Background to community

My question

For some time now, I have had a problem. In the Constellation, we talk about communities a lot. We talk about ‘Community Life Competence’. We have a ‘Community Action Day’. Here is my problem. I do not know what the word ‘community’ means.

Most people seem very clear about the idea of a community and it is so obvious that it merits no reflection. But I have struggled to understand what makes a community different from any collection of people. Why do we need this word? Over the last few months, I have been reading and thinking about this word. This note puts together what I have learned, just in case there is anyone else out there who also has problems with the idea of community.

My reference

The book that I have found most helpful in my reading is called ‘Community’ by Gerard Delanty. I have been using the second edition printed in 2010 by Routledge. Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex in the UK. Any chapter or page reference is to the second edition.

Why clarity might be important for the Constellation

I think that we need to be clear about the word ‘community’ because there are others out there who have very clear ideas about the word and those ideas are perhaps not the same as ours.

For some people, it is a word that has become that has become meaningless. Take Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes (1994, p. 428)

‘Never has the word “community” been used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life.’

Another view is that community says more about the user of the word than describing a real phenomenon. This quotation comes from Zygmunt Bauman, Community (2001, p. 144)

‘We miss community because we miss security, a quality crucial to a happy life, but one which the world we inhabit is ever less able to offer and ever more reluctant to promise.’

We may agree or disagree with these ideas. I don’t think that is relevant. When people hear us talk about ‘Community Life Competence’, I think that these ideas might sit in the back of their minds. Our challenge is to be able to speak clearly and directly about elements of a community in our use of the word.

Community—a history of the word and the idea.

The word community has its origins in the Greek word ‘koinonia’ and is based on the idea of the city state, the ‘polis’. The Greek city state brought together social relations, contractual relations and political relations in a single entity. To what extent it was a reality or a creation of the philosophers of the time is difficult to tell. But perhaps the all-embracing aspect of this original idea sows the seeds for future confusion. You are allowed to pick and choose those portions of the concept that you favour and label it with the word ‘community’.

One way to think about European history over the last 600 years is that it is the development of two contrasting ideas. The first is the concept of the individual with an identity and with rights and responsibilities. The second is the concept of the group (e.g. a nation) with a political process in which all of its citizens have a voice.

In this European setting, it is very easy to see ‘community’ as the entity that sits between these two ideas. It is neither the individual nor the ‘contractual and political’ but is the space that sits in between these two worlds. It is the space within which we relate to each other as human beings. If the idea of the 'individual' is weak, or if the idea that an individual has a role in the political process is absent, then I think that it will be difficult to see the word community in this light.

This idea of community as the space between the individual and the state can be interpreted as heaven or hell. So Anthony Giddens in ‘Beyond Left and Right’ (1994, p. 124)

‘On each side of the political spectrum today, we see a fear of social disintegration and a call for a revival of community.’

and Alain Touraine in ‘Critique of Modernity’ (1995, p. 304)

‘A communitarian society is suffocating and can be transformed into a theocratic or nationalist despotism.’

To use the vocabulary that Tony Blair developed in the UK, community is an encapsulation of the idea of the third way. The precise meaning is left both to the writer and to the reader.

Community and Society—the Victorian debate

There was much debate in the 19th century around the word community and it was dominated by Ferdinand Tönnies’ book ‘Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft’ published in 1887. In the book, community (Gemeinschaft) is seen as real or organic life in which people relate to each other as human beings; whereas society (Gesellschaft) is seen as inhuman, where we relate to each other in an imaginary or mechanical way. Community is living while society is mechanical. Community is rooted in locality and is natural, while society is a more rational and mental product that is sustained by relations of exchange. And the reason that this is important is that in the modern era, society replaces community as the primary focus for social relations.

This analysis sat comfortably with both left wing and right wing political views. Tönnies could be, and was, accused of being a romantic conservative, looking backwards at the lost world of the traditional rural community. The dilemma for this argument is that he was an ardent socialist who lost his professorial chair for supporting strike action in Hamburg in the 1890s. And it is Marx who saw in industrial society the alienation of the individual from the means of production.

The analysis leads to the proposition that remains a consistent thread in thinking to this day. Community is threatened by modernity and it must be valued and nurtured in order to sustain it in the face of forces that threaten its existence.

The Urban Community—the 20th Century debate

In the 20th century, a new strand appeared (or re-appeared) in the debate. This saw the medieval city as origin of community in its fullest (Greek) sense. The Hanseatic cities and other free states captured the idea of a civic community. Max Weber in ‘The City’ (1905) argues that the city in this sense was one of the major achievements of Western civilisation. The city was the natural expression of civil society and was based on liberty and citizenship. It was a vibrant and dense site of interconnecting social relations based on the autonomy of the city with respect to other political units.

The detailed analysis of the community was taken up in the USA and became identified in sociology as the Chicago School. It feels as if there are two viewpoints that are at odds with each other in the school and the pendulum swings backwards and forwards. One strand is the belief that the American genius will fashion new forms of relationship and community in the urban environment. This (surprisingly) was in the ascendant in the 1930s when the pragmatic school of philosophy identified with James, Peirce and Dewey came to the fore. But there was also a deep seated view that saw the American ideal as based on the small town or village.

In the second half of the 20th century, this pessimistic view came to dominate. The titles of books such as ‘The Eclipse of Community’ by Maurice Stein (1960) and ‘The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West’ by Martin Pawley (1973) seem to say it all.

