Abstract

While most political philosophers now agree that community membership is an important human good, an adequate account of the nature of community has yet to be developed. I develop such an account in my dissertation. I argue that community is founded on a specific kind of shared attitude toward others and the world. In explicating this shared attitude, I extend John Searle's notion of "collective intentionality." A collective intention is not simply an attitude I take toward others; it is an attitude I share with others. It has the form "We value/intend/believe ... ". In this collective attitude, the individual conceives of his or her projects, beliefs, values, as intrinsically shared. My account moves beyond standard accounts of collective intentionality by arguing that, when individuals share collective intentions over time, the collective forms a unique identity. Once this identity is formed, it gives rise to a number of features which have been seen as distinctive of community: feelings of solidarity with one another, a tendency to act on the basis of the good of the whole community, and the individual's identification with the group and with fellow group members