Communitarianism

Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its central belief is that a person's social identity and personality are largely moulded by community relationships, with less weight placed on individualism. The community in question may be a family, but in the wider philosophical sense it is understood as a collection of interactions among people in a given place or among people who share an interest or a history. As a political philosophy, communitarians stress the importance of the family and of intermediary institutions of civil society, such as churches, charities and other voluntary associations, understood as non-coercive social structures that stand apart from both collectivism and individualism.