Community

David Weissman (City College of New York)

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English

State University of New York Press
02 August 2025

Ethics & moral philosophy; Social & political philosophy; Social theory; Social & cultural anthropology; Political science & theory

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.

By: David Weissman (City College of New York)
Imprint: State University of New York Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9798855801033
Pages: 169
Publication Date: 02 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction. The Uses of Community 1. Community 2. Infrastructure 3. Meaning and Normativity 4. Autonomy 5. Cooperation and Conflict 6. The One and the Many Afterword Notes Index

David Weissman is Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He is the author of Eternal Possibilities: A Neutral Ground for Meaning and Existence and Truth's Debt to Value, among other books.

Reviews for Community

""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