Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes

By Benjamin Zablocki

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029357802
• ISBN13: 9780029357804
• Release Date: April 1980
• Publisher: Free Pr
• Length: 455 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A STUDY OF AMERICAN COMMUNES BY A NOTEWORTHY SOCIOLOGIST

Benjamin Zablocki (b. 1941) had previously written a monumental study of the Bruderhof community (THE JOYFUL COMMUNITY: An Account of Buderhof - A Communal Movement Now in Its Third Generation by Benjamin Zablocki (1973 Softcover 362 pages including Index. Penguin Books.)) "Alienation and Charisma" is a sociological study rather than just a typical "survey" of different intentional communities, with recurrent themes of "alienation" and "charisma" as foundations for the community. The study was based on a survey between 1965-1978 of 120 communes. He observes that "After 1915, commune building in America with into a fifty-year decline, but at no point did it completely stop. There was a brief revival of communitarian interest after World War II, particularly among Quaker and Brethren conscientious objectors. About a dozen communes were founded in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that still exist today. But nothing approximating a communitarian social movement on a national scale occurred again until about 1965." Here are some examples of his insights: "Although few communal experiments last longer than a few years, their mortality rate does not differ by all that much from that of other radical voluntary organizations." "Nonwhites are rarely found in the American commune movement. More than three-quarters of the communes in this study were 100 percent white." "Most departures from communal life are voluntary." "Religious communes are more apt than nonreligious communes to require personal uniformity among their members." "No commune was able to overcome the sex-role stereotyping of labor." A summary statement is, "(C)ommunitarianism is a cultural response to cognitive and choice overload: it will occur when people find themselves overwhelmed by competing belief systems, value systems, and action alternatives."