Tyson, Louis. Psychological Politics of the American
Dream: The Commodif ication of Subjectivity in
Twentieth-Century American Literature. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1994.
Steven Fonash
community
Community is an oft-invoked, seemingly simple term
that has widely varying historical and current mean-
ings dependent on sociocultural and discipline-spe-
cific contexts. As such, its meanings differ between
everyday discourse and the specialized terrain of
scientific, technological, and sociological discourse.
Today, the fundamental notions of community are
undergoing a sea change because of the emergence
of new communication technologies, access to the
Internet, and the formation of different kinds of
Web-based communities that have paradoxically
both expanded as well as made more intimate the
connections between people. Blogospheres, chat
rooms, Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace,
and other such new avenues of expression in cyber-
space have democratized and made the world more
intimate in ways never imagined before. Local com-
munities have been revived even as cyber-technol-
ogy has been accused of destroying traditional bonds
of community life.
In its most commonly understood sense, com-
munity implies networks of solidarity and connec-
tion that attest to a primary instinctual need of
humans beings as social animals. Community is
thus an important source of meaning and validation
in human lives and is predicated on a set of com-
monly held beliefs, values, interests, knowledge and
information, and interpretive frameworks deemed
as good by those who belong to the community.
A sense of belonging to a collective is an integral
aspect of community, and this sense of belonging
may be located in a series of things, whether it be a
common cultural heritage, religion, language, ritu-
als, race, ethnicity, nation, or geographical territory.
Indeed, a nation is merely a larger political form
of community. In James Joyce’s a portrait oF
the artist as a younG Man, the young Stephen
Dedalus inscribes his name in his geography book
followed by a series of addresses that locate him in a
chain of increasingly wider personal and community
networks: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements,
Clongowes College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ire-
land, Europe, the World, the Universe” (24). Here
the widening circle of belonging extending from
his class, college, county, country, and continent to
the very universe itself traces Stephen’s expanding
notion of self entrenched in a chain of being that ties
the individual to the community.
In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies,
in his book Community and Civil Society, developed
the distinction between community—which he
said is informal and ethically oriented, with mutual
bonds of a traditional communal life—and civil
society, which is impersonal, formal, and relatively
more amoral, with merely administrative ties. The
chief distinction in Tonnies’s view is that while the
onus of pursuing the community’s goals of common
well-being is on its members, in a civil society, the
group itself becomes instrumental for its members’
individual goals and aims. Community may be
exemplified by a family or neighborhood, while a
modern state or industrial corporation arising out of
an urban capitalist setting is an example of society.
The former is romanticized as embodying more
enduring, personal relationships while in the latter
relationships are more impersonal, superficial, and
motivated by professional and monetary connec-
tions. Tonnies’s theorization between the organic
mutually sustaining holistic natures of a community
as opposed to the individual-centered society has
become central to debates on the sociological, moral,
and political implications of community. The chief
distinction between the two modes of organization
or belonging can be seen as that between holistic
communitarianism versus individual liberalism, and
this has implications for citizenship, political par-
ticipation, and notions of common good.
However, communities, although they imply
a largely positive social network based on collab-
orative ties and shared goals, can also be oppressive
forces if they assume an identity that is oriented on
exclusionary or supremacist principles in the guise
of universal or community values. Nazi Germany
under Hitler’s rule, guided by principles of Aryan
supremacy, or Fascist Italy under Mussolini are
examples of pathological community formations
that pervert the generally benign and organic rootscommunity 19