Some scholars, such as Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, argue that Action Civics aims “to turn children into activists” and inappropriately promotes a “communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.”
He achieved a platform to espouse Fourier's communitarian theories with the help of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who was impressed by Brisbane's ideas and allowed him to write a weekly article.
Then, in 1991, Robert Gilman and Diane Gilman co-authored a germinal study called "Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities" for Gaia Trust, in which the ecological and communitarian themes were brought together.
Board members include Jonathan Brent, Editorial Director of Yale University Press; Norton Garfinkle, former Chairman of the George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies; Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; Hugh Price, formerly president of the National Urban League; Alan Wolfe of Boston College; and Ruth A. Wooden.
It had effectively died out as a living experiment by the late 1930s, though a handful of veterans gathered in the late 1940s to plan the Braziers Park community - essentially a residential adult college which functioned on communitarian lines, and was the childhood home of the singer Marianne Faithfull.
The Harvest Hills Cooperative Community or Harvest Hills 'commune' was a communitarian experiment in communalism established in the late 1960s by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (renamed the "Community of Christ" in the year 2000), in keeping with early Latter-day Saint notions of "religious communism" alluded to in the New Testament.
His father, Arthur Bestor, was a historian of American 19th century communitarian settlements and of origins and development of the American constitution.