Intentional Communities

Even though William Kephart and William Zellner (1991, p. ix) believe the modern communal movement is dead or dormant, conservative estimates by scholars indicate that there are 3,000 to 4,000 intentional communities in the United States. The Fellowship for Intentional Community (2000) has data which include the names and addresses of over 600 North American intentional communities and over 100 intentional communities on other continents. One such group is Twin Oaks of Louisa, Virginia, a community originally based, in part, on the principles of Skinner's Walden Two. Twin Oaks celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary in the spring of 2002.

In addition to these communal groups there are over 425 Hutterite colonies in North America (75% are in Canada and 25% in the United States) with a combined population of over 40,000. There is also a colony in Japan, started by a group of Japanese who admired the Hutterite lifestyle. The Hutterites are the oldest communal group in North America. They trace their roots back to Europe and the Anabaptist movement of the 1500s. They arrived in the United States in the 1870s and settled in the Dakota Territory. They operate large farms, and their colonies are largely self-sufficient. Hutterites practice Gelassenheit, which means self-surrender (Kraybill and Bowman 2001).

The largest communal movement outside North America is the Israeli kibbutzim. Significant changes have occurred among some of the kibbutzim. Fewer of them have collective dining rooms and children now tend to reside with their parents. Collectivism and egalitarianism have waned under the pressure of modernism and individualism (Ben-Rafael 1997, p. 77). There are 270 kibbutzim in Israel, and together they have 125,000 members (Oved 1999, p. 67).

The Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Cooperative Living has listings for twenty-eight countries outside North America including locations in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and Mexico. England, Australia, and Germany have the largest number of intentional communities. Communal living is alive and well at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a survey completed by 600 of the 728 communities listed in the directory, 255 were formed in the 1990s, 133 in the 1980s, 164 in the 1970s, 46 in the 1960s, and 48 before 1960 (Fellowship for Intentional Community 2000).

Zablocki (1980) developed a useful classification system of intentional communities based on his study of 120 communes (60 urban and 60 rural, of which 37 were religious and 83 secular) from 1965–1978. The communal groups were placed in one of eight classifications (Eastern, Christian, psychological, rehabilitative, cooperative, alternative family, countercultural, and political) depending on their strategic philosophy (consciousness or direct action) and their locus of attention (spiritual world, individual self, primary group community, or secular society). Zablocki found the most significant differences regarding membership and social structure to be between the religious communes and the secular communes, not between consciousnessoriented groups and direct-action-oriented groups.

Much has been written on the success and failure of contemporary intentional communities. Kanter (1972) developed a theory of commitment and concluded that those groups that were able to incorporate as many commitment-producing mechanisms (sacrifice—abstinence and austerity; investment—physical and financial; renunciation— of relationships outside the community; communion—shared characteristics; mortification—deindividuation; and transcendence—ideology) as possible were more likely to survive and be successful. She identified three types of commitment that bind people to organized groups: continuance (sacrifice and investment), cohesion (renunciation and communion), and control (mortification and transcendence). Kanter wanted to uncover the structural arrangements and organizational strategies that promote and sustain commitment. She found that nineteenth-century groups used transcendence and communion mechanisms the most, followed by sacrifice, renunciation, investment, and mortification. William L. Smith (1986) investigated contemporary urban religious communities and found that communion, mortification, and transcendence mechanisms were used at moderate or high rates, while sacrifice, investment, and renunciation were not widely used.

In a study of communalists from the 1960s and 1970s, Angela A. Aidala and Benjamin Zablocki (1991 ) found that communalists came from a variety of social class backgrounds. Approximately one-quarter of them were from working-class or lower-middle class origins, while the remaining members were predominantly from the upper-middle and middle-middle classes.