The article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective
intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead
reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community.
It discusses different versions of the community first view and argues that they
fail because they operate with too simplistic a conception of what it means to be
a self and misunderstand what it means to be (part of) a we. In presenting this
argument, the article seeks to demonstrate that a thorough investigation of
collective intentionality has to address the status and nature of the we, and that
doing so will require an analysis of the relation between the we and the I, which
in turn will call for a more explicit engagement with the question of selfhood
than is customary in contemporary discussions of collective intentionality.