Few historians would argue that our times are not characterized by a concern for community. What we have not acknowledged is that the rise of interest in community and neighborhood organization since the 1950s has coincided with a revolt against a deterministic notion of culture as a total way of life definitive of the possibilities of human behavior in particular locations or times. In the past two decades that revolt has centered on a quest for self-fulfillment. This has led to a public policy dilemma and to a semiparalysis in politics, for in a community of liberated individuals in pursuit of self-fulfillment there can be no public welfare toward which to work and to sacrifice and over which to argue and make compromises.
McMillan and Chavis (1986), in the opening essay of this special issue, take an advocacy stance toward the question of community, and one quite characteristic of our times. The essay assumes the importance of assuring the self-fulfillment of individuals by providing them a warm and intimate sense of community. It assumes that a sense of community is not inherent within a territorial or associational group, but must be created. It contends that the "sense of community force" runs strong during the 1980s, that almost all Americans are engaged in a quest for community, and that the quest for community is a good thing, a quest, nonetheless, that needs a theory and methodology with which to manipulate the sense of community toward faith, hope, and tolerance instead of fear, hatred, and rigidity. And the essay's emphasis is internal. It centers on