Construction and Constitution of Community – Epistemological and Cultural Comparative Reflections

The community concept gives rise to cultural comparative reflections since diverse notions of community are represented when going back to the roots of the sociological discipline contrasting the Anglosaxon and the German tradition, opening up the comparison to the American, Asian and other contexts. Combining a social science with a phenomenological perspective, I will analyze the construction and constitution of the community phenomenon. On the one hand, from a social science viewpoint, it will be investigated in which expressions in diverse socio-historical conditions the idea of community was constructed. On the other hand and from a phenomenological perspective, it is highly significant that communities or communal relationships are constituted on the basis of general structures of experience in activities of consciousness. The phenomenological perspective allows describing the structures of the life-world as “mathesis universalis” which is seen as a priori of the social world. It opens up the ground for historical and cultural comparison of diverse ideas and empirical expressions of community, even though Ferdinand Tönnies considered it to be a general sociological concept. The ‘parallel action’ of phenomenology and social science allows reconstructing the specificity of the respective community concept within a particular cultural background. It permits e.g. to analyze the distinctiveness of Max Weber’s idea of the communal relationship, in which the orientation of social action is based on the subjective affectual and traditional feeling of the parties of belonging together.