SYMPOSIUM: THE ACHIEVEMENT OFAMITAI ETZIONI

Keep Rowing: Amitai Etzioni and History

Jonathan Marks

Published online: 3 July 2014

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Reflecting on themost recent stage of his career, thecommunitarian, Amitai Etzioni, gives three reasons for whathe perceives as his loss of influence. First, the media prefers anargument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni isneither liberal nor conservative. Second, the media prefersspecialized intellectuals, but Etzioni has refused to “stick tohis knitting.” Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular, dovishposition on China. I argue that Etzioni is mistaken about thereasons for his and communitarianism’s rise and perceived falland offer a more optimistic assessment than he does of thepotential influence of his thought. I use this local problem ofhistorical interpretation to question Etzioni’s global interpre-tation of modern history.

Keywords Communitarianism . Etzioni . Contemporarypolitical theory . Political theory . Neoconservatism .

Tocqueville

I first had the pleasure of conversingwithAmitai Etzioni in 2000.He trackedme down after I published a review of JamesDavisonHunter’s The Death of Character: Moral Education in a WorldWithout Good and Evil. I was beginningmy career. Amitai’s noterequesting a conversation made no reference to the review andwas so flattering that I was certain he had me confused withanother Jonathan Marks, the distinguished Yale University an-thropologist. I wrote him back to that effect. I may even havepassed along that other Jonathan’s e-mail address. Fortunately forme, Amitai persisted. Eventually we published a dialogue oncommunitarianism and classical liberalism together.1

At least a few things are notable about that initial encounter.First, Amitai, who is no conservative read The WeeklyStandard.2 Second, Amitai is glad to test his ideas againstpeople who object to them. My review had said a number ofunflattering and, in retrospect, unfair things about communi-tarian character education. And although I never wrote there-after anything in unmixed praise of communitarianism,Amitai continued to invite me to conferences and otherwisechampion my work. Third, Amitai was either very kind tonovices or unmindful of distinctions of academic rank. Heseemed as happy to tangle with me as he was to tangle withheavyweights like Robert George and Roger Scruton.

Amitai read and acted on my review during a year in whichhe also found time to publish some 30 articles and opinionpieces on matters ranging from Israel, to the Internet, to publicritual, to moral dialogues. Three years later, in My Brother’sKeeper: A Memoir and a Message, he would write that the“hourglass is almost empty.”3 Since then, he has written sevenbooks and about 278 shorter pieces which, far from simplyrepeating what he was saying when I met him, address, amongother things, Somali piracy, the Tea Party, and drone warfare. Iam leaving out his blog and the fact that, according to a recentpublication, he is weighing the suggestion of his “youngcolleagues” that he learn to boil his thoughts down to tweets,though he is not inclined to “stream, beam, and scream.”4

Let me begin with that recent publication, “My Kingdomfor a Wave.” In it, Etzioni again declares that the “hourglass isalmost empty,” reflects on the remarkable rise of the commu-nitarian “wavelet” he helped set in motion and guide, and

1Etzioni, Amitai and Jonathan Marks. Summer 2003. “Communitarian-

ism and Classical Liberalism: A Dialogue.” The Responsive Community13:3: 50–60.

2 As Wilson Carey McWilliams has observed, Etzioni’s communitarian-ism, its genuine “middle way” aspirations notwithstanding, “leans decid-edly to the left of center” (Wilson Carey McWilliams. Spring/Summer2004. “The Journey of a True Communitarian.” The ResponsiveCommunity 14:2: 99.3 Etzioni, Amitai. 2003.My Brother’s Keeper: A Memoir and a Message(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 405.4 Etzoni, Amitai.Winter 2014. “MyKingdom for aWave.” The AmericanScholar 83:1, 38.

J. Marks (*)Department of Politics, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 19426,USAe-mail: jmarks@ursinus.edu

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considers the causes of what he calls his “gradual loss of amegaphone.”My “Kingdom as a Wave” offers a mini-historythat I will use as a jumping off point for further reflections onhistory, including the history of Etzioni’s thought, the reasonsfor the rise and tapering off of the communitarian movement,and, more briefly, the role of history in Etzioni’s thought. I willrespectfully disagree with Etzoni’s thoughts on history but Ihope to do so in a way that offers a more optimistic assessmentthan his of the reach and relevance of his message.

