Verso una teorie delle comunità

The original version of the essay appeared as an extended foreword to Bell and Newby’s (1974) edited Volume The Sociology of Community: A Selection of Readings. A review of the original Bell and Newby (1974) book prompts a number of observations. First, the book is a compilation of journal articles and re-worked book chapters from the late 1960s – covering topics such as Southern Italian peasant society; the sociology of rural British communities; sociology of the inner city; and the Lloyd Warner ‘Yankee City’ studies. These in turn were edited together with a small amount of commentary and overview. The collection was prepared with the aim of illustrating ‘some of the problems and issues that preoccupy community sociologists’ (Bell and Newby 1974: li). However, while the collection is certainly a ‘rich harvest’ the Elias foreword is, alongside the short introduction by Bell and Newby and shorter still section introductions, the main previously unpublished substantive material in the collection. Second, when the original edited collection is read in its entirety, some forty years on, the clarity, relevance and resonance of Elias’s ideas still ‘shine through’. This is particularly true when Elias’s ideas are compared to the faded and dated approaches to community advocated by those functional anthropologists (with their attendant overbearing obsession for social systems) also included in the collection (see, for example, Arensberg and Kimball 1968). Perhaps one of the drawbacks of presenting Towards and Theory of Communities in a ‘collected works’ format is that the essay becomes divorced from its original context. This may mean readers of the collected works edition may not fully appreciate the impact that Elias’s foreword actually had upon the original collection as whole. Third, by anyone’s standard, a thirty three-page foreword to any text is something of a rarity. Yet Elias used his extended foreword to make a substantive contribution to community studies by setting out his own theory of communities, by arguing cogently for reality congruent theoretical advancement in community studies. Rather than simply describing the origins and aims of the edited book, or the series editor’s interactions with the authors, or writing the usual ‘darling you were wonderful’ type foreword, what Elias offers instead is simultaneously agenda setting for community studies research and an important critique of existing approaches to studies of community. It is a direct call for a processual study of community rather than the static approaches advocated elsewhere and in the same book. It is the clearly stated need to consider past, present and future relationships and the ever-changing balances of power and interdependency that is so unlike anything else in the entire edited volume (save for his chapter with John Scotson also included in the collection). In writing the foreword as he did, Elias arguably offered community scholars something more, something different. Furthermore, it is an approach that has ‘stood the test of time’ with the essay remaining as relevant today as it did some forty years ago. Finally, the foreword also has much to offer beyond a theory of communities. (J.Goodwin)