[From Latin communitas: community or fellowship.]
(politics) In the 19th century, the word "communitarian" referred to members of voluntary communities formed to put socialist or communist ideas into practice (close to the more recent usage of the term communalism). In the 1990s, a movement of intellectuals resuscitated the term to mount a philosophical and political challenge to the seeming triumph of market liberalism, stressing the importance of fellowship and community over economic relations and market interactions.