Soc (2014) 51:362–368 DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9793-y

SYMPOSIUM: THE ACHIEVEMENT OF AMITAI ETZIONI

Keep Rowing: Amitai Etzioni and History Jonathan Marks

Published online: 3 July 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Reflecting on the most recent stage of his career, the communitarian, Amitai Etzioni, gives three reasons for what he perceives as his loss of influence. First, the media prefers an argument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni is neither liberal nor conservative. Second, the media prefers specialized intellectuals, but Etzioni has refused to “stick to his knitting.” Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular, dovish position on China. I argue that Etzioni is mistaken about the reasons for his and communitarianism’s rise and perceived fall and offer a more optimistic assessment than he does of the potential influence of his thought. I use this local problem of historical interpretation to question Etzioni’s global interpretation of modern history. Keywords Communitarianism . Etzioni . Contemporary political theory . Political theory . Neoconservatism . Tocqueville I first had the pleasure of conversing with Amitai Etzioni in 2000. He tracked me down after I published a review of James Davison Hunter’s The Death of Character: Moral Education in a World Without Good and Evil. I was beginning my career. Amitai’s note requesting a conversation made no reference to the review and was so flattering that I was certain he had me confused with another Jonathan Marks, the distinguished Yale University anthropologist. I wrote him back to that effect. I may even have passed along that other Jonathan’s e-mail address. Fortunately for me, Amitai persisted. Eventually we published a dialogue on communitarianism and classical liberalism together.1 1

Etzioni, Amitai and Jonathan Marks. Summer 2003. “Communitarianism and Classical Liberalism: A Dialogue.” The Responsive Community 13:3: 50–60.

J. Marks (*) Department of Politics, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 19426, USA e-mail: [email protected]

At least a few things are notable about that initial encounter. First, Amitai, who is no conservative read The Weekly Standard.2 Second, Amitai is glad to test his ideas against people who object to them. My review had said a number of unflattering and, in retrospect, unfair things about communitarian character education. And although I never wrote thereafter anything in unmixed praise of communitarianism, Amitai continued to invite me to conferences and otherwise champion my work. Third, Amitai was either very kind to novices or unmindful of distinctions of academic rank. He seemed as happy to tangle with me as he was to tangle with heavyweights like Robert George and Roger Scruton. Amitai read and acted on my review during a year in which he also found time to publish some 30 articles and opinion pieces on matters ranging from Israel, to the Internet, to public ritual, to moral dialogues. Three years later, in My Brother’s Keeper: A Memoir and a Message, he would write that the “hourglass is almost empty.”3 Since then, he has written seven books and about 278 shorter pieces which, far from simply repeating what he was saying when I met him, address, among other things, Somali piracy, the Tea Party, and drone warfare. I am leaving out his blog and the fact that, according to a recent publication, he is weighing the suggestion of his “young colleagues” 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 Kingdom for a Wave.” In it, Etzioni again declares that the “hourglass is almost empty,” reflects on the remarkable rise of the communitarian “wavelet” he helped set in motion and guide, and 2

As Wilson Carey McWilliams has observed, Etzioni’s communitarianism, its genuine “middle way” aspirations notwithstanding, “leans decidedly to the left of center” (Wilson Carey McWilliams. Spring/Summer 2004. “The Journey of a True Communitarian.” The Responsive Community 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. “My Kingdom for a Wave.” The American Scholar 83:1, 38.

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considers the causes of what he calls his “gradual loss of a megaphone.” My “Kingdom as a Wave” offers a mini-history that I will use as a jumping off point for further reflections on history, including the history of Etzioni’s thought, the reasons for the rise and tapering off of the communitarian movement, and, more briefly, the role of history in Etzioni’s thought. I will respectfully disagree with Etzoni’s thoughts on history but I hope to do so in a way that offers a more optimistic assessment than his of the reach and relevance of his message. In the Preface of The Active Society, the book that announced him as a major thinker, Etzioni imagines society as “an ocean liner propelled by an outboard motor, requiring not only more drive but also reconstruction while continuing to sail the high seas.”5 More than 40 years later, reflecting on the end of his career, Etzioni imagines himself in a rowboat, “pulling at the oars, no matter how small my boat, however big or choppy the sea.”6 How does Etzioni get from one boat to the other? We will get to how Etzioni thinks it happened. But first, let’s consider a different account, offered by the political theorist Patrick Deneen, of Etzioni’s move from ocean liners to rowboats. Deneen has argued that the “ocean liner” is “an insistently modern” metaphor. When ancient political philosophers like Plato wrote about a “ship of state,” they directed attention to “the internal elements of the ship, particularly the character and relationships among the “sailors” qua citizens.” Moderns, like David Hume, in contrast attended especially to “external structures” both because they wanted to “avoid the potential oppressiveness that comes from character formation” and because they had a “greater belief in the possibility of human mastery” than the ancients did. An ocean liner “plies the seas virtually without obstacle”; assuming human technicians add the requisite drive and reconstruct the ship, we can expect that it will be “nearly invincible in its power and perpetual on account of its superb design and workmanship.” By using the ocean liner metaphor, Etzioni declares himself “consummately modern,” betting on the transformative power of 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 our social 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 a very different kind of boat by the time he writes Brother’s Keeper, which came out in 2003, the same kind that appears in “My Kingdom for a Wave.” Reflecting on the problems the

