Community: A Trinity of Models

by Frank G. Kirkpatrick

Overview

Community, like love, is a concept everybody talks about but nobody bothers to define. From the community of scholars to the community of nations, we passionately seek and widely take for granted a quality of interrelatedness that touches a chord deep within each of us whose vibrations we spend little time submitting to critical examination. Frank Kirkpatrick's rigorous and detailed discussion of community places that notion within a discussion that has developed among philosophers over the past 200 years.
Beginning with the contractual model of Hobbes and Locke, in which individuals work out rules to control their enforced proximity, he moves on to the more complex, organic model of Marx and Engles, and beyond that, the work of Whitehead, in which individuals now interact with one another as organically related parts of a greater whole.
Finally, he devotes most of his attention to a third, highly personal model of community, which owes its most sophisticated recent formulation to John Macmurray. Within that model he sees the greatest possibilities for developing a coherent and comprehensive notion of community that takes seriously both the unique individuality of each person and the possibility for these individuals to commit themselves to loving fellowship with each other.


Frank G. Kirkpatrick is Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Professor of Religion, Trinity College. He has published five other books including books The Episcopal Church in Crisis; Together Bound: God, History, and the Religious Community; The Ethics of Community; A Moral Ontology for a Theistic Ethic: Gathering the Nations in Love and Justice; and John Macmurray: Community Beyond Political Philosophy. He has also published a general textbook in the field of ethics, Living Issues in Ethics with Richard Nolan, and numerous articles in scholarly journals, as well as op-ed pieces and topical analyses of current religious events.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606081945
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	12/28/2008
Pages:	245
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frank G. Kirkpatrick is Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Professor of Religion, Trinity College. He has published five other books including books The Episcopal Church in Crisis; Together Bound: God, History, and the Religious Community; The Ethics of Community; A Moral Ontology for a Theistic Ethic: Gathering the Nations in Love and Justice; and John Macmurray: Community Beyond Political Philosophy. He has also published a general textbook in the field of ethics, Living Issues in Ethics with Richard Nolan, and numerous articles in scholarly journals, as well as op-ed pieces and topical analyses of current religious events.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction 1

The Three Basic Models 2

2 The Atomistic/Contractarian Model of Community 13

Gesellschaft and the Social Contract 13

Thomas Hobbes 17

John Locke 23

Atomism in American Thought 34

Atomism Today 37

Individualism, the Free Market, and Community 51

3 The Organic/Functional Model of Community: Part One-Social Visions from Hegel to Marx and Some Sociologists 62

Organism and the Social Whole 62

G.W.F. Hegel 67

The Organic Model and some Sociologists 70

Karl Marx's Vision of Community 79

4 The Organic/Functional Model of Community: Part Two-The Metaphysics of the Organic Community from Whitehead to Systems Philosophy 99

Alfred North Whitehead 99

Systems Theory and the Philosophy of Hierarchy 116

Edward Pols and a Hierarchical Model of the Person as Agent 126

5 The Mutual/Personal Model of Community: Metaphysical Foundations 137

Community in the Religious Context 137

Buber's I-Thou and Vision of Interrelationship 140

The Metaphysical Foundations of the Model: John Macmurray 146

The Personal Unity-Pattern 158

The Characteristics of Persons 166

Persons in Relation 173

6 Religion and the Nature of the Loving Community 186

The Communal Mode of Relationship 186

Toward an Inclusive Community: Reconciling The Models 204

7 Conclusion: Koinonia as a Community among Communities 221

The Nature of Agape 221

The Church as a Community among Communities 227