The Responsive Community

“Communitarianism” entered the language only within the last twenty years. You will not find it in the 1975 edition of Webster’s dictionary, though you will find a “communitarian” there defined as “a member of a society that practices communism.” What does this new ism signify? Is it, as Tocqueville wrote of “individualism” in 1835, “a new word to which a new idea has given birth”? Or does it name a distinctive new variant of a very old idea? Is the idea (if there is one...