There is a range of disputes over what kind of social relationships can be communities. Some argue that communities have to be face to face, whilst others allow that they may unite those who do not know each other. Some maintain that members of a community must inhabit the same locale, whilst others allow that they may be geographically dispersed. Some argue that communities must involve relationships of a certain moral quality, e.g., where exploitation is absent, whilst others allow that feelings of solidarity may be sufficient, even if these feelings rest upon illusions or misconceptions about the moral character of the relationship.

These disputes, coupled with the sheer variety of its ordinary and theoretical uses, can give rise to the worry that ‘community’ is employed by people simply to commend the social arrangements they happen to favour. If so, the term would have no shared descriptive meaning, and there might be no properties common to those things which are labelled communities. More cynically, it might be thought that the term ‘community’ is often applied to a group in order to divert attention from the deep divisions within it and thereby serve the interests of its dominant class. I shall try to answer some of these worries, although not by supplying precise necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper use of ‘community’ since I am sceptical about the value of attempts to do so.