Ambivalenza della comunità occidentale e nuovi modelli comunitari: "comunità radicata" (materiale) e "comunità sradicate" (immateriali) tra identità e istanze pluraliste

Starting from the recent return in sociology of law to considering the "community" to be the expression and the vehicle of individual and collective "identity", this article identifies a gradual transition from the focus on the traditional Western communitas to the rise of new models of community. More generally, it questions what the substantial nucleus of the traditional conception of community actually was and what ist current destiny is. From the Greek polis to the dawn of modernity, the Western notion of community has at least two essential features. On the one hand, it rests primarily on the category of "rooting" and, as such, can be defined as a "rooted community" (or a material one). On the other hand, it contains a structural dialectic ambivalence that oscillates between Utopia, Ideology and Dystopia. Models of community alternative to this are now taking shape, exemplified by particularly significant typologies: the "scientific community" and the "electronic-virtual community", whose methods of articulation are radically innovative and which can be classified, in contrast to the others, in terms of "uprooted (or immaterial) communities". This cultural transition implies at least two essential effects: the potential overall reconfiguration of the classical Western model of community (in both socio-legal and anthropological-philosophical terms), which is often evoked in a process of instrumentalisation, and the rise of unprecedented historical and social scenarios in which the juxtaposition between identity and pluralism can be expected to be played out in the near future, both domestically and internationally