When colleagues and I launched an international conference on the “career of the concept of community between compassion, tribalism and intent” in 2017, I had not anticipated the resurgence of interest in the term. Forty-five participants, mostly from German-and French-speaking universities soon registered for a five-day conference which took place in May 18 to 23, 2018 at University Lumière Lyon 2, the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, supported by a number of research centres (ihrim, Triangle, cer, celec, Agora, the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Arbeitsstelle of the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt), the Institut d’études politiques of Paris, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the laboratoire d’excellence Constitution des Modernités or comod, the Goethe Institut, and the Fonds Pascal of the French Ministry of Culture, affording us the luxury of simultaneous interpretation between French, English, and German. The conference drew interest from political theorists and sociologists, but also philosophers such as our keynote speakers Daniel Alvaro and Jean-Luc Nancy, anthropologists and social anthropologists, economists, linguists, jurists, area studies specialists, literary specialists, and community therapy psychiatrists from as far as Argentina, Canada, and China. The Ferdinand Tönnies Gesellschaft in Kiel, Germany was well represented, as was the Ferdinand Tönnies Arbeitsstelle in Klagenfurt, Austria. A German-language set of conference proceedings appeared in Profil-Verlag in 2019. Subsequent conferences in Warwick, Cergy, Kiel, London, and again in Lyon allowed me to deepen conversations with scholars in the field and to gather some of the present contributions, which represent a stark addition to the original conference papers.
For the present volume, I would like to thank my colleagues at the European Society for the History of Political Thought for their encouragement, three anonymous reviewers for their important input, and the editors of the series at the European Society of the History of Political Thought, Erica Benner, László Kontler and Mark Somos, and Alessandra Giliberto and Petra Stiglmayer at Brill for considering and accepting publication of this work, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their sound advice. Tim Barnwell provided valuable assistance in copyediting, and my thanks to Kiefer Oakley for translating chapters from French into English. I would also like to thank Werner Gephart, Nina Dethloff, and Clemens Albrecht for their invitation for a fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg – Institute of Advanced Studies on Law as Culture in Bonn
Niall Bond