Dr John Postill

Book review for Comparative Sociology of Hopper, P., Rebuilding Communities in an Age of Individualism, (Aldershot : Ashgate, 2003).

Dr John Postill, University of Bremen (Germany), January 2005

This book explores the prospects for local community-building in the context of the growing individualism deemed to be afflicting the contemporary West, especially Britain and America. The first part of the book is an impressive survey of the interdisciplinary Anglophone literature on social change, globalisation, individualism, and communitarianism in late modern Western societies. The author attributes the depletion of social capital in neighbourhoods across the Western world to the combined forces of post-Fordist production models, egocentric consumerism, identity politics (‘tribalism') and the decline of traditional settings of community interaction such as trade union clubs, local shops and community churches. In his view, we are in the midst of an Age of Individualism counter to the primal needs of human beings for belonging and community – needs that are yet to be fully recognised by Western governments. The second part follows from the preceding discussion and offers a ‘modest proposal' for the reinvigoration of local communities, namely central government campaigns to persuade citizens to devote small amounts of time (up to four hours a month) to ‘inclusive' community-building activities in their local areas.

It is hard to argue against the author's refreshingly modest ambitions for community regeneration, not least given his painstaking research into the matter. After all, many authors take the reverse approach by dreaming up grand visions of social change on the basis of scant research or reflection. Yet there are, in my reading, two main problems with the book's main thesis that there is a direct causal link between the rise of individualism and the decline of local communities in the West. First, we are given no historical baseline with which to gauge the erosion of local communities described by the author, or indeed its causal links (if any) with growing individualism. Occasionally there are references in the book to better community days of yore, mostly in working-class communities blessed with what EP Thompson called ‘rituals of mutuality' and other forms of solidarity, but there is no diachronic analysis or ethnographic fleshing out. Instead the author opts for vague gerundives (the –ing form) when discussing social change, for instance when he contends that there is a ‘growing shift' in Western societies towards individualistic social practices (p. 11). Second, the elusive notion of community is never defined but rather qualified by means of the term ‘local community' (p. 4). But even this qualification is not consistently carried through. At times community appears in the unhelpful formulation ‘our communities and societies' (pp. 87, 148); at another point it is identified with the ties obtaining between grandparent and grandchild (p. 144); at another point it refers to national states (p. 114); at yet another it is linked to the economic realm, e.g. ‘Economic activity is an essential prerequisite of community' (p. 16). There is no engagement in the book with critiques of the concept of community or with the notion of social network, a currently influential concept in many social scientific quarters.

Notwithstanding the limitations of its main thesis, with its broad overview of key discussions in social and political theory and accessible style, the book can be a useful addition to undergraduate reading lists in political theory, sociology and social policy. Two caveats, however, in this regard. First, it is based on a DPhil completed in 1997, and although revised for publication in 2003, it still has a strong mid-1990s feel and content; thus Japan (not China) appears as the rising economic power in East Asia, and religious fundamentalism (whether American or Islamic) is confined to the margins of a presumed worldwide secularisation. Second, the book is marred by its weak copy-editing; the phraseology is at times repetitive or grammatically incorrect, e.g. ‘For local communities to function it necessitates its members being sociable…' (p. 62).

But these are minor quibbles that should not distract us from the book's main value as a comprehensive literature review and as a timely reminder that community-building still features low on the agendas of Western governments and citizens.

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