In the Preface of The Active Society, the book that an-nounced him as a major thinker, Etzioni imagines society as“an ocean liner propelled by an outboard motor, requiring notonly more drive but also reconstruction while continuing tosail the high seas.”5 More than 40 years later, reflecting on theend of his career, Etzioni imagines himself in a rowboat,“pulling at the oars, no matter how small my boat, howeverbig or choppy the sea.”6 How does Etzioni get from one boatto the other?

We will get to how Etzioni thinks it happened. But first,let’s consider a different account, offered by the politicaltheorist Patrick Deneen, of Etzioni’s move from ocean linersto rowboats. Deneen has argued that the “ocean liner” is “aninsistently modern” metaphor. When ancient political philos-ophers like Plato wrote about a “ship of state,” they directedattention to “the internal elements of the ship, particularly thecharacter and relationships among the “sailors” qua citizens.”Moderns, like David Hume, in contrast attended especially to“external structures” both because they wanted to “avoid thepotential oppressiveness that comes from character forma-tion” and because they had a “greater belief in the possibilityof humanmastery” than the ancients did. An ocean liner “pliesthe seas virtually without obstacle”; assuming human techni-cians add the requisite drive and reconstruct the ship, we canexpect that it will be “nearly invincible in its power andperpetual on account of its superb design and workmanship.”By using the ocean liner metaphor, Etzioni declares himself“consummately modern,” betting on the transformative powerof social science knowledge rather than on “civic education”and “moral knowledge.” Although the active society must be,as Etzioni puts it, “responsive,” the capacity to “change oursocial combinations,” for people to “change themselves” and“be the creator” depends on the new social science.7

As Deneen observes, Etzioni already imagines himself in avery different kind of boat by the time he writes Brother’sKeeper, which came out in 2003, the same kind that appears in“My Kingdom for a Wave.” Reflecting on the problems the

world faces in the newmillennium, he recalls a proverb that hehas always misremembered (I will come later to what hemisremembers): “Oh lord, the sea is so large and my oar isso small.”8 Deneen thinks that Etzioni, in part because of hisdisappointment with 1960s student activism, has come toembrace “a chastened vision of human community that ad-vance[s] a recognition of limits, the reining in of the dream ofcontrol and mastery, and . . . a profound sense of the tragicdimension of human existence.”9 This move to what Etzionidubbed communitarianism is his “second sailing,” one under-taken humbly in a small boat, rather than grandly in an oceanliner.

But Deneen is wrong, at least in part about the ocean liner,which is already a symbol not only of our power but of theconstraints on it. Societies, like ocean liners, are difficult tomaneuver once they get moving. As Etzioni puts it, albeitmore than two decades after the publication of The ActiveSociety, “society is like an ocean liner. It doesn’t turn on adime.”10 More tellingly, since this statement comes muchnearer in time to The Active Society, Etzioni compares societyas an ocean liner to something much more maneuverable, atorpedo, and makes it abundantly clear, that as for Plato,reconstructing the ship does involve the ship’s “internal ele-ments,” the relationships among the sailors, as well as “theirfeelings, preferences, values, and interests.” The latter must beconsidered for “both normative and practical reasons.”Unlike“torpedoes and other technical systems those elements subjectto review and signaling in a society are not dead matter butindividuals and groups of persons.”

Indeed, reconstruction of the ship mean not simply tendingto “external structures” (e.g. institutional mechanisms) but tohow the people on the ship will determine its course. Thisidea, far from being secondary is the precise meaning of theocean liner metaphor.

The core metaphor is of society as an ocean liner pro-pelled by an undersized engine; thus it partly drifts withthe ocean current and is partly self-propelled. Mean-while, a struggle goes on among the decks . . . overwhere the various groups of passengers want the ship togo and over how the deck privileges will be allocatedand by whom. The result is that the ship itself is contin-ually being restructured as it sails the high seas. Sailingthe ship safely into port is clearly more than a matter ofcorrectly determining latitude and longitude and work-ing the rudder; it has to entail finding ways to reduce thestruggle among the passengers and between the passen-gers and crew and finding a means for everyone to5 Etzioni, Amitai. 1968. The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and

Political Processes (New York: The Free Press), x-xi.6 Etzioni, “Wave,” 38.7 Deneen, Patrick. 2006. “From the Active Society to the Good Society:The Second Sailing of Amitai Etzioni.” In The Active Society Revisited.Ed. Wilson Carey Mc Williams (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield),311–18.

