A School Years Hero Of Mine Died-- Rest In Peace, Amitai Etzioni

College wasn’t a waste of time for me. I was president of the freshman class and learned a lot about politics. I was a dj on the college radio station, WUSB, and chairman of the Student Activities Board and learned a lot about the music business, which became my career. I used a lot of drugs and learned a great deal from those experiences, not just on acid, but even on much heavier and more dangerous drugs. What was a waste of time was my classroom work. To be honest, I barely remember any of it. I barely even remember what subjects I took. I started as a History major and I realized if I didn’t get out of that, my innate love of History would be killed. So I switched to Political Science and I found the teachers almost as dull and doctrinaire as the History teachers. By the end of my freshman year I found refuge in the Sociology Department. And the only thing I can remember about my classes was learning about Amitai Etzioni’s work.

I didn’t realize until last week that he wasn’t an Italian sociologist but a German-born Israeli-American. I learned it because he died (age 94) and the NY Times ran an obituary. When I was at Stony Brook, he was teaching at Columbia and several of my Stony Brook professors were big fans of his work and assigned his books. One, The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes, came out while I was a junior and the professor insisted it was the most important book we had to read that year. It was and it’s work I still refer to today in my own writing. The book deals with the challenges faced by modern societies and in it he proposes a framework for creating a more engaged and participatory society, because passive societies— where individuals are disengaged and rely heavily on the state or other institutions— are less able to address societal problems effectively. In it he advocated for an “active society” where individuals actively participate in social and political processes, emphasizing the importance of balancing individual autonomy and social cohesion. He suggests that a healthy society should encourage and facilitate individual initiative and self-governance, while also promoting a sense of social responsibility and cooperation.

This was the beginning of his work on societal integration— which argues that societies need to establish strong social bonds and shared values in order to maintain stability and achieve common goals. He advocates for the development of social institutions that promote civic engagement, community participation, and shared responsibility. He feels that government should act as a facilitator, creating the conditions for individuals and communities to be active participants in shaping society. He emphasized the importance of a decentralized decision-making process that allows for local autonomy and citizen involvement. He was writing explicitly about “communitarianism” yet but you can see the roots of it taking shape in The Active Society.

By the way, that same professor had already told us Studies in Social Change was the most important book we’d be reading that year. The year before I had read Political Unification: A Comparative Study of Leaders and Forces. In the Times obit, Robert McFadden wrote that Etzioni “fought for Israeli independence, moved to the United States in 1957 and became an influential academic and political figure. He wrote prodigiously, taught at George Washington University, testified before Congress and advised presidents, prime ministers and other Western leaders on foreign and national policies.” One of the reasons he became an intellectual hero of mine was because of his very active opposition to the war against Vietnam and how brilliantly he questioned the moral and strategic rationale for the war, countering all the bullshit from Henry Kissinger and other hawks. He made the point that the war wasn’t just detrimental to people in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) but also to people here in the U.S. His outspoken opposition to the war was part of everything that was important tome at the time: human rights, social justice, environmental protection, civil rights, equality…

He was appointed to commissions and advisory panels, invited to join editorial boards and television debates and showered with fellowships, awards and honorary degrees. He argued with Wernher von Braun on the Soviet-American space race, helped Betty Friedan in 1974 start an Economic Think Tank for Women, as it was called, to consider women’s “hidden economic power,” and was invited to lead a state investigation of a nursing home scandal in New York involving substandard conditions.

But of all Etzioni’s pursuits, none hit home with greater force than “communitarianism,” which he named, interpreted and promoted for two decades, starting in the early 1990s. It was not novel— liberals and conservatives had debated an unnamed middle ground for decades— but it captured imaginations with its sermonizing, political rhetoric and dashes of old-fashioned needlepoint virtues.

Communitarianism, with its emphasis on community, not the individual, staked out ground between liberal advocates of civil liberties and welfare rights on one hand, and conservative champions of laissez-faire economics and traditional values on the other. It never became a mainstream political movement, but it won significant followings in America and Europe.

Though the idea seemed simple, its implications spread out in all directions. Individual liberty and equality were the foundations, he said, but these depended on the good character of people who willingly embraced the responsibilities of citizenship. These, in turn, depended on healthy communities and institutions like the family, schools, neighborhoods, unions, local governments and religious and ethnic groups.

Decades after he was my hero, he kind of went off the deep end with his theory of communitarianism, pissing off left and right. But I had long lost track of him— maybe I figured he was back in Italy— and, while remembering his early work, has no idea he was still alive and still active-- even consulting presidents and Congress. Anyway, RIP.