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Amitai Etzioni (; Hebrew: אמיתי עציוני; né Werner Falk; 4 January 1929 – 31 May 2023) was an Israeli-American sociologist, best known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He founded the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to supporting the moral, social, and political foundations of society. He established the network to disseminate the movement's ideas. His writings argue for a carefully crafted balance between individual rights and social responsibilities, and between autonomy and order, in social structure. In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations, in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.
Etzioni was the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at The George Washington University, where he also served as a professor of International Affairs.
By the time he turned five, both of his parents had escaped to London, which left Etzioni in the care of his grandparents. Etzioni was smuggled out of Germany soon afterwards, arriving at a train station in Italy with a non-Jewish relative, who soon reunited Etzioni with his parents. Etzioni was stuck with his parents in Athens, Greece for a year, unable to enter Palestine since his family was awarded a bachelor permit instead of a family permit. When the paperwork was finally resolved, Etzioni found himself learning Hebrew in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine in the winter of 1937. (2026). 9780742521582, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.. ISBN 9780742521582
At this time, he began to go by the first name Amitai instead of Werner, since the principal of Etzioni's new school strongly encouraged Etzioni to introduce himself by a Hebrew name. He was given the name Amitai based on the Hebrew word for truth ( emet) and the name of Jonah's father in the Hebrew Bible ( Amittai). Etzioni moved with his family to a small village, Herzliya Gimmel, which served as a base for an emerging community called Kfar Shmaryahu. When Etzioni was eight, he moved to the new village, where his family was assigned to a small, boxlike new house and a small farming lot. In the spring of 1941, Etzioni's father left to join the Jewish Brigade, which was a Jewish unit formed within the British army. Etzioni, at the age of thirteen, was struggling at school, which then caused his mother to send him to a boarding school in Ben Shemen.
In the spring of 1946, at the age of seventeen, Etzioni dropped out of high school to join the Palmach, the elite commando force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community of Palestine, and was sent to Tel Yosef for military training. When the Palmach learned that the British police had captured a list of the Palmach members, they were issued new, fake ID cards and had to choose new last names. Amitai Falk chose Etzioni, a pen name he had used when he started writing in Ben Shemen at age 15.
During Etzioni's time in the Palmach, it carried out a campaign of blowing up bridges and police stations to drive out the British, who were blocking Jews escaping post-Holocaust Europe from immigrating to Palestine and standing in the way of the establishment of a Jewish state. In contrast to the Irgun, the Palmach largely sought to affect British and global public opinion rather than cause casualties. Etzioni describes his early life and decision to join the Palmach in the video "The Making of a Peacenik". Etzioni's Palmach unit participated in the defense of Jerusalem, which was under siege by the Arab Legion. His unit sneaked through Arab lines to fight to defend Jerusalem and to open a corridor to Tel Aviv, participating in the Battles of Latrun and the establishment of the Burma Road.
Following the war, Etzioni spent a year studying at an institute established by Martin Buber. In 1951, he enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he completed both BA (1954) and MA (1956) degrees in sociology. In 1957, he went to the United States to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a research assistant to Seymour Martin Lipset. He received his PhD in sociology in 1958, completing the degree in the record time of 18 months.
The book was well received in academic circles. A book review in Political Science Quarterly by Peter Fricke called it "a principal text for students of organizations." The book established Etzioni's academic credentials and led to many studies, which Etzioni reviewed and included in a revised edition of the same title, published in 1975. He expressed the same basic ideas in a much shorter book, Modern Organizations, which was translated into a large number of languages.
Much of Etzioni's best-known work is about communitarianism. According to Etzioni, communitarianism is centered on the communal definition of good. It thus stresses the role of community in social and political life and institutions. It rose in response to libertarianism and some forms of contemporary liberalism, both of which are centered on liberty and individual rights. Etzioni contrasts his version of what he calls "liberal communitarianism" with that championed by some East Asian public intellectuals, who extolled social obligations and accorded much less weight to liberty and individual rights.
