The Communities of the Pre-modern Era

If modernity is to be understood as an age of solitudes, the question arises as to the communities that must have existed in times before the beginning of modernity. How can the experiences of community be described in distinction to the modern solitudes? And what takes the place of the pre-modern in the course of modernization—i.e. in the transition process from an epoch preceding modernity (pre-modernity) to modernity itself?