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If you think about recent podcasts you listened to and articles you shared, how many of them stressed the importance of community? Grappling with the loneliness epidemic, the damaging role of social media on face-to-face socialising, and young people’s struggles to interact with peers in the post-pandemic era, psychotherapists look for an explanation in the lack of ‘community’. Sociologists talk about community as a solution for childcare shortages and the best way to support nuclear families. Anthropologists remind us about the power of collective rituals, and bring up examples of culturally diverse models of communal life. Climate experts emphasise that the fight against the climate crisis entails the economy of sharing and a myriad of communal efforts. In short, whether it is about fixing the economy, healing individual traumas or saving a generation, ‘community’ appears to be the panacea.

If it sounds like I am sceptical about this ‘community hype’, it is not because I do not share the conviction about the importance of cooperation, support and solidarity – all that we tend to associate with ‘community’. Being a parent, a university professor, a citizen, an inhabitant of a rapidly warming planet, it’s hard not to recognise the damage that the undermining of communal ties has brought about at both individual and societal levels in the past decades, in which the spread and the normalisation of the neoliberal order has remade political, economic and social life. Yet, the diversity of problems that tend to be associated with the (presumed) lack or weakness of community should give us pause and make us ask not only if it is ‘the community’ that is seemingly universally needed and desired, but what kind of community, and also – what is meant by ‘community’? Further, these questions push us to consider: what was the reason behind the ‘escape from community’ in the first place, and what continues to push individuals away from it?

I write these words also as an ethnographer who has spent the past 10 years with a group of people – ‘a community’, as they would have it – who decline and conjugate the notion of community in all possible ways, rendering it nearly sacred. Since 2015, I have been following youth far-Right militants active in several European countries, collecting their life stories, observing them in action, and striving to understand what motivates them to embrace this radical nationalist ideology. The movements they belong to share a set of key characteristics: they are all ultranationalist, express attachment to Christian heritage, adhere to a conservative gender ideology, and consider interwar fascism to be a source of inspiration. Their reading of history and culture is filled with racist and xenophobic claims, and a deeply anti-pluralist and anti-egalitarian agenda. Members are active in a variety of domains, from historical politics through social assistance projects to promotion of sport activities and a healthy lifestyle. They see themselves as part of movements, not as political parties, and strongly emphasise their educational mission, with ‘education’ meaning a cultural and ethical upbringing. Numbering between dozens to a few hundred members, they are active locally and form tight groupings, often socialising on an everyday basis.

These similarities notwithstanding, the young people I met in Italy, Poland and Hungary differ in their approach to religion, their views on marriage and their concrete economic solutions. Young people active in one country and belonging to the same movement may disagree when it comes to intellectual figures they claim to find inspiring, and they may come from quite different backgrounds. Some are the rebellious kids of rebellious 1968ers – while others are the pious offspring of deeply religious Catholics. The diversity of pathways and personal stories struck me most when I embarked on this project and was striving to understand how this heterogeneity can coexist within movements that give the appearance of being rather homogeneous. A common denominator I identified in their accounts was the ‘search for community’ – when they explained what motivated them to join the movement – and the ‘power of community’ – when they explained what motivated them to stay. ‘We are like the Fellowship of the Ring,’ Alberto, an Italian activist, once told me, his eyes sparkling. ‘What attracted me to this community is that I realised that here we can have relationships like in The Lord of the Rings – friendship, closeness.’ His Polish peer Miron would say: ‘You know what attracts people to [this group]? A communitarian spirit.’

Throughout the years, my ethnographic engagements with far-Right activists made me realise both why ‘community’ is so appealing and ends up being considered the ultimate value, as well as why it is a trap. While the radical movements I studied may undoubtedly appear as marginal, idiosyncratic and having little to do with the aspirations, strivings and maladies of mainstream society, examining them closely demonstrates that ethnography, and anthropology more broadly, is about studying large issues in small places. But if a study of the far Right may tell us more about community writ large, what is community in the first place?

In discussing ‘community’ as one of his ‘keywords’ in 1976, the writer Raymond Williams noted that it can be ‘the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.’ Either way, ‘it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.’ The ‘warm’ connotations of the term date back to the social-scientific reflections on modernity and modernisation, wherein (traditional) ‘communities’ and (modern) ‘societies’ were seen as sets of, respectively, emotional relations and rational bonds. As such, communities were often idealised as cosy, less formal groupings, and contrasted with the cold, formalised relations that were supposedly to become dominant in modern times.

In the readings of Ferdinand Tönnies and of Émile Durkheim, ‘community’ vis-à-vis ‘society’ was about closeness vis-à-vis detachment, and about natural, organic relations vis-à-vis artificially established rapports. This transformation was not necessarily seen as negative. In adopting an evolutionary view, modern theorists posited that the disappearance of community would be tantamount to hierarchy and religious charisma giving way to equality and rational, scientific criteria. Such a view of social change also posits community against market forces. Therefore, in the Marxist reading for instance, the discourse on community may be ultimately ambiguous, with community representing, negatively, both the backward village life and, positively, the weapon against alienation.

Against the teleological reading of human history, which saw the transformation of communities into societies, the notion of community not only persisted but arguably expanded. And, whether we talk about a ‘neighbourhood community’, a ‘religious community’, a ‘European community’ or a ‘global community’, it is obvious that the term is being used because of its positive connotations – and because it’s vague enough to cover the variety of ways in which people relate and connect. Community thus appears to be a paradoxical term. Its ubiquitous use has nearly stripped it of meaning, but, at the same time, given how often it is invoked and applied, it must mean something.

First and foremost they see in community a response to liberalism and its ‘extreme individualism’

Community’s ‘affective potency’, to quote the anthropologist Ann Grodzins Gold, does not seem to weaken, even though........

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