Liberal communitarianism, as developed by Etzioni, formulated criteria for developing public policies that enable societies to deal with conflicts between the common good and individual rights. These include: (1) no major change in governing public policies and norms is justified unless society encounters serious challenges, (2) limitations on rights can be considered only if there are significant gains to the common good, and (3) adverse side effects that result from policy changes must be treated by introducing strong measures of accountability and oversight. Etzioni worked this out in two of his books, The Limits of Privacy (1999) and The New Normal (2015). Etzioni stresses that preferences are, to a significant extent, socially constructed and hence reflect the values of the communities people are members of. Therefore, one should not treat preferences as unadulterated expressions of individual freedom and should allow for public education to improve these preferences when they turn asocial and surely when they turn anti-social in dogmatic liberal societies.
His main communitarian books are The New Golden Rule (1996), The New Normal (2015), (2026). 9781412855266, Transaction Publishers. ISBN 9781412855266 Law and Society in a Populist Age (2018), (2026). 9781529200256, Bristol University Press. ISBN 9781529200256 and How Patriotic is the Patriot Act (2005). (2026). 9780415950473, Routledge. ISBN 9780415950473 His communitarian treatment of privacy is spelled out in The Limits of Privacy (1999) (2026). 9780786725052, Basic Books. ISBN 9780786725052 and Privacy in a Cyber Age (2015). (2026). 9781137513588, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137513588
Etzioni's contributions to socioeconomics are found in The Moral Dimension (1988) (1988). 9780029099018, The Free Press. ISBN 9780029099018 and Happiness is the Wrong Metric (2018). (2026). 9783319696232, Springer. ISBN 9783319696232 His main argument is that, in neoclassical economics (the governing form of economics), predictions are poor, the theory about human nature is wrong-headed, and the normative implications are negative. He holds that, rather than assuming that people are seeking to maximize their own utility, one should assume that people are conflicted between (1) their commitments to moral values and the common good and (2) their self-interest. He hence characterized people as "moral wrestlers." He showed that people act mainly as members of social groups, rather than as free-standing agents. Typically, the main issue is not that the government interferes unduly in the market, but that concentrations of economic power in the private sector unduly affect the government and social life.
Etzioni considers The Active Society his most important work. The book was published in 1968. It starts by discussing philosophical questions about the extent to which people have free will and the extent to which human fate is predetermined, beyond our understanding and control. It dives into theories related to steering mechanisms that put people in control of inanimate systems, like factory machines, and then demonstrates that democratic processes must be involved in expanding this type of theory to societies and affecting history. Democracy is crucial, because people must participate in creating the signals to which they will respond.
Later, the book describes the four key parts of a social steering system: decision-making strategies, consensus-building, knowledge, and power. The last part of the book examines human needs and seeks to determine whether they can be altered or whether they remain static. If it is the latter (that human needs are constant), Etzioni looks for ways to guarantee that we restructure society to meet these fixed needs, instead of getting roped into a restructuring scheme that satisfies the needs that society is willing and able to meet, without regard for whether those are the needs that truly need to be met. The Active Society received positive feedback from reviewers, with one reviewer writing that:
I consider this to be one of the most important books in its field in the last twenty years. Apart from its substantive contribution to the strategy of societal activation, it offers a whole focus of immensely valuable perspectives for detailed empirical investigation in the future.
Betty Friedan wrote that The Active Society provided a "philosophical grounding" to her work as a leader of the women's movement. His last book, Reclaiming Patriotism, was published by University of Virginia Press in 2019.
Etzioni was active in the peace movement, the campaign against nuclear weapons, and the protests against the war in Vietnam. This led to two popular books, The Hard Way to Peace (1962) and Winning without War (1964), and, in later years, to From Empire to Community, Security First, Hot Spots, (2026). 9781412855464, Transaction Publishers. ISBN 9781412855464 and Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box. (2026). 9781138678309, Routledge. ISBN 9781138678309 He spelled out ways to make China a partner in world order in Avoiding War with China (2017). (2026). 9780813940038, University of Virginia Press. ISBN 9780813940038 His main argument in these books is that the world needs a global community and worldwide forms of governance; however, because people are strongly invested in nations, the world is not ready to transition to a global community. Hence, transnational arrangements must continue to be based on national representations. He shows that democracy must be largely homegrown and cannot be introduced by foreign powers through the use of force.
Etzioni has published many scores of academic articles, including law reviews, many of which can be found on SSRN, as well as hundreds of popular articles in the press and online. His papers are deposited with the Library of Congress.
