What is the State of Community?

The Individual, the community. and the institution - What Mumford missed, according to Critchley

Luu Wouters Unsplash

Continuing the discussion of Mumford.

Peter Critchley, writing about the twentieth-century luminary, Lewis Mumford, underscores the importance of community involvement:

Mumford particularly valued the corporate and communal character of Medieval urban life. ‘To exist, one had to belong to an association, a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild. There was no security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognise the obligations of corporate life’.

What Mumford writes here is not dissimilar to the functional mediation proposed by Hegel, the idea that individuals create the identity only by belonging to a corporate or social bloc or association. The individualism and atomism that reduces bourgeois civil society to a sphere of universal antagonism and egoism is held in check by church and guild organisation. These are the pillars of town life. The Medieval City conformed to Aristotle’s definition of a community as ‘the common interest in justice and th…