The concept of community weighs heavily in the history of social and political theory but even more so in the collective imagination. The idea and varying visions of community traverse concepts of identity, public sphere, and state in theoretical discourses. Community also insinuates itself into discussions and decision making at the most practical level. Keally D. McBride's book offers a creative and probing exploration of how community has been imagined by theorists and how imagined communities inform practice. It does not claim to be a comprehensive synthesis of competing views, but rather succeeds as a provocative set of thematically linked, exploratory essays. While McBride acknowledges at the outset the importance of the analytic task of delineating the various conceptualizations of community, her project makes its contribution by explicating how visions of the political imagination of different eras inform the imagination of community. She shows how the resulting set of ideals and images creates and constrains real-world political possibilities. Throughout, she offers subtle judgments and useful provocations and, in the end, this book emerges as an important resource for everyone who values the possibilities of community, but wishes to remain critical of the concept's many traps and seductions.
McBride situates her own view of the status of “community” in relation to the vast literature on the topic in the early chapters of the book. A central premise of her argument is that community is a ubiquitous notion among theorists from Hegel forward since it provides not one but many solutions to the problem of the opposition between self and world. She stresses that the lesson that we should derive from Hegel's master–slave discussion lies in his recognition that the slave's identity emerges in his struggle with the limitations imposed by an obdurate world as he tries to act on it. She uses this starting point to criticize and appropriate a host of contemporary theories of community, but also to explain why identity, community, and consumption have become so intimately intertwined in the real world of consumer capitalism as a sort of grand evasion of contemporary society's inability to generate a meaningful sense of self. McBride shows how the concept of identity can be used as a way of evading the fragility of self in the face of contemporary realities. The mass marketing and consumption of images of community become means of compensating for the limits to individuation that come with the overwhelming demand on people's time and other features of society. At its worst, community sometimes serves as an anodyne solipsism where its advocates demand to see, at some organic social level, a finished expression of their incomplete sense of self. The logic of competitive capitalism exacerbates this problem when it turns images of community into a commodity. The need for a sense of meaning and completeness in an anomic and hectic form of life is real enough, and a variety of ventures, including real estate developers with slick marketing packages, are there to fill the void.
McBride's contribution throughout the volume is to press for political wisdom. Beyond this critique of both theory and contemporary society, she strives to offer a better way of conceiving the relationship between community and individual identity formation than one finds in the literature. She thus resists the temptation to dispose of the idea of community altogether, and instead explores its potential as a generative concept, weaving both elements of existing theories and lessons from practice into her argument. From her work, one could conclude that the possibility for liberation contained in the idea of community is better redeemed in the effort to make community, and in the action involved in changing the world in which subjects find themselves, than in the product that emerges from community building. Yet, she attends to the material conditions necessary for community throughout her discussion.
In a short but provocative final chapter, McBride discusses instances of “community in practice,” relying on West Philadelphia, and ironically (and in passing) New Orleans, as examples. She raises several challenging themes in this brief chapter. She identifies a set of important elements, including the right spatial arrangements, institutional commitments, and structural interdependence between key institutions, as well as the availability of time for at least some people to devote to turning specific locales into spaces with a liberating sense of community, what Hannah Arendt referred to as “spaces of appearance.” This final chapter is concise, but it provides an important link between political theory, which often neglects the central concept of the built environment, and scholarly studies of old and new urbanism.
One hesitation some may have to embracing this challenging and important book lies in the way the author writes about new urbanism. She uses Celebration, Disney's residential real estate development to discuss the new urbanist movement, even after noting that Celebration is not at all representative of that movement. The broader points she makes in describing Celebration concern how it has commodified a collective imagination rooted in nostalgia and popular culture images of community—and how the actual place has jarring features that shatter this illusion. On this score, she is thought-provoking. However, those unfamiliar with the new urbanism should be warned away from the idea that Celebration offers a good read of it. The new urbanism itself is a complex and important phenomenon and it is not well represented by Celebration. Ironically, nowhere are there more practitioners devoted to thinking through how the built environment and social and political institutions, including democratic design practices, can contribute to richer social and political interactions than among the new urbanists. In other words, there is a far greater affinity between McBride's theory and the best of new urbanism than she recognizes.
The issues raised in this book's final chapter are familiar ones to those following the development of the new urbanism. McBride may have missed the opportunity to open up a dialogue between political theorists and urban designers by her lean discussion of Celebration, but it is a flaw that does not undercut the importance of this fine book. Collective Dreams creatively and judiciously moves the discussion of community in a constructive direction.
