One of the words we hear most frequently is “community.” This newspaper has been “serving the community since 1933.” The word is used not only in the sense of a specific community, such as “the Ukrainian American community,” but also as an abstraction. This is perhaps because we feel we have lost “community” and want to recover it.
But before we can do that, we need to know what it is. One definition of “a community” is “a social group, usually identified in terms of a common habitat… and implying both a body of common interest[s], a degree of social cooperation and interaction in the pursuit of them, and a sense of belonging among the members” (Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought, s.v. ‘community’).