1842 E. Miall in Nonconformist 2 809 Your communitarians, or societarians of modern days who seem intent on fashioning a new moral world by getting rid of all individuality of feeling.

1852 N. Hawthorne Blithedale Romance viii. 78 These mendacious rogues circulated a report that we communitarians were exterminated.

1880 T. Frost Forty Years' Recoll. 46 The Ham Common communitarians found raw carrots and cold water unendurable when the snow lay thick upon the ground.

1929 N. Arvin Hawthorne iii. 104 It was not for the fostering of such methodical unsociability that the communitarians of Brook Farm had banded together.

1978 G. L. Gutek Joseph Neef iii. 37 The New Harmony communitarians opposed private property ownership as the source of human and social evil.

2007 Futurist (Nexis) May 44/2 The communitarians made us welcome, and I was fascinated to hear of the residents' experimentation with new ways to deal with interpersonal relationships.

1984 G. C. Lodge Amer. Dis. ii. 44 The community, says the communitarian, is more than the sum of the individuals in it; the community is organic, not atomistic.

1991 Futurist May 35/1 Etzioni discusses the issues with which communitarians are wrestling, from efforts to combat drug dealing, to the moral upbringing of youth, to political corruption.

1995 Independent on Sunday 5 Feb. i. 6/6 Communitarians tend to draw back from laying down laws. They emphasise the need for people to change their hearts and to realise that, for example, it is more satisfying for parents to bring up children properly than to spend all their time at work.

2001 Washington Post (Electronic ed.) 1 Feb. There is still no such thing as a card-carrying communitarian.

1840 J. G. Barmby in New Moral World 1 Aug. 75/1 A social banquet of the adherents of the Communist, or Communitarian school is expected to take place.

1847 Hogg's Weekly Instructor 5 285 A thriving colony of Moravian brethren..who live in the communitarian style, and labour together for their common benefit.

1898 in C. Reddie Abbotsholme (1900) xiv. 447 Ireland is Celtic and belongs to the primitive communitarian type, where the home is a fixed and material centre.

1912 J. M. Robertson Meaning of Liberalism iv. 160 Their innocent attempts at communitarian life were libelled.

1966 New Statesman 21 Jan. 73/2 The kind of libertarian, communitarian society he often promises.

2005 Virginia Law Rev. 91 1956 The highly communitarian Amish social world is built up largely around a system of individual property ownership.

1983 Policy Rev. Winter 188 The ethos of cooperation..shapes a certain kind of human being who is neither an individualist nor a collectivist but a ‘communitarian individual’. Crucial to the development of the individual and indispensable to the continuation of democratic capitalism is the family.

1985 Philos. & Public Affairs 14 308 We are witnessing a revival of communitarian criticisms of liberal political theory.

1995 Times 20 Feb. 9 The communitarian call to restore civic virtues, [is] for people to live up to their responsibilities and not merely focus on their entitlements, to shore up the moral foundations of society.

2001 Washington Post (Electronic ed.) 1 Feb. Bush's inaugural address, said George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, a communitarian thinker, ‘was a communitarian text’, full of words like ‘civility’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘community’.