Community in the 21st Century—a search for coherence

It feels as though there are a lot more threads that have been added to the discussion of community recently. Perhaps this has always been the case and time will filter out the failures. Here are some of the discussions that are going on and which I think are not resolved.

Community as a political idea

The idea of communitarianism is a view put forward by right wing politicians. I don’t find it easy to define, but it appears to argue against the idea of excessive individualism in our society. It argues for a more social conception of the person. In the context of the United Kingdom, the current Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron continues to put forward his idea of the ‘Big Society’, but he struggles to translate the nebulous concept into clear political action.

Community and multiculturalism

The debate around cultural identify and communities defined by cultural identity is a source of confusion rather than clarity at the moment. Within a multicultural society, is a community defined by its culture? Or is the purpose of a nation to blend and integrate diverse cultures into a single, united entity?

Global Community

This idea is linked in my mind with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He used it heavily in his the aftermath of the attack on New York in September 2001 and in his subsequent justification for the war in Iraq. Here is an example:

‘By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can living alone. For those people who lost their lives on 11 September and those that mourn them: now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial.’

This is a statement of ‘world community’. I think it takes the word ‘community’ and deprives it of any useful meaning.

Social/Virtual Communities

The Internet is transforming how we come together to work and to play. The only thing that it is clear to me is that the idea that a community is localised has gone. We can have a sense of community with people who are dispersed around the globe, some of whom we have never met.

A personal perspective on the idea of community

I hope that what I have written so far has been relatively neutral. I may confess to not understanding the idea of community, but I do have some very strong ideas about community based on my own life. I would like to add those to my exploration of the idea of ‘community’. Those views are going to be part of my own definition of community so I had better make them clear.

I grew up in Liverpool, a large city in the United Kingdom during the 1950s and the 1960s. From a historical perspective, I would say that I grew up in what we would call a community. At the time, I think that people would say that the very tight communities that had developed during the Second World War were under threat from the growing prosperity of the 1960s. There was a strong religious divide in the community between catholics and protestants and violence was not uncommon. The level of violence never exploded to the extent that Northern Ireland was to see in those years.

My abiding memory in the context of this discussion is that community (even within the catholic community, for example) does not exclude conflict and social division around class, gender and religion. I really do not know how you would group people together in any meaningful way into a community.

When I was doing post-graduate study in the mid-1970s, I lived in a village in County Durham where until recently most of the people had earned their living mining coal and where many of the people still earned their living by producing coal. (My study had nothing to do with the village. I was studying earthquake waves as they travelled through the earth.) In England, such a village would be identified as model location for a community. I would describe it as a close knit community.

When I left that community after living there for 3 years, I felt a tremendous mixture of feelings. In one sense, I had enjoyed that sense of togetherness that existed in that world. But after 3 years, I was very pleased ‘to escape’ and to find the freedom that a job in London offered to me. Communities offer support and friendships, but they can stifle and restrict. From my point of view, they do not offer a perfect solution to anything. A community may be part of an answer to something, but it is not the whole answer to anything.

Towards a definition of ‘community’ in the context of the Constellation

So what do I conclude about the idea of ‘community’ in the light of this exploration.

First of all, we can in a general sense define a community to refer to any group that is linked by a shared interest.

Here are what I understand as the elements of a community based on the discussion in this note:

  • A community embodies a principle for human organisation. It sits between the individual and the political process.
  • A community is an organising principle founded on choice, not obligation or right.
  • A community is an organising principle that is not restricted by location, but is restricted by time.

But I think that in the Constellation we use the word community in a stronger sense than that. Here is a statement from an internal Constellation document. I did not write it, but it does for me embody my idea of a community

'In the Constellation we are bound by a common vision in which -all over the world- communities are connected for Life Competence. In a Life Competent community, people act from strength:

    • to acknowledge that issues concern everyone
    • to build a common vision and overcome obstacles to reach that vision
    • to mobilize their capacities to reduce their vulnerabilities and risks
    • to allow everyone to live out their full potential, and
    • to learn from their experience and share it with others

The Constellations mission is to stimulate and connect local responses around the world, using the Community Life Competence Process'

It seems to me that this statement envisages a community to be more than simply a shared interest in singing, gardening, needle work or football.

When I think about the Constellation, I find that the starting point is ‘Local Response’. The idea of 'Local Response' implies that the community faces a challenge i.e. that there is something to which it needs to respond. The Constellation asserts that the community can respond to that challenge and, indeed, the Constellation seeks to stimulate that response to the challenge and to connect that response to the challenge.

We are not talking about a verbal response here, we are looking for a community to do something in response to a challenge. The reason that we are looking for a group to take action is because we believe that the group can be more effective than a set of individual, uncoordinated actions. One aim of the Community Life Competence process is to improve the effectiveness of their work together. Another way to say the same thing is that the process aims to improve collaboration.

So here is my attempt to define the essentials of a community in the sense that we use it in the Constellation.

For the Constellation, a community is any group:

  • where the individuals can identify a common objective
  • where the individuals within the group believe that they can achieve more together than they could when they acted alone and
  • where the individuals freely choose to take action together

Here are some consequences of this definition:

First, a community is not defined by a group of people who are located together. The possibility for a community arises when there is a common objective. That is the essential.

Secondly, in order for a community to come together it requires that its member can achieve more together than they could if they were to act alone.

Thirdly, the members of the community freely choose to take action together. This is not a contractual or legal arrangement. It is a consensual arrangement.