8 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 362.9 Deneen, 318, 320.10 Henderson, Keith. April 19, 1993. “Advocate for a Changing Society.”The Christian Science Monitor.

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participate in reaching an agreement about the shipsfuture course.11

More broadly, as Deneen acknowledges, Etzioni rejects the“voluntaristic” view that a “societal actor” can “remold theworld at will” or what he also calls “the Enlightenment con-ception of knowledge and willpower as the movers of societalmountains.”12 For one thing, there are basic human needs,from survival, to recognition, to self-actualization, that imposelimits on social control. Etzioni’s example is the failure of theUSSR, after 50 years, to change the behavior of its people:“the needs manifested in the behavior of the average Russianare surprisingly similar to those of theWestern person.”13 Thisclaim is no afterthought; retrospectively, Etzioni views it as“the most important social philosophical position taken in TheActive Society.”14

Etzioni, in other words, comes pre-chastened. And whileDeneen is right to find in him the spirit of confident modernity,he neglects Etzioni’s deep doubts about modernity’s blessings:“a central characteristic of the modern period has been con-tinued increase in the efficacy of the technology of productionwhich poses a growing challenge to the primacy of the valuesthese means are supposed to serve.” More recent develop-ments in genetics and the chemical control of behavior expand“the freedom to choose” but also make possible “the choice todestroy everything, including freedom.”15 Whether we willavoid dystopian possibilities remains to be seen. As Etzionisays in a different context, whether we will have a relativelyegalitarian and responsive society or a deeply inegalitarianand barely responsive society, “depends in part on historicalforces beyond our personal and possibly collective control.”16

This doubt explains what Wilson Carey McWilliams hascalled the “edge of desperation” that balances the optimismof the Active Society. When you consider that, in the rowboatmetaphor, Etzioni is not a whole society but a single publicintellectual, struggling to set in motion a movement capable ofanswering this frightening challenge, it is no wonder that he isrowing pretty hard.

Let’s return to Etzioni’s misremembered proverb. Here iswhat Etzioni says about it:

I thought that the fisherman’s prayer was “Oh God, thesea is so large and my oar is so small. When I was toldthat the prayer speaks of a small boat, not an oar, I askedmyself why I misremembered it in this particular way.The original text seems to concern someone who is

cowed by the sea, who fears being overwhelmed by itsmighty squalls. My fear is that I would not travel farenough, would not deliver what I was destined todeliver.17

Just as Etzioni’s ocean liner metaphor, which may appearoverconfident, is more cautious than it seems, Etzioni’s row-boat metaphor is more confident than it seems; whereas theoriginal proverb suggests fear that the boat can’t be steered,the misremembered proverb suggests fear only that there willnot be enough time to complete the trip.

In the Active Society and Etzioni’s later writings, then, wefind the same combination of high purpose and caution. Theplacement of the rowboat metaphor as used in aMy Brother’sKeeper Illustrates the point perfectly; it arises, in a chapterentitled “Tomorrow, the World?” just as Etzioni is contem-plating “finding and promoting some form of global gover-nance,” a goal he first espoused in The Active Society. Com-munitarianism is not a departure from but a working out, in theform of a social movement, of the goals of the Active Society.One last illustration must suffice. Deneen sees Etzioni’s em-brace of post-material values as a “fundamental departurefrom the heady identification of “power and knowledge” thatmarked the Active Society.” But the move away from materi-alism is already announced in The Active Society. Etzionisupposes that in such a society, as in the Greek city states,the “status of political and intellectual activity combined [will]approximate the status of economic processes in modernsocieties.” In Social Problems, Etzioni adds the “search forgreater insight into self and better relations with others” as oneof the strongest candidates to replace the “materialisticproject.”18

I have established, I think, Etzioni’s consistency, that hedoes not find himself in a rowboat instead of an ocean linerbecause an early hubris has been replaced with a sense oftragedy.19 It remains to consider why he thinks he is in such arowboat or, to be more precise, why he is having hard timecatching a wave.

Reflecting on the “wavelet” that brought communitarian-ism to prominence in the 1990s, Etzioni uses another vehicu-lar metaphor. “Societies,” he says, “are like cars with loosesteering wheels; we keep steering them so far to the left orright that their course often must be corrected, which leads toovercorrection—which itself calls for still more course adjust-ments.” To stick, for the sake of simplicity, to the UnitedStates, “President Reaganwas elected in part as a conservative

11 Etzioni, Amitai. 1976. Social Problems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ).12 Etzioni, The Active Society, 68; Social Problems, 170.13 Etzioni, The Active Society, 619–28; Social Problems,14 . Etzioni, Amitai. 2006. “The Active Society Revisited: A Response.” InThe Active Society Revisited.15 Etzioni, The Active Society, vii, 6.16 Etzioni, Social Problems, 173.

