Amitai Etzioni

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Amitai Etzioni (born Werner Falk on 4 January 1929 in Cologne, Germany) is an Israeli-American sociologist, famous for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He was a founder of the communitarian movement in the early 1990s and established the Communitarian Network to disseminate the movement’s ideas. His writings emphasize the importance for all societies of a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and autonomy and order.

1 Career
2 Work
3 Bibliography (partial)
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Career

Having fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Etzioni studied with Martin Buber at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1958 he received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his degree in the record time of 18 months. He was a professor of sociology at Columbia University for twenty years, serving as chair of the department for part of his time there. He joined the Brookings Institution as a guest scholar in 1978 and then went on to serve as Senior Advisor to the White House on domestic affairs from 1979-1980. In 1980 he was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he currently serves as the director of the Insititute for Communitarian Policy Studies.

[edit] Work

Etzioni is the author of 24 books, many of which have been translated into numerous languages. Among his most influential are The Active Society (1969), The Moral Dimension (1988), The Spirit of Community (1993), The New Golden Rule (1996), and The Limits of Privacy (1999). His most recent books, How Patriotic is the Patriot Act: Freedom Versus Security In the Age of Terrorism and From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations were published in 2004. Etzioni frequently appears as a commentator in the media.

The main idea of Etzioni is that individual rights and aspirations should be protected but that they should be inserted into a sense of the community (hence the name of the movement he created, 'Communitarianism'). In Europe, The Social Capital Foundation (TSCF) defends views similar to those defended by Amitai Etzioni in the US, while adapted to a more international context.