Amitai Etzioni, who championed the virtues of community, dies at 94
Amitai Etzioni, an American Israeli sociologist who served as a senior policy adviser to the Carter White House, taught at George Washington University and championed the virtues of bedrock institutions — family, school, local government — while promoting the philosophy known as communitarianism, died May 31 at his home in Washington. He was 94.
The death was confirmed by his son, David A. Etzioni. The cause was not immediately known.
Etzioni, a German-born Jew who fled the Holocaust, fought for Israeli independence and launched his academic career in the United States, was a wide-ranging intellectual with a soft voice that belied his bustling energy. He wrote hundreds of academic papers and more than 30 books, both for specialists and general readers, on topics including foreign affairs, sexual ethics, organizational theory, nuclear proliferation, privacy, morality and the costs of the space race.
Unlike many of his peers, he sought to connect his research and findings to policymaking, seeking to bring sociology “out of the Ivory Tower” and “into the real world,” as his colleague Richard M. Coughlin once put it. He wrote guest essays for publications including The Washington Post and New York Times, gave frequent television and radio interviews, and worked at the Brookings Institution as a guest scholar before joining the administration of President Jimmy Carter in 1979 as an adviser.
“Sometimes Amitai Etzioni seems to be a one-man profession,” Time magazine declared in a 1975 profile that labeled him “The Everything Expert.” The magazine noted that Etzioni, who was then teaching at
Columbia University and leading a New York think tank, the Center for Policy Research, had recently “debated Wernher von Braun on the space race, helped Betty Friedan start a ‘think tank’ for women, testified as an expert on an abortion bill, and received a National Book Award nomination” for “Genetic Fix” (1973), which explored the fledgling field of genetic engineering.
“Staid social scientists tend to view him as a pushy hustler,” Time observed, “and the American Sociological Association’s newsletter has received complaints that he is quoted entirely too much in its pages. But his influence is not doubted.”
Etzioni rose to scholarly prominence with his book “The Active Society” (1968), a 700-page study of social change in which he examined the role that individual action, power and consensus play in shaping history.
But he became best known as the chief spokesman (or “guru,” as some journalists called him) for communitarianism, a centrist philosophy that earned him an audience in the 1990s with leaders including President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
As formulated by Etzioni, the philosophy was somewhere between the political left and right, combining a liberal emphasis on social justice with a conservative belief in personal responsibility. It aimed to maintain and repair society and its institutions, just as environmentalism sought to safeguard the natural world.
“We are not simply individual citizens or economic creatures who have self-interests,” he told The Washington Post in 2004. “We have not just rights but also obligations to our family and country and even the global community.”
Etzioni was not the first to use the term “communitarian,” but helped develop and popularize the concept while promoting policies that included parental leave, more restrictive divorce laws, mandatory national service and increased drug testing.
To promote the movement, he founded a nonprofit organization, started an academic journal and directed the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University, where he was a faculty member starting in 1980. He also organized Capitol Hill teach-ins that drew senators including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., and Al Gore, D-Tenn.
Some critics worried that communitarianism threatened to erode civil liberties, and saw traces of authoritarianism in the philosophy’s emphasis on traditional values and moral education. Etzioni insisted that his movement — or “move-let,” as he jokingly referred to it in the early 2000s, after it had begun to fade from relevance — was far different from conservative factions like Moral Majority, which he considered “morally obnoxious.”
“The right wing thinks that authoritarian schools with dress codes and ‘Don’t ask any questions of the teacher’ and ‘Salute’ are the way to bring up upright human beings,” he told The Post in 1982. “And in my judgment, that gives you people who obey as long as the policeman hovers over them. Then the moment he turns away, they return to their impulses.”
Reporting on a communitarianism teach-in in 1992, the Times paraphrased Joan W. Konner, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, as remarking that the philosophy “appeared to be one part church sermon, one part reassertion of old values, one part political campaign message and one part social movement.”