This paper critically examines the term ‘community’ as applied to people with intellectual disabilities over time and aims to describe its shifting conceptualisation from the eighteenth century to the present day. Unpublished documentary sources from Old Bailey criminal trials in the eighteenth century, the Earlswood Idiot asylum in the mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century government reports have been used to explore historical changes in the concept of community. The word community is historically contingent both in its past and present uses. Its meaning has been adapted to strengthen and justify professional claims to own, treat and manage people with intellectual disabilities. Inclusion and community acceptance were normative in the eighteenth century. In later medicalized institutionalization programmes the meaning of community was subverted to endorse and vindicate professional claims. It has been further adapted since deinstitutionalization to support contemporary claims for the social model of community inclusion. Today’s language of inclusion emanates from these historical conceptual shifts, masking a set of unconscious assumptions and meanings attached to the status of intellectually disabled people. The modern concept of community is based on an assumption that people with intellectual disabilities have always been excluded. In the collective memory, it has been forgotten that they were, before the asylum, natural members of community embedded within social, economic, and familial networks. It is communities themselves that must adapt and remodel rather than trying to remodel those people they originally excluded.
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