If you say that someone is communing with an animal or spirit, or with nature, you mean that they appear to be communicating with it. She would happily trot behind him as he set off to commune with nature. Group of people living together who hold property in common and live according to a set of principles usually arrived at or endorsed by the group. The utopian socialism of Robert Dale Owen and others led to experimental communities of this sort in the early 19th century in Britain and the U.S., including New Harmony, Brook Farm, and the Oneida Community. Many communes are inspired by religious principles; monastic life is essentially communal (see monasticism). B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948) inspired many American attempts at communal living, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See also collective farm, communitarianism, kibbutz, moshav. In medieval European history, a town that acquired self-governing municipal institutions. Most such towns were defined by an oath binding the citizens or burghers of the town to mutual protection and assistance. The group became an association able to own property, make agreements, exercise jurisdiction over members, and exercise governmental powers. Communes were particularly strong in northern and central Italy, where the lack of a powerful central government allowed them to develop into independent city-states. Those of France and Germany were more often limited to local government
{i} group of people living together and sharing possessions and labor; group of people that share a common interest; conversation, exchange of thoughts and ideas
the name usually given by historians to the more or less formal organization of the people of a town or rural district in the Middle Ages The most common contemporary name for what is now called a commune was universitas (Latin) or its derivatives, a generic word for many kinds of association (What we now call a 'university' was distinguished by the term universitas studiorum, an 'association for studies' ) Communes were most important in European history between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries
a body of people or families living together and sharing everything the smallest administrative district of several European countries communicate intimately with; be in a state of heightened, intimate receptivity; "He seemed to commune with nature"
Word comes from Communist ideology Used to describe a group of people living together, and the place they live Communes practice self-sufficiency, often farming the land
A small territorial district in France under the government of a mayor and municipal council; also, the inhabitants, or the government, of such a district