17 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 363.18 Etzioni, Active Society, 7; Social Problems, 172.19 For a complementary discussion of the early and late Etzioni’s, seeLehman, Edward. 2000. “From Compliance to Community in the Worksof Amitai Etzioni.” In Autonomy and Order: A CommunitarianAnthology. Ed. Edward Lehman (Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield):xvii-xxiv.

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reaction to the liberal 1960s and the plethora of social pro-grams introduced under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.”This was the overcorrection in the direction of the individual,so that, at the end of the Reagan era, Etzioni encounteredstudents and older Americans “afflicted with” a “malaise ofexcessive individualism.” Communitarianism flourished,Etzioni thinks, because Americans, for both psychologicaland policy reasons, were looking for a course correction.20

Reflecting on his waning influence, Etzioni leaves out onecause that he names in My Brother’s Keeper, namely thatsociety “changed in directions we favored.”21 As he alsoobserves in that book, his influence recovered, for at least atime, with his 1999 book The Limits of Privacy. But in “MyKingdom for a Wave,” Etzioni’s boat is adrift: “no matter howfiercely I huff and puff, my sails have been left luffing and myseas are becalmed . . . . [N]o one seems to be listening.”22

Since the media “is the only place an entire nation can conductits townmeetings” and consequently the only means by whichcommunitarian change can occur, this loss of attention is morethan a personal problem.23

Etzioni gives three reasons for his loss of influence as apublic intellectual. First, the media prefers an argument be-tween strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni does not fitsquarely into the “liberal or conservative category.” That isalso true of this fellow communitarians. Second, “the medialike public intellectuals to be specialized,” but Etzioni hasresolutely refused to stick to his knitting. Third, Etzioni hastaken an unpopular dovish position on China.24

I am not convinced by Etzioni’s account of either the rise orfall of communitarianism and his own influence. To begin withthe rise, Etzioni relies too much on the assertion that RonaldReagan led a drive against community. Perhaps Reagan’s attemptto align the spirit of the Puritans and the spirit of commerce,evident in his references to the “city on a hill” did not makesense, or perhapsRepublican anti-government rhetoric ultimatelyundermined community as well as government. But it is hard todeny that community was an aspiration of Reagan’s politics. Hismemorable speech on the Challenger disaster, like his “city on ahill” references fuses the love of community with the love offreedom and an ambition to “reach for the stars.”

The sacrifice of your loved ones has stirred the soul ofour nation and, through the pain, our hearts have beenopened to a profound truth—the future is not free, thestory of all human progress is one of a struggle againstall odds. We learned again that this America, whichAbraham Lincoln called the last best hope of man onEarth, was built on heroism and noble sacrifice. It was

built by men and women like our seven star voyagers,who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more thanwas expected or required, and who gave it with littlethought to worldly reward.

We think back to the pioneers of an earlier century, andthe sturdy souls who took their families and the belong-ings and set out into the frontier of the American West.

The political scientist Hugh Heclo has called Reagan’spublic philosophy “communitarian individualism.” That pub-lic philosophy proposes that big government has underminedhealthy individualism and community simultaneously. The“attempted mechanization of civic virtue through big govern-ment programs suffocates” the impulse of people to look aftereach other. Through such programs, “good samaritans arerelieved of responsibility and those who are on the receivingend of Washington’s largesse begin to think that they have theright to support but no obligation to help themselves.” This isthe individuality of entitlement, which needs to be supplantedby “individualism rightly understood [which is] the individu-alism of volunteer activity, private sector initiatives, and com-munity based efforts to meet social needs.”25

That individualism rightly understood reminds us ofTocqueville’s self-interest rightly understood and of neocon-servatism, which, as Etzioni observes in Social Problems“reckons its descent from Tocqueville.” As the title of theformer flagship journal of neoonservativism, the PublicInterest, suggests, neoconservatism, like communitarianismresists individualistic currents pulling us away from the publicinterest. As the lead editorial in the first 1965 issue says,“democratic society with its particular encouragements toindividual ambition, private appetite, and personal concern,has a greater need than any other to keep the idea of the publicinterest before it.”26 Neoconservatism shares other featureswith Etzioni’s communitarianism as well: it is, at least in itsinception, determinedly nonideological, interested in bringingsocial science findings to bear on public policy, and orientedmainly toward domestic policy.