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world faces in the new millennium, he recalls a proverb that he has always misremembered (I will come later to what he misremembers): “Oh lord, the sea is so large and my oar is so small.”8 Deneen thinks that Etzioni, in part because of his disappointment with 1960s student activism, has come to embrace “a chastened vision of human community that advance[s] a recognition of limits, the reining in of the dream of control and mastery, and . . . a profound sense of the tragic dimension of human existence.”9 This move to what Etzioni dubbed communitarianism is his “second sailing,” one undertaken humbly in a small boat, rather than grandly in an ocean liner. But Deneen is wrong, at least in part about the ocean liner, which is already a symbol not only of our power but of the constraints on it. Societies, like ocean liners, are difficult to maneuver once they get moving. As Etzioni puts it, albeit more than two decades after the publication of The Active Society, “society is like an ocean liner. It doesn’t turn on a dime.”10 More tellingly, since this statement comes much nearer in time to The Active Society, Etzioni compares society as an ocean liner to something much more maneuverable, a torpedo, and makes it abundantly clear, that as for Plato, reconstructing the ship does involve the ship’s “internal elements,” the relationships among the sailors, as well as “their feelings, preferences, values, and interests.” The latter must be considered for “both normative and practical reasons.” Unlike “torpedoes and other technical systems those elements subject to review and signaling in a society are not dead matter but individuals and groups of persons.” Indeed, reconstruction of the ship mean not simply tending to “external structures” (e.g. institutional mechanisms) but to how the people on the ship will determine its course. This idea, far from being secondary is the precise meaning of the ocean liner metaphor. The core metaphor is of society as an ocean liner propelled by an undersized engine; thus it partly drifts with the ocean current and is partly self-propelled. Meanwhile, a struggle goes on among the decks . . . over where the various groups of passengers want the ship to go and over how the deck privileges will be allocated and by whom. The result is that the ship itself is continually being restructured as it sails the high seas. Sailing the ship safely into port is clearly more than a matter of correctly determining latitude and longitude and working the rudder; it has to entail finding ways to reduce the struggle among the passengers and between the passengers and crew and finding a means for everyone to

5

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. Deneen, 318, 320. 10 Henderson, Keith. April 19, 1993. “Advocate for a Changing Society.” The Christian Science Monitor. 9

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cowed by the sea, who fears being overwhelmed by its mighty squalls. My fear is that I would not travel far enough, would not deliver what I was destined to deliver.17

participate in reaching an agreement about the ships future course.11 More broadly, as Deneen acknowledges, Etzioni rejects the “voluntaristic” view that a “societal actor” can “remold the world at will” or what he also calls “the Enlightenment conception of knowledge and willpower as the movers of societal mountains.”12 For one thing, there are basic human needs, from survival, to recognition, to self-actualization, that impose limits on social control. Etzioni’s example is the failure of the USSR, after 50 years, to change the behavior of its people: “the needs manifested in the behavior of the average Russian are surprisingly similar to those of the Western person.”13 This claim is no afterthought; retrospectively, Etzioni views it as “the most important social philosophical position taken in The Active Society.”14 Etzioni, in other words, comes pre-chastened. And while Deneen 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 continued increase in the efficacy of the technology of production which poses a growing challenge to the primacy of the values these means are supposed to serve.” More recent developments in genetics and the chemical control of behavior expand “the freedom to choose” but also make possible “the choice to destroy everything, including freedom.”15 Whether we will avoid dystopian possibilities remains to be seen. As Etzioni says in a different context, whether we will have a relatively egalitarian and responsive society or a deeply inegalitarian and barely responsive society, “depends in part on historical forces beyond our personal and possibly collective control.”16 This doubt explains what Wilson Carey McWilliams has called the “edge of desperation” that balances the optimism of the Active Society. When you consider that, in the rowboat metaphor, Etzioni is not a whole society but a single public intellectual, struggling to set in motion a movement capable of answering this frightening challenge, it is no wonder that he is rowing pretty hard. Let’s return to Etzioni’s misremembered proverb. Here is what Etzioni says about it: I thought that the fisherman’s prayer was “Oh God, the sea is so large and my oar is so small. When I was told that the prayer speaks of a small boat, not an oar, I asked myself why I misremembered it in this particular way. The original text seems to concern someone who is

