It should already be clear from the first three chapters of the book that the (small, stable) community is not a continuously harmonious place, in which necessarily there are no tensions, no social constraints on individual action, no occasions on which some individuals are persuaded, induced and even forced by others to do things they otherwise would not have done. We have seen, indeed, that community makes possible the effective use of social controls which are an alternative to the concentrated force of the state. These controls, the use of which is widely dispersed among the community's members, may be thought of as more egalitarian than those associated with the state, less liable to be used for purposes not widely approved; but they are controls nevertheless: because of them people are deterred from doing things they otherwise would do. It is not obvious, then, that the small community is a place in which individual liberty flourishes. Writers of a liberal persuasion have, indeed, generally claimed that community is inimical to liberty. So far as the communal societies of the pre-capitalist past are concerned, Marx largely shared this liberal assessment; but he also asserted (especially in the Grundrisse) that, while capitalism required and established only a limited sort of liberty, it created the material conditions for a form of liberty not previously found, the ‘free individuality’ which would flourish in the communal society of the post-capitalist future.

For writers in the communitarian anarchist tradition, community is thought to be not only compatible with individual liberty but a necessary condition of it.