I bring up the neoconservative movement because it sug-gests that Etzioni’s communitarianism occupies not a newfield, or a field occupied primarily by religious conservatives,but a field that the neoconservatives already occupied. It is anodd feature of Etzioni’s work that before he becomes a com-munitarian, he has worked out how his movement will differ

20 Etzioni, “Wave,” 31–32.21 Brother’s Keeper, 313.22 Etzioni, “Wave,” 34–35.23 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 301.24 Etzioni, “Wave,” 38.

25 Heclo, H. 1986. “Reaganism and the Search for a Public Philosophy.”In Perspectives on the Reagan Years. Ed. John Logan Palmer (Washing-ton D.C., Urban Institute Press), 44–45.26 Bell, Daniel and Irving Kristol. Fall 1965. “What is the Public Inter-est?” The Public Interest 1: 5. Admittedly the group had not yet acquiredthe neoconservative label, which Michael Harrington pins on them in1973. But even in its most overtly conservative manifestations, a worryabout untrammeled individualism remains.

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from theirs.27 Neoconservatives, taking their cue fromTocqueville, worry about the effects of the love of equalityand especially about the effects of that love harnessed to acentralized administrative state. They are also, informed byrecent experience on the left, cautious about social change. AsDaniel Bell put it, “the underlying philosophical orientationwas skepticism toward utopianism”; the writers for the PublicInterest in the early years had “a hope for progress, but doubtthat it may be possible.”28

Etzioni defines himself in part against the neoconservativeapproach. Although, as I have indicated, Etzioni is not withoutcaution in the Active Society, he nonetheless has much greaterhopes for social change instigated by social movements thanneoconservatives do. In a 1977 essay, Etzioni expresses deepimpatience with the neoconservative wish—Etzioni has IrvingKristol and Daniel Bell particularly in mind—to use “themarket to introduce social change.” Even a college sophomoreknows, Etzioni says, that the market maximizes choice onlyfor those “with high buying power” and consequently locksinequalities in. Neoconservatives are unmindful of the need to“deal with the powerful people who oppose” social change”and the fact that “their opposition can scarcely be counteredwithout political mobilization.” Even the “fear of instabilityand violence” can be a useful spur to change, and “the briefhistory of the turbulent sixties” suggests that conservativesgreatly overplayed the dangers of youth violence. Far frominsisting on a skeptical attitude toward social change, Etzioniproposes that we should be more mindful than we are of thelikelihood that “a class of people may find their needs betterserved in a different social structure.”29

Since Etzioni, in his more directly communitarian phase,continues to embrace democratic social movements and in-tends communitarianism itself to be a major social move-ment,30 it seems reasonable to understand his communitarian-ism, not simply as a reaction to the individualism of the 1980s,or even, as Etzioni sometimes does, as a reaction to the moralconfusion we have been living with since the late 1960s.Rather, it is a distinctive criticism of individualism linked toa distinctive theory of how social change is best effected thatcan be put in a fruitful dialogue with neoconservatism.Etzioni, I assume, would argue that by the time he wasengaged in building the communitarian movement in the late1980’s, neoconservatism was an appendage of the RepublicanParty. But the Public Interest was still publishing then andalthough it may have tilted to the right, it continued to publisharticles on policy, informed by social science, from varied

perspectives (as Etzioni acknowledges, his own work occa-sionally found a home in the Public Interest). Neoconserva-tives like Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson stillshared concerns, about character and moral culture, withcommunitarians. But inMyBrother’s Keeper, Etzioni, perhapsbecause he had always understood the effectual truth of neo-conservatism to consist in obeisance to the market or theRepublican Party, takes the movement’s focus to be “deregu-lation . . . blocking legislation and cutting taxes.”31 As I havealready argued, this assessment, even applied to Reaganism, ishard to defend.

Any explanation of communitarianism’s rise is bound to bespeculative, but communitarianism arguably catches fire, atleast in the United States, not primarily as a response to aperceived community vacuum, but as a response to the rela-tive political success of Reaganism. A Democratic partylooking to find its way after three consecutive presidentiallosses was open to a new political philosophy, particularly onethat could not easily be dismissed as big government liberal-ism. That is not to deny that Etzioni’s political philosophy isitself principled. Its consistent features include attentiveness tosocial science research, willingness to follow that researchacross political and ideological boundaries, refusal to let theidea of rights, self-evident truths, or human nature dissolve inrelativism, and insistence that politics has to confront themessy question of what the good society is. If Etzioni’sinfluence has waned, that is a great loss. But there is no reasonto believe that the decline of communitarianism is permanent.

