What specifies this article as a work of- general theory is its analytical approach to the urban society concerned to elucidate the meaning of community. Our use of the notion of community here differs somewhat from the usual essay, because it is mainly concerned with the mode of communal cohesion among the people in any particular collectivity.
In our previous paper, we argued for a theoretical application of this notion in urban social studies. It was stressed by the social formation approach that the urban society, compared with the homogeneity of rural society, displays a highly differentiated pluralistic social structure.
In this paper we restricted ourselves to an account of the urban social relationship which is typicaly observable in the central business district(C. B. D. ) of metropolitan area. The major characteristic of this district is that all sorts of people meet together who never fully comprehend one another. This area appears to be a major reseach frontier in urban studies in Japan. Most sociologists in their studies of urban society have focused to some extent on the symbiotic and commensalistic aspect of urban neighborhood or on the "community planning" in urban area. Yet they hove not derived satisfactorily a theoretical model for the study of major communal variables in the co- existence relationship which typically occur whithin the C. B. D. However, we do not aime here to make a comprehensive discussion of this frontier of urban study. We try rather to demonstrate in an ideal-typical manner some possibilities of developing "the communityness" within the co - existence relationship in the urban areas.
After examining the theoretical meanings of the mode of co- existence contact, we select four main phases of it, which are selected analytically in terms of emphasising possibility of social mutualization in these contacts.
These are Incongruity of mutual interests 2) conformity to social constraint 3)mutual emotional response and 4)regulation. We argued that these phases characteristically correspond to four major types of modern man : 1)bourgeois 2)citizen or citoyen 3)common people and 4)mass as an "abstract collection of individuals". Among these, the citizen or public can be viewed as the ideal typical realization of the classical theory of democracy and also of a community as a value in Western social thought. We recongnized that a community in the ideal sense had existed paradigmatically in the Greek Polis, paryicularly in Periclean Athens.
We attempted to specify more fully the nature of the community ideal. After examinating previous works on "community of public" and the neighborhood association as a focus of local autonomy in Japan, some of the possible criteria were examined to determine which of these are consistent with liberal theory of the community in the metropolitan areas. We paid also attention to the recent movement among urbanites against pollution, as a means to reformulate a community in sociological study.
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