Sensitivity Training and Communes: Contemporary Quests for Community

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the sensitivity training-encounter movement and the contemporary communal movement represent alternative expressions of a pervasive quest for community that is significantly influencing a wide range of other contemporary social movements. Intellectually, the paper builds on and extends Nisbet's (1952) conception that the single most impressive fact in twentieth-century Western society is the quest for community through political means. This article describes two superficially independent contemporary movements which are essentially quests for community through nonpolitical means. Both movements reflect new kinds of attempts to provide collective experience, participation, and commitment plus psychosocial meaning and identity through intimate, homogeneous, primary relations in "extended families."