I doubt very much that this decline has much to do withbeing middle of the road (people still read David Brooks), orfailure to stick to one’s knitting (many public intellectuals—Noam Chomsky, Richard Posner, and Martha Nussbaum, forexample, do not), or Etzioni’s position on China (which, inany case, would account only for his personal loss of amegaphone). Nor has communitarianism simply beenabsorbed into our way of thinking about things or becomeold hat. Etzioni concedes that much of what communitarian-ism set out to do is not yet done. It has not, for example, filled“the gnawing moral vacuum with moral dialogues and softmorality, rather than state-driven imposed values,” or inspireda full blown social movement.32

It also matters that the communitarian movement rose justafter the BerlinWall fell and peaked just before September 11,during the 2000 presidential primary elections. The two lead-ing democratic candidates, Bill Bradley and Al Gore, had bothbeen associated with the communitarian movement from al-most its beginning. Gore’s campaign was not especially com-munitarian but Bradley’s was in part about what sounded a lotlike a somewhat top-heavy version of communitarian dia-logue. Bradley would “take what is a national problem and

27 Etzioni, Social Problems, 20–27.28 Bell, Daniel. Summer 1992.”American Intellectual Life: 1965–1992.”The Wilson Quarterly 16:3: 84–85,29 Etzioni, Amitai. 1977. “The Neoconservatives.” Partisan Review 24:3:436–37.30 Etzioni, Amitai. 1993. The Spirit of Community (New York: CrownPublishers), 18–20.

31 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 369.32 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 362, 369.

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convert it into a public issue and then engage the idealism ofthe American people in support of that public issue.”33 TheRepublican primaries pitted Bush’s “compassionate conserva-tism” against “national greatness” conservatism, both ofwhich concerned the character of American community andto what goals it should dedicate itself. In retrospect, of course,though the period was hardly free from domestic and foreignpolicy challenges, the period in which communitarianism’srelatively optimistic vision was able to flourish now seems apleasant rest between the end of the Cold War and September11th, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and thelong recession. One struggles to imagine a debate today aboutwhat Americans should do, as Bradley put it, in a time of“unprecedented prosperity,” or a worry that, as Francis Fuku-yama put it at the beginning of the period, we have “centuriesof boredom” to look forward to.34 Although the debate oversecurity and privacy that followed September 11th was, asEtzioni points out, hospitable to some communitarian ideas,and although Etzioni’s foreign policy ideas have receivedrespectful attention, communitarianism may have declined inthe recent past because peace and prosperity are more hospi-table to its concerns than war and deep recession.35 If so, thedecline should be reversible.

My account of the rise and fall of communitarianism isspeculative, but so is Etzioni’s. It is not easy to say what drivesthe relatively small historical change with which we have beenconcerned, the cresting and breaking of Etzioni’s communi-tarian wavelet. That difficulty brings me to a final challenge toEtzioni’s communitarianism, which is in important respects atheory about history.

Etzioni sets his thought in the context of two great histor-ical changes. We have touched on the first without naming it.In the Active Society Etzioni asserts that we are in the midst ofa great historical change. The modern age had been defined byadvances in technologies of production, like the steam engine,but the postmodern age will be defined by advances in tech-nologies of knowledge, like the computer. The postmodernage promises great improvements. For example, the shift fromreliance on material objects to reliance on symbolic ones mayreduce the “strains of scarcity.” It also increases the capacity ofsocieties to control and transform themselves. But it’s all toopossible that the postmodern age will be marked by the moreeffective exploitation of the many by the few.36 Communitar-ianism answers the question, how can societies exploit the

new postmodern possibilities of control and transformationwithout abandoning, even while deepening, our dedication todemocracy.37

The second change, emphasized in Etzioni’s communitar-ian work, is a longer standing trend toward individualism,which emerged as a “grand corrective to the social formationsof the Middle Ages . . . and the paradigms that legitimatedthem.” Modernity, so understood, means “an emphasis onuniversal individual rights” and “the virtue of autonomy, ofvoluntary action and consensual agreements.”38

If Etzioni finds himself on a boat, whether an ocean liner ora rowboat, these are the historical currents for which he mustcompensate in order to stay on course to an active, democraticsociety that balances rights and responsibilities, one that pre-serves individual freedom while recognizing, as Alexis deTocqueville did, that “sentiments and ideas renew themselves,the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed onlyby the reciprocal action of men upon one another.”39 Etzionithinks that not only Reaganism but the history of the past fourcenturies, justifies communitarianism, which represents a de-cision to throw one’s weight, even as one recognizes theimportance of individual freedom, on the side of community.

