The word community has a variety of political uses. It can be an ideal, evoking a political order characterized by warm, fraternal and caring social relations of an almost family-like nature. In this usage it resembles the idea of fraternity, one of the three parts of the French revolutionary slogan, along with liberté and egalité. It can be a purely descriptive term merely referring to the informal relations of people who live in some sort of a group, rather than to any formal political system or state they may set up to run their society. It may refer, however, to a small self-supporting group where this previous distinction is not seen as valid.
Political theory has often concerned itself with the idea of community in this latter sense, where all members of the society share values so closely that neither a separation between individual and state, nor the enforcement of collective obligations, is necessary. The traditional model of such a community is an extended family, or sometimes a tribal grouping in a pre-state society. Here, it is argued, an identification of the good of the individual with the good of the group is complete (see common good). Where positions of authority or divisions of labour and responsibility have to exist, they are non-contentious and even ‘natural’. This idealized view of a community is found as early as Plato and Aristotle, and is still powerful today with thinkers like Marcuse and many supporters of movements such as the Greens. In most social science uses community is an empirical concept describing a collectivity of individuals who share many values and life experiences, and can be expected to act with some degree of consensus and co-operation in political matters.
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