Communitarianism is a collectivist philosophy that explicitly rejects individualism.
Collectivism by itself does not necessarily deny individual rights, but it considers group rights to be primary. Communitarianism does not merely relegate individualism to a subordinate position, but is openly hostile to it.
[bk]
An antiliberal political theory whose advocates seek to establish a democratic politics of the common good and thereby to tame or even to supplant the prevailing liberal politics of individual rights. The communitarian movement rose to prominence in 1980s, in the political world as well as in the academy. This revival of the idea of community has taken a remarkable variety of forms, from traditional conservative to social democratic to radical postmodernist. As a result, it is difficult to state with precision the distinctive features of a communitarian political theory.
But communitarians at least are united by a shared hostility to the pervasive individualism of contemporary liberal democratic politics. They are critics of liberal democracy founded on individual rights and partisans of more robust forms of democratic politics founded on common deliberation about the common good. Communitarians thus raise again a question that for a time had been closed by the theoretical and practical successes of liberal democracy: the nature of a just and healthy democratic polity.
[krauth]