I bring up Tocqueville again because he shows why thatdecision is open to criticism.40 For Tocqueville, the advancetoward equality of conditions, and away from the fixed rankscharacteristic of aristocratic societies, a “democratic revolu-tion,” was and could be expected to be thereafter the maindriver of history.41 This democratic revolution, unlike theliberal revolution, does not obviously favor individualism.Although the forces that favor individualism are “manifest,”“one does not perceive at first glance” the forces that causedemocratic people to cluster together.”42 In this context, clus-tering together is not a good thing. Equality of conditionsmeans that while no individual will tolerate another individ-ual’s assertion of superiority, individuals will have neither thestrength nor a principled reason to assert themselves againstthe public, before which they feel their “insignificance andweakness.”43 Consequently, equality of conditions, as a driverof history, tends to cause “the entire society” to form “a singlemass.”44

33 New Hampshire Democratic Primary Debate, Jan 5, 2000, Universityof New Hampshire, Durham, NH.34 Fukuyama, Francis. September 199. “The End of History?” The Na-tional Interest 16: 18.35 I do not mean to suggest that periods of great national stress are nothospitable to cultural politics, but they do not seem to me to be hospitableto what Etzioni himself characterizes as a concern for moral dialogue andsoft morality.36 Etzioni, The Active Society, 9–10.

37 Etzioni, “Response,” 334–37.38 Etzioni, Amitai. 1996. The New Golden Rule: Community and Moral-ity in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books), xvii, 8–9, 3.39 Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2000. Democracy in America. Trans. and Ed.Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press), 491.40 I consider the relationship between Tocqueville and Etzioni in a 2005manuscript, “Alexis de Tocqueville and Amitai Etzioni: Interpreting andActing in History,” posted by the Institute for Communitarian PolicyStudies at this address: http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/handle/1961/1420.41 Tocqueville, Democracy, 3, 8, 427.42 Tocqueville, Democracy, 616.43 Tocqueville, Democracy, 616.44 Tocqueville, Democracy, 597.

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In light of his assessment of history, Tocqueville, al-though he sings the praises of associational life, makes apragmatic decision that is diametrically opposed to thecommunitarian decision: he throws his weight on the sideof individual freedom. To “give to particular persons cer-tain rights and to guarantee them the uncontested enjoy-ment of those rights; to preserve for the individual thelittle independence, force, and originality that remains tohim . . . appears [to Tocqueville] the first object of thelegislator in the age we are entering.”45

I have not shown that Tocqueville’s reading of history andthe pragmatic decision that follows from it is superior toEtzioni’s any more than I have shown that my reading of therise and fall of communitarianism is superior to Etzioni’s.What I do wish to suggest is that until the question betweenEtzioni and Tocqueville is settled, or more broadly until wecan be confident of the historical current in which we sailorsfind ourselves, it is hard to know whether strenuous rowing isgoing to get us to our destination.

I think, though, Etzioni is right when he says that the mostimportant premise advanced in the Active Society was its least

historical premise, that, to repeat, “people have basic humanneeds, needs that cannot be manipulated.”46 This premise,along with the conviction that society must be responsive tothose needs, and that such responsiveness is possible only indemocracies, may be said to constitute what Etzioni called, inpraising Tony Blair, a “true north,” or “real inner core” thatanimates Etzioni’s career.47 Etzioni is a man of true north.But he has also, for his entire career, tested his convic-tions and thought through their implications in light ofsocial science research and the arguments of those withwhom he disagrees. There is good reason to think thatsome time not long from now his work and the work ofthose whom he has inspired will regain its influence. IfI may risk another travel metaphor, Etzioni will rideagain.

Jonathan D. Marks is Professor of Politics at Ursinus College. He isauthor of Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-JacquesRousseau.

45 Tocqueville, Democracy, 672.

46 Etzioni, “Response,” 335.47 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 324.

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