On Community

The individualism and restless mobility of modernity have become disorienting and frightening.

Our nostalgia for premodern times, when natural bonds to kith and kin were unshakable, continues to surface - most recently in the popular phenomenon of support groups. "On Community" examines this philosophical issue of community for the postmodern mind by presenting 13 original essays by specialists currently working on this problem.

The first four essays, by Eliot Deutsch, R.W. Hepburn, Hilary Putnam, and Leroy S. Rouner, examine philosophies of community, emphasizing metaphysical analysis and definition of the nature of community.

The second section considers the theme in a cross-cultural context.

Merry White, Katherine Platt, Benjamin Schwartz, and Huston Smith illustrate in this section the various ways in which community is understood and experienced in Japan, North Africa, China, and India.

The final section, which contains contributions by Patrick Hill, Jurgen Moltmann, Catherine Keller, and George Rupp, explores the future of community, focusing on community building in Western societies.

While the authors represent diverse interests, they also share common ground. Virtually all agree that a creative community needs some form of individualism in order to make a community effective. And there is a consensus among the essays that community is a good thing that the quest for community in our time is a significant fact.

Finally, the contributors suggest that the critique of the liberal view of the autonomous individual, in vogue in recent years, now seems to have waned.