Community and Society or Association

Classical sociologists were struck by how differently people related to one another in the old, agrarian, traditional way of life compared with the new, urban, modern one, and they built an entire pair of concepts — community versus society (or 'association') — to capture that difference.

'Community' describes relationships that are highly personal, intimate and long-lasting, where a person's involvement with the others is considerable, sometimes close to total — the bond within a family, among real friends, or inside a tightly-knit group are all instances of 'community' in this technical sense. What makes such a relationship a community is not simply that people know each other, but that the relationship absorbs a large part of who a person is; it is not entered into for a specific, limited purpose and then set aside.

'Society' or 'association', by contrast, stands for almost everything community is not: relationships that are impersonal, superficial and temporary, of exactly the kind that characterise much of modern urban and commercial life. Commerce and industry, in particular, push people toward a calculating, self-interested and rational way of dealing with one another — we enter into contracts and agreements with people we barely know, rather than building the kind of deep, personal familiarity that marks a community. A shopkeeper and a customer, or two parties to a business contract, relate to each other as association, not community. …