Suny Press
Community
About this book
Communities are vital to personal and social well-being because collaboration is required where skills and resources are scarce; their pathologies—anonymity and isolation, tribalism and murder—defeat us.
Community is often invoked respectfully but without a clear referent. The word is said to be used ninety-four ways, evidence that its sense is diffuse. Community clarifies the word's principal expressions and the alternative ideological spaces-holistic and hierarchical or open and tolerant-in which communities form. Members bind in the interest of utility-jobs or schools-or because home and friendship are the focus of feeling and significance. These binders are social glue: they explain our dedication to communal aims and loyalty to fellow members. Autonomy in their context is socialized; its bases are the information, attitudes, and skills acquired when families and schools prepare us for roles in communities inherited or chosen. Yet community is fraught. Holistic societies are repressive; open societies are vulnerable. The members of successful communities-families, businesses, and schools-often thrive. Those excluded for want of luck or skill are abandoned and anonymous. Their isolation is one of an open society's two pathologies: collaboration is a social necessity when resources, space, and skills are scarce; competition turned visceral and murderous is a vice.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
"Community takes up a theme that has engaged Weissman, namely, community, to which he now adds new extended thought, exploring the complications and tensions surrounding some of the central social issues of our own time. The work's address of essential issues in ethics, politics, and social theory is not separable from Weissman's view of larger philosophical issues, such as the one and the many, issues that are diversely articulated in some of his other publications. The idea of community is introduced to make possible a multipronged approach to these issues. This is a forthright, lucid, and admirably thoughtful work." — William Desmond, University of Villanova
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction
1 -
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Chapter One Community
11 -
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Chapter Two Infrastructure
33 -
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Chapter Three Meaning and Normativity
55 -
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Chapter Four Autonomy
89 -
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Chapter Five Cooperation and Conflict
113 -
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Chapter Six The One and the Many
131 -
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Afterword
147 -
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Notes
149 -
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Index
153
