LitArk » Books » Art

Scott Greer - The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations

Here you can read online Scott Greer - The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2007, publisher: Routledge, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations
Author:
Scott Greer
Publisher:
Routledge
Genre:
Books / Art
Year:
2007
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Community is a basic concept, perhaps the basic concept, in social science and in social philosophy. Its meanings are many and varied, yet it is pre-eminent in discussions of man and his world. The editors of this book have selected material from many sources in an attempt to explore the meaning and relevance of the idea of community as it is used in social science, political commentary, and general literature.

The book is organized around four basic problems: What aspect of social life is community? What is the character of community in different settings? What is the relationship of politics to community? What is the prospect for community in todays changing world? To answer these questions, the editors have drawn from historical and contemporary sources in political philosophy, empirical social science, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, and ancient and modern literature (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer, C. P. Snow, Lawrence Durrell, and others)--all reflecting a broad spectrum of attitudes and approaches. Community is considered in both Western and non-Western societies. The editors introduce each chapter of the book with a critique and provide the reader with an informed general commentary.

Including some of the classic statements on the meaning and importance of community while drawing upon new sources of insight, this book supplements courses relating to this central concept. Emphasizing the idea of community as an aspect of social organization and political life, it is especially useful in political science and sociology courses dealing with local politics and the urban world.

Scott Greer: author's other books

Who wrote The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

The Concept of Community

READINGS WITH INTERPRETATIONS

EDITED BY DAVID W. MINAR
AND SCOTT GREER

First published 1969 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007060656

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The concept of community : readings with interpretations / David W. Minar and
Scott Greer, editors.
p. cm.
Originally published: Chicago : Aldine 1969.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-202-30962-0 (alk. paper)
1. Communities. I. Minar, David W. II. Greer, Scott A.

HT65.M5 2007
307dc22

2007060656

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30962-0 (pbk)

Contents

The concept of community is a complex, usually unanalyzed, abstraction. It is often a source of confusion for it stands for many things, and when it is used with interchangeable meanings very elementary errors creep into our discourse. This weakness is true of most germinal notions, and the remedy lies in analysis and discrimination.

Frequently we use community to reter to a physical concentration of individuals in one place. This is the ecological meaning and accordingly a community is simply whatever happens to exist in a given territoryrabbits and coyotes, businessmen and laborers. It means no more than that. There is another connotation of the word, however, which refers to the social organization among a concentration of individuals. And this latter is the source of still another level of meaning.

For community is both empirically descriptive of a social structure and normatively toned. It refers both to the unit of a society as it is and to the aspects of the unit that are valued if they exist, desired in their absence. Community is indivisible from human actions, purposes, and values. It expresses our vague yearnings for a commonality of desire, a communion with those around us, an extension of the bonds of kin and friend to all those who share a common fate with us. Aldous Huxley remarks that D. H. Lawrence was much more unhappy at the lack of real community than he was at the sexual condition of men: community, in this view, is the precondition for the smaller orders and more idiosyncratic values of individuals.

Looking at this double nature of the term, empirically descriptive and normatively prescriptive, leads us to the basic question: What do we want? We may think of a continuum that begins with the Platonic Republic, in which men are socialized and related to one another so that one wants what he gets and gets what he wants. In such an order that which is good to the individual is right to the group. Self-interest and public interest are different aspects of the same morality.

Nineteenth-century economic liberalism is another effort to reach this end, but by what a different route. Its definition of the proper relation of man as individual and collective emphasized his freedom to do what he wished within very broad limits, ignoring the interests of others in the faith that the invisible hand of the market place would allocate values, reward virtue, and punish vices. Individual aggrandizement would result in the greatest good of the collective. This solution to the problem of community resulted in encouraging the entrepreneur and the innovator, at considerable cost to the traditional social values and particularly, the weaker social classes. It produced a world valuing change, individuality, heterogeneity, and individual liberty.

Whatever we want, the next question raised by the normative meaning is strictly empirical: Under what conditions is our desired state of affairs possible? Here we look to the social mechanisms that allow and encourage a society like Platos Republic, or like Natures Half Acre. Historically, we examine specific social structures, from the Athenian polis to Imperial Rome, from the folk society of the Maya to such great world cities as New York, Paris, London. Using sociological concepts, we look at the grounds of community in interdependence, communication, and the ordering of behavior.

Throughout our examination of the concept of community we have found certain recurring antinomies. There is the continual tension between individual interest and the common interest. The Greeks, those idealists of the polis, were forever struggling with brilliant individualists who used the freedom of the community to get their way with it: they never solved the empirical problems their ideals posed.

We also find, as Robert Maclver noted before World War I, a continuing tension between the smaller community and the larger, the part and the whole. Localism is a perennial in the organizational system. Rooted in shared fate, isolation, and intense interaction, interdependence, and communication, units based upon localism are always in tension with those based on nationalism. States fly apart for this reason, national policy is slowed, crippled, and distorted for this reason. At the same time the autonomy of the local community is limited, its own values subordinated to those of the larger society, its very reason for being cast in doubt.

And underlying many discussions of community is the antinomy of stability and change. Perhaps the kind of social unit in which we would have identification with the whole and communion with others is simply one that can persist with very slow rates of change over a long period of time. What one expects and what he gets tend to become fitted in such societies; justice occurs. Perhaps the preliterate societies destroyed by nineteenth century expansionism had invented, after their own fashion, a secular version of Platos Republic, Certainly rapid change has subverted these values.

Change has destroyed the validity of the oldest and in many ways still archetypal form of community, the agricultural village. Created ten thousand years ago during that great creative period we call the Neolithic, it is still the home of most of mankind. But the superior energy sources and power of the urban technological societies everywhere (including nations where a majority still live in the villages), and their expansive tendencies, indicate the obsolescence of the older form.

As this change occurs, another dichotomy is often evoked. From the community of the peasant village to the society of the urban world is a transition from narrow parochialism toward universal ism. As the smaller unit becomes integrated into a large-scale society, our ethnocen- trism declines (or at least is expanded to embrace a nation) and our freedom to act is increased. We lose the comfort, but also the intellectual sterility, of the smaller scene; we gain broader intellectual horizons but also anxiety, and even vertigo, in the great metropolitan societies.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations»

Look at similar books to The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Marvin W. Cropsey

The Book Of Resolutions of The United Methodist Church 2012

Raymond Plant

Community and Ideology: An Essay in Applied Social Philosphy

Aksel Tjora

Communal Forms: A Sociological Exploration of Concepts of Community

Scott W. H. Young

Using Social Media to Build Library Communities: A Lita Guide

Wang Bin

Communication and Community in the New Media Age

Gideon Baker

The Future of Political Community

Christine Everingham

Social Justice and the Politics of Community

Eversley

Social and community development: an introduction

Kafka Franz

Kafkas social discourse: an aesthetic search for community

Anna Leon-Guerrero

Social Problems: Community, Policy, and Social Action

Alexander Rosenberg

Philosophy of Social Science

Daniel Little

Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science

Reviews about «The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.