Amitai Etzioni - Work

Work

Etzioni's concern for public issues surfaced during his boarding school days. In the 1960s, he was concerned with the Cuban Missile crisis, the nuclear arms race, the Vietnam war and the criticisms of Project Apollo's cost. By the 1970s his interests peaked in bioethics and re-industrialization. His early works include his published work on complex organizations called Modern Organizations in 1964. He also published The Active Society in 1968 on social organization. In his later works, he dealt with the ideas of the Communitarian movement in The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society in 1996. His other influential books include The Moral Dimension (1988), How Patriotic is the Patriot Act: Freedom Versus Security In the Age of Terrorism (2004) and From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (2004).

Etzioni frequently appears as a commentator in the media. He has championed the cause of peace in a nuclear age in The Hard Way to Peace (1962), Winning Without War (1964), and War and its Prevention (Etzioni and Wenglinsky, 1970). His recent work has addressed the social problems of modern democracies and he has advocated communitarian solutions to excessive individualism in The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (1993) and New Communitarian Thinking (1996). Etzioni has been concerned to facilitate social movements that can sustain a liberal democracy in The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (1968) and A Responsive Society (1991). He criticized civil libertarians' approach on privacy, claiming it had to be balanced against public order and that ID cards or biometrics technologies could prevent ID theft, and thus enhance, rather than deteriorate, privacy (The Limits of Privacy, 1999). Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, was published in 2007. His upcoming book, Foreign Policy: Eight Hot Spots, will be published in October 2012. In all, Etzioni is the author of 24 books, many of which have been translated into numerous languages. Etzioni has received many awards for his contributions to Sociology and was elected to serve as president of the American Sociological Association in 1995.

Etzioni's main idea 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'). Within the movement, the communitarian thinking developed in reaction to the "me-first" attitude of the 1980s. Also the movement has sought to establish a common ground between liberals and conservatives, thus bridging the continual division. The movement works to strengthen the ability of all aspects of the community including the families and schools in order to introduce more positive values. In addition, it aims to get people involved in positive ways in all levels of the community and ensure that society progresses in an orderly fashion. These works which have occurred between 1990 and the present have given Etzioni his greatest successes and satisfactions in the public realm. He also articulated an early reason-based critique of the space race (in the book "The Moon-Doggle") in which he points out that unmanned space exploration yields a vastly higher scientific result-per-expenditure than a manned space program. Amitai Etzioni also coined the word McJob in an article for the Washington Post in 1986.