Let us take the topic of community,
for example. Here one finds a tradition of social, religious and
political speculation of more than two thousand years, a tradition
that includes writings from Old and New Testaments, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, St. Augustine, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Proudhon,
Kropotkin, and a many other sources. For more recent points of reference,
one can turn to a wealth of scholarly studies of historical and
contemporary communities in Weber, Durkheim, Tonnies, and countless
other modern sociologists about how living communities actually
work. For the cyberlibertarians, of course, none of this matters.
Visions of community found in the literature of philosophy, history
and social science are not significant points of reference. If they
were, the notions of "community" often used to discuss
what is happening on the Net would likely have a much different
complexion.