The Everything Expert (Page 2)

While not on the same philosophical level as the communitarian writings of Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, Etzioni's work has provided the most sustained institutional response to the liberal individualist project, of which John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is the most powerful expression. Much like the neoconservative movement from which he says he takes inspiration, Etzioni is more interested in influencing policy than philosophy. To paraphrase Irving Kristol, Etzioni is a liberal who was "mugged" by community.

a reaction was setting in to the excessive individualism that neoconservatives and their followers helped to foment. The country was yearning for a less one-sided way of thinking, a third way between the worshipers of the market and state-hipped liberals and an approach that would not ignore core social-moral values. To effectively respond, the American renewal project needed a school rather than merely individual thinkers, each working on his or her own.

To this end, he founded a journal, The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, which is published under the auspices of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies of The George Washington University, where Etzioni is a university professor. In 1991 he published "The Communitarian Platform," which announced the movement's principles. And he surrounded himself with an impressive group of thinkers: Mary Ann Glendon, an expert on family law and civil rights; William Galston, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who was issues director for Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign and Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy under Clinton; the political theorist Benjamin Barber; the ethicist James Fishkin. Over the past decade, Etzioni & Co. (the names above, as well as Robert Bellah, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Nathan Glazer, Martha Minow and others) have churned out hundreds of books, monographs, position papers and editorials, while also sponsoring dozens of panels and conferences across the country.

In a sense, the story of communitarianism is the story of Amitai Etzioni--a story that might itself have been lifted from the pages of a Leon Uris novel. Smuggled from Germany in 1934, the 5-year-old Werner Falk (as Etzioni was born) moved from Italy to Greece, and finally, in 1937, to Haifa, where he thrived in the communal life of a kibbutz. His father fought against Hitler under the auspices of Great Britain's Jewish Brigade, and young Amitai--his adopted name was created by fusing the Hebrew words "truth" (emet), "tree" (etz) and "Israel" (Zion)--did his part by smuggling fleeing European Jews into Palestine. In March 1947, at age 18, he attended a meeting where David Ben-Gurion announced, "The time is right for us to take the ultimate risk and demand and fight for the formation of a full-blown state." Writing in his diary, Etzioni wavered between dedicating his life to "riches and status" or to "service for the common good." Soon after, he quit school and led a platoon in the Palmach (the commando unit of the Haganah) in the fight for Israel's independence. (Two-thirds of his unit were either killed or wounded defending Jerusalem.) His first book, A Diary of a Commando Soldier (a collection of newspaper columns he wrote during the war), was a bestseller. The 21-year-old Etzioni had discovered his public voice.

Lacking a high school diploma, Etzioni had difficulty finding a university that would admit him after the war. Luckily, Martin Buber was looking for students to attend his new institute. In addition to studying Kabbalah with Gershon Scholem, Etzioni worked with Buber himself, and was profoundly influenced by the philosopher's notion of "dialogue" ("a give-and-take during which people open up and reach each other profoundly"), as well as his famous distinction between "I-Thou" relationships (treating others as fellow human beings) and "I-It" relationships (treating others as objects). Later, while studying sociology at Hebrew University, Etzioni discovered the concept of "anomie," the condition of spiritual aimlessness that Durkheim argued was the result of modernity's loss of social fabric. The essential concepts of communitarianism were in place.

Etzioni arrived in Berkeley in 1957. Eighteen months later--having received a PhD in sociology in record time--he landed a job at Columbia, home to the legendary sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, as well as the iconoclastic C. Wright Mills. Although Etzioni's scholarly work was well within the confines of 1950s quantitative social science (his first book was titled A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations), his activism soon got him into trouble with his more "value neutral" colleagues. After Lazarsfeld called him onto the carpet for writing a review of the art film Hiroshima Mon Amour ("The last thing we need is another C. Wright Mills," he scolded), Etzioni concluded that the "images from Hiroshima sufficed to confirm my belief that humanity could not possibly do without my administering to it." He vowed to become a scholar and an activist, a public intellectual. "Here I stand; I can do no other," he announced to his wife, invoking Luther.

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