To try to compare Gandhi's various experiments in community living with Israel's kibbutzim at first sight appears to be a rash endeavour. But it is an endeavour which to my mind is fully justified. The wide umbrella of experiments in founding a new social order accommodates the histories of ideal (or even idealistic) communities in various parts of the globe. These quests for a Gemeinschaft felt to be missing in the extant social set-up range from those inspired by religious motives to those engendered by rationalist/radicalist/secularist thought. Different though these two poles may be, they yet share a common optimism about the feasibility of restructuring human institutions, for without such a faith the whole project of community building across kinship and other boundaries would be self-defeating. If the religiously inspired find warrant for moral perfectibility in divine sources, the radicals rely on the innate goodness of man when freed from the institutions which have led to his enslavement. This brings into focus another common element — the tendency to shun authority if not to challenge it. In this attempt to resist existing institutions, however, a new set of institutions with new foci of authority come into being. Pioneer religious communities have been particularly prone to this since they have nearly always developed around a "guru" figure who provided an alternative focus of authority.