Community, industrial society and contemporary debate

Abstract

This article revisits the debate about community, which was stimulated by the reception of the idea of industrial society into social thinking. It asks what models of community were offered as a response to the emergence of industrial society, and whether they have present‐day descendants. The suggestions will be that present‐day and ‘industrial’ models of community can be linked in ways that complement, or even challenge, the typology of models of community associated with the major political ideologies; and that there are more interesting ways to classify thinking about types of community than the alleged contrast between liberalism and communitarianism, or individualism and communitarianism, recognizes.

Notes

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Glasgow, 1996, and appears in its proceedings in Iain Hampsher‐Monk and Jeffrey Stanyer (Eds), Contemporary Political Studies (Belfast: Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, 1996, 3 Vols), Vol. 2, pp. 1083–92. I am grateful for discussion to John Cunliffe, Jack Lively, Alan Ware, Andrew Williams, and Christ Woodard; to fellow panellists Iain Hampsher‐Monk, Avner de‐Shalit and Ursula Vogel; and for the helpful and detailed comments of the editor and anonymous readers of this journal, of some of which I have been unable to take full account.