Communitarianism

Communication generates and sustains community by expressing shared understandings. Communitarianism represents a school of political thought, developed in the 1980s, that argues for the moral and political relevance of such shared understandings and communal solidarity, thereby challenging the abstract and individualist tendencies of contemporary liberalism. Communitarianism argues that culture and shared values constitute the identity of individuals. Therefore it defends a politics of the common good. Communitarian politics has been argued for at different levels of society: the national, the local, and the intermediate subnational level. In the first case it overlaps with, or touches upon, nationalism and in the last case with a politics of difference or multiculturalism