The following books review Etzioni's work: Communitarian Foreign Policy: Amitai Etzioni's Vision, by Nikolas K. Gvosdev; (2026). 9781412862608, Transaction Publishers. ISBN 9781412862608 The Active Society Revisited, edited by Wilson Carey McWilliams; (2026). 9780742549159, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.. ISBN 9780742549159 Amitai Etzioni zur Einführung, written by Walter Reese-Schafer; (2026). 9783885063421, Junius Verlag. ISBN 9783885063421 and Etzioni's Critical Functionalism Communitarian Origins and Principles, by David Sciulli. (2026). 9789004190436, BRILL. ISBN 9789004190436 See also a short documentary by Kevin Hudson, " The Making of a Peacenik."
In 2019, Etzioni celebrated his 90th birthday at Arena Stage, where he launched, curated, and moderated a series of civil dialogues, bringing together public intellectuals with differing points of view on various topics. The videos of these dialogues, as well as many of Etzioni's appearances on television, can be found on YouTube.
Elizabeth Frazer, in The Problems of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict, argues that Etzioni's concept of the "nature of community" is vague and elusive, in regards to the idea that the community is involved with every stage of government policies. She also mentions Etzioni's thought that the community has a moral standing equal to that of the individual when she firmly believes it is just the opposite. Warren Breed's The Self-Guiding Society provides a critical overview of The Active Society. David Sciulli's Etzioni's Critical Functionalism: Communitarian Origins and Principles evaluates Etzioni's "functionalism".
Etzioni was criticized in 2016 for publishing an article titled "Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah's Missiles?" Lebanese journalist and human rights researcher Kareen Chehayeb called it "ludicrous" that a prominent American professor "can just calmly say the solution is to flatten this entire city of 1 million people."
In 1966, Etzioni married Mexican scholar Minerva Morales. They had three sons: Michael, David, and Benjamin. Morales was raised Catholic, but converted to Judaism, Etzioni's religion. On 20 December 1985, Minerva was killed in a car crash. Etzioni wrote of his considerable grief over her death and that of his son Michael, who died of a heart attack in 2006, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a son.and In 1992, Etzioni married Patricia Kellogg.
Etzioni provided a personal account of his work and life in a memoir called My Brother's Keeper. He augmented this account with an essay about losing his public voice called "My Kingdom for a Wave." He revealed his early childhood experiences to be the source of his feelings against war and aggression in a short video, called "The Making of a Peacenik."Archived at Ghostarchive and the
Etzioni lived at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., where he died on 31 May 2023, at the age of 94.
Books edited and/or co-authored by Etzioni are not included in this list.
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Bibliography
(1998). 9780814782361, New York University Press. ISBN 9780814782361
(1999). 9780191522529, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191522529
(2026). 9783885063421, Junius Verlag. ISBN 9783885063421
(2026). 9780742549159, Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780742549159
(2026). 9780813341903, Westview Press. ISBN 9780813341903
(2026). 9789004190436, Brill. ISBN 9789004190436
(2026). 9781412862608, Transaction Publishers. ISBN 9781412862608
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External links
Categories: Official Website, 20th-century American Philosophers, 21st-century American Philosophers, 20th-century American Sociologists, 21st-century American Sociologists, 20th-century American Non-fiction Writers, 21st-century American Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century American Male Writers, 21st-century American Male Writers, American Male Non-fiction Writers, American Political Philosophers, American Political Writers, Jewish American Sociologists, Jewish American Non-fiction Writers, Radical Centrist Writers, Columbia University Faculty, Elliott School Of International Affairs Faculty, George Washington University Faculty, Hebrew University Of Jerusalem Faculty Of Social Sciences Alumni, Members Of The National Academy Of Medicine, Palmach Members, Presidents Of The American Sociological Association, University Of California, Berkeley Alumni, Writers From Washington, D.c., Ai Legal Scholars, Naturalized Citizens Of The United States, Israeli Emigrants To The United States, Jewish Emigrants From Nazi Germany To Mandatory Palestine, German Emigrants To Mandatory Palestine, American People Of German-jewish Descent, 20th-century American Jews, 21st-century American Jews, 1929 Births, 2023 Deaths, People From Kfar Shmaryahu
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