Concept
Intentional community
Overview
An intentional community or commune is a voluntary residential community designed to foster a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. Such communities typically promote shared values or beliefs, or pursue a common vision, which may be political, religious, utopian or spiritual, or are simply focused on the practical benefits of cooperation and mutual support. While some groups emphasise shared ideologies, others are centred on enhancing social connections, sharing resources, and creating meaningful relationships.
Some see intentional communities as alternative lifestyles. Others see them as impractical social experiments. Some see them as a natural human response to the isolation and fragmentation of modern housing, offering a return to the social bonds and collaborative spirit found in traditional village life. Others see them as ways to address problems that are seen as plaguing modern cities, such as alcohol abuse, poverty, unemployment and crime, especially when used in conjunction with emigration from industrialized countries and colonization of new lands.
The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterite colonies, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
As well, planned developments such as some company towns that provided comfortable workers' housing and aspirations of a stable sober workforce, could be considered intentional communities and sometimes even spark from an aspiration for a utopia.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
So far as such combinations of individuals are recurrent or stable, their nature and operations are definitely formulated and definitely enforceable. Partnerships, clubs, corporations, guilds, families are such stable unions, with their definite spheres of action. Buying and selling, teaching and learning, producing and consuming, are recurrent activities whose legitimate methods get prescribed. These specific…
John Dewey, Ethics
States what Intentional community is.
Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which, keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing economic situation.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Intentional community is.
And more than this, each separate individual is not presented to others as such totality, but is only reflected in whatever isolated interest they may happen at the time to possess in his actions, desires, and opinions. And what interests mankind mainly is some relation to their own particular thoughts and aims.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
Close in meaning to Intentional community; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Intentional community
Related ideas
- Egalitarianism
- Family
- Anarchism
- Harvard University Press
- Hierarchy
- Greenwood Publishing Group
- South Africa
- Latin
- London
- Nuclear family
- The Guardian
- University of Chicago Press
- Russian Empire
- Industrialisation
- Authoritarianism
- New Testament
- Politics
- Pythagoras
- Zed Books
- Religion
- Russian Revolution
- Socialism
- Scotland
- Spirituality
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Anarchism.