There is a distinctive way in which communitarianism has been reinterpreted in Germany. It can be described as a specific transnational process of social politicization. In this article, I will firstly describe the type of basic arguments that were made by communitarians, focusing especially on the way in which communitarianism argues and on the image of society that it generates. Secondly, I will examine briefly how this communitarian image of society was reinterpreted through the recent German social policy discourse. Thirdly, to understand why this process of transnational social politicization happened, I will use a systems theory approach to read it as a response to an already existing welfare state critique. We can therefore understand the German reception of communitarianism as a highly functional step that bridged the gap between pre-existing anti-welfare state arguments of the 1970s and 1980s and the currently dominant doctrine of the activating German welfare state.