility of achieving it. The search for community has been a central aspiration of the modern era, with community often treated as a chimera waiting to be discovered. Moreover, this sense of longing traverses the political spectrum, including the quest for liberation and fellowship by socialists and the left and the nostalgia for a traditional locality governed by authority relations prized by conservatives and the right (for discussion of the political range of quests for community, see Selznick 1992: 371-376, 2002: 4-7).

Certain forms of community are attenuated in modernity. In particular, the boundaries between today's communities are invariably porous, with memberships overlapping, multiple, and fluid. However, we are by no means so socially isolated as the narrative of loss suggests, with membership in communities such as sports clubs, religious groups, and special interest organizations important parts of many people's lives. Moreover, many of the developments that seem to threaten community turn out to be double-edged swords that offer opportunities for new forms of connection. For example, processes of globalization have put the nation-state - the key unit of political community in the modern world - under pressure by raising the salience of global issues such as climate change, migration, and regulation of transnational corporations. However, they also point to the possibility of worldwide community, as in the notion of the "global village," or can be met via international cooperation.4 Similarly, the internet has reduced the time that people spend interacting with others in person, but it has fostered opportunities for communities of interest with global reach (for discussion, Delanty 2010: 134-149; though see Haidt 2024: 12-17 for an account of online communities that argues that they bring significant social costs, especially to children and adolescents). The opportunities that challenges bring can also be seen in environmental thought: deep ecology suggests that humans must learn to see ourselves as part of a community of sentient beings across species lines and generations, or as part of an ecosystem, if we are to combat the climate crisis (Naess 1990; O'Neil 2016; De-Shalit 1995).

This makes the contemporary world ripe for rethinking the concept of community. In recent decades, there has been a new wave of communitarian thought in social and political theory (for recent surveys, see Tam 2019, 2021). Reacting to the individualism of much liberal thought by stressing people's social embeddedness (Sandel 1984a; Taylor 1989a), new communitarianism seeks to avoid what it sees as the overly conformist tendencies of many conservative invocations of community (Etzioni 1996: 4-5). It seeks to bolster the possibilities for collective action and the quest for a common good while leaving room for individual autonomy and social equality. Thus, contemporary communitarians seek to balance, or find alternatives to, dualisms such as capitalism or communism, market or state, and rights or responsibilities.5 The aim is to provide a corrective to the individualism of much of American and European society, while not accepting communities as they currently are, but seeking to offer a normative theory of how communities might and should be that balances community with other values.6 The hope is to develop visions of society that reconcile a politics of the common good with individual freedom and equality.

This book analyzes and explicates the meanings of and possibilities for community in the 2020s and beyond. I consider the accounts of community advanced by liberals, conservatives, socialists, republicans, feminists, and communitarians old and new. In thinking about community, it is important to consider its critics, as well as its advocates, for various thinkers - including, but not only, individualists - deny the claim that a new balance need be struck between the claims of individuals and those of groups.7 The book thus considers both the benefits of strengthening communities in terms of greater social connection and solidarity, reduced loneliness, and enhanced social care and provision, and the potential pitfalls, such as reifying existing social relations, privileging powerful community members, and the "vague" and "indeterminate" nature of the concept itself (Frazer 1999: 5-6).

I begin with this first question, asking what we mean by community and which elements make it up. I then provide an account of my approach and major arguments, before outlining the structure of the book.

The Meanings of Community

The definition of community is hotly and perhaps essentially contested. Community is not unique in this regard: the same is true of other important terms in the social sciences, including core concepts of political theory such as freedom, equality, justice, rights, democracy, and power. However, in at least one respect, community may seem especially problematic. That is, some view it as a feel-good buzzword rather than a meaningful piece of political analysis (see Frazer 1998: 121, who comments that it appeals to conservatives concerned with social order and to socialists because it suggests solidarity, without being especially threatening to liberals). Raymond Williams exemplifies this view, famously arguing that, "Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term" (Williams 2015: 400).8 By contrast, Williams holds, society does have more determinate connotations as either a body of institutions or relationships or as the condition necessary for their formation (Williams 2015: 228-231). Anderson's claim that any community too large for direct interpersonal contact to be its defining feature - he has in mind primarily national communities - are "imagined" (Anderson 2006: 6) can be interpreted as skeptical in this vein, for it suggests that nations do not actually share meaningful relationships but merely believe themselves to do so.

Community is used both to describe existing social orders (or express nostalgia about an at least partly mythologized historical order) and to prescribe a desirable future order (this sense is partly utopian) (Plant 1974: 8-13). Moreover, it does necessarily contain "imagined" or felt elements, and this is as true of local communities marked by face-to-face contact as of nations or even empires. For community matters as an expression of the social side of humanity and the importance of connections between different people that tie them together in particular relationships and create special bonds between them. Human relationships can never be measured purely by the nature of the interaction, but always depend in part on how those interacting conceive of their interaction. That conception can be revealed in practice but is never entirely reducible to it. Put differently, a community whose members did not "imagine" themselves to form a community would not be a community, no matter how dense their interactions. Anderson recognizes this when he notes that what makes national communities imagined is that, while members may not know of or meet each other, they perceive themselves as a "deep horizontal comradeship" (Anderson 2006: 6-7). Shared commitment or fellowship is integral to - perhaps the core of - community.

Accounts in the literature tend to start by noting that community is about belonging or fellowship. Delanty points out that the term originates in the Latin words com (with) and unus (singularity), which suggests that community is about how people live together (Delanty 2010: x-xii). One of the most prominent contemporary communitarian thinkers, Amitai Etzioni, makes a similar point by saying that communities involve "I & We" relationships (Etzioni 1995b: 18-20), arguing that communities combine public ("We") aspects of identity with private ("I") ones. Robert Nisbet argues that community "encompasses all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and...