On the Possibility of Communitarianism

In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about a gathering of intellectuals attempting to live together in a farming community in a satire of the transcendentalists. He writes that they joined together "not by necessity, but choice." The narrator asserts, "Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again, tomorrow."

I wonder if real communitarianism is possibly in the contemporary world. Or perhaps it is only available to some people and not to others. Real community necessarily involves a recognition of an actual need and dependence on particular people. I'm not sure that we can have that need, really--globalism makes localism at best one option among others. And that is not what communitarianism itself claims to be.