The Loss of Community and the Role of the State in a Mass, Market Driven Society
What is community and why is it so important to understand what a community is and the role it is supposed to play in society?
Community. This is one of those words which gets thrown around all the time. There is a kind of mystique to it. A sense of longing. We all seem to want it. We all claim that we are a part of some community or another, even if it’s just an online community. But one gets the sense that we talk about it so much because so few of us experience real community any more. It seems like the kind of thing that, if you have it, you don’t need to talk about it. So what is community? What are its characteristics? How do we know it when we see it? And why is it so important to understand what a community is and the role it is supposed to play in society? If we don’t, we cannot properly understand the role that our political institutions—that is, “the state”—must play in today’s mass society.
If you have not read Alan Ehernhalt’s “The Lost City: the Forgotten Virtues of Community in America,” I highly recommend you do. His book looks at community a…
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