Amitai Etzioni - Biography

Biography

In 1933, Amitai Etzioni was only four years old when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. He was separated from his family but reunited with them by the year 1947. In that time, Etzioni lived a year in Athens, went to Palestine, lived on a cooperative farm and went to boarding school. In 1950, he was enrolled in a special academic institute established by Martin Buber after having dropped out of tenth grade three years earlier to join Palmach (an elite commando unit of the Haganah). In 1951, he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he studied classical and contemporary works in Sociology, completing both BA and MA degrees.

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 then became 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 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 Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. In 1989 he founded the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics (SASE), an international, interdisciplinary organization, and served as its first President. He leads the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization which is dedicated to support the moral, social and political foundations of society. It is based in Washington, D.C. He also held a faculty position at Harvard Business School from 1987 to 1990 serving as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor. He served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1995. Etzioni is known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. In 2001, Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. He was the 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 between autonomy and order.