Just as Etzioni’s ocean liner metaphor, which may appear overconfident, is more cautious than it seems, Etzioni’s rowboat metaphor is more confident than it seems; whereas the original proverb suggests fear that the boat can’t be steered, the misremembered proverb suggests fear only that there will not be enough time to complete the trip. In the Active Society and Etzioni’s later writings, then, we find the same combination of high purpose and caution. The placement of the rowboat metaphor as used in a My Brother’s Keeper Illustrates the point perfectly; it arises, in a chapter entitled “Tomorrow, the World?” just as Etzioni is contemplating “finding and promoting some form of global governance,” a goal he first espoused in The Active Society. Communitarianism is not a departure from but a working out, in the form of a social movement, of the goals of the Active Society. One last illustration must suffice. Deneen sees Etzioni’s embrace of post-material values as a “fundamental departure from the heady identification of “power and knowledge” that marked the Active Society.” But the move away from materialism is already announced in The Active Society. Etzioni supposes 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 modern societies.” In Social Problems, Etzioni adds the “search for greater insight into self and better relations with others” as one of the strongest candidates to replace the “materialistic project.”18 I have established, I think, Etzioni’s consistency, that he does not find himself in a rowboat instead of an ocean liner because an early hubris has been replaced with a sense of tragedy.19 It remains to consider why he thinks he is in such a rowboat or, to be more precise, why he is having hard time catching a wave. Reflecting on the “wavelet” that brought communitarianism to prominence in the 1990s, Etzioni uses another vehicular metaphor. “Societies,” he says, “are like cars with loose steering wheels; we keep steering them so far to the left or right that their course often must be corrected, which leads to overcorrection—which itself calls for still more course adjustments.” To stick, for the sake of simplicity, to the United States, “President Reagan was elected in part as a conservative

11

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12

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Etzioni, Amitai. 1976. Social Problems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ). 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.” In The Active Society Revisited. 15 Etzioni, The Active Society, vii, 6. 16 Etzioni, Social Problems, 173.

Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 363. Etzioni, Active Society, 7; Social Problems, 172. 19 For a complementary discussion of the early and late Etzioni’s, see Lehman, Edward. 2000. “From Compliance to Community in the Works of Amitai Etzioni.” In Autonomy and Order: A Communitarian Anthology. Ed. Edward Lehman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield):xvii-xxiv.

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reaction to the liberal 1960s and the plethora of social programs 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 encountered students and older Americans “afflicted with” a “malaise of excessive individualism.” Communitarianism flourished, Etzioni thinks, because Americans, for both psychological and policy reasons, were looking for a course correction.20 Reflecting on his waning influence, Etzioni leaves out one cause that he names in My Brother’s Keeper, namely that society “changed in directions we favored.”21 As he also observes in that book, his influence recovered, for at least a time, with his 1999 book The Limits of Privacy. But in “My Kingdom for a Wave,” Etzioni’s boat is adrift: “no matter how fiercely I huff and puff, my sails have been left luffing and my seas are becalmed . . . . [N]o one seems to be listening.”22 Since the media “is the only place an entire nation can conduct its town meetings” and consequently the only means by which communitarian change can occur, this loss of attention is more than a personal problem.23 Etzioni gives three reasons for his loss of influence as a public intellectual. First, the media prefers an argument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni does not fit squarely into the “liberal or conservative category.” That is also true of this fellow communitarians. Second, “the media like public intellectuals to be specialized,” but Etzioni has resolutely refused to stick to his knitting. Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular dovish position on China.24 I am not convinced by Etzioni’s account of either the rise or fall of communitarianism and his own influence. To begin with the rise, Etzioni relies too much on the assertion that Ronald Reagan led a drive against community. Perhaps Reagan’s attempt to align the spirit of the Puritans and the spirit of commerce, evident in his references to the “city on a hill” did not make sense, or perhaps Republican anti-government rhetoric ultimately undermined community as well as government. But it is hard to deny that community was an aspiration of Reagan’s politics. His memorable speech on the Challenger disaster, like his “city on a hill” references fuses the love of community with the love of freedom and an ambition to “reach for the stars.” The sacrifice of your loved ones has stirred the soul of our nation and, through the pain, our hearts have been opened to a profound truth—the future is not free, the story of all human progress is one of a struggle against all odds. We learned again that this America, which Abraham Lincoln called the last best hope of man on Earth, was built on heroism and noble sacrifice. It was Etzioni, “Wave,” 31–32. Brother’s Keeper, 313. 22 Etzioni, “Wave,” 34–35. 23 Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 301. 24 Etzioni, “Wave,” 38. 20 21

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built by men and women like our seven star voyagers, who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than was expected or required, and who gave it with little thought to worldly reward. We think back to the pioneers of an earlier century, and the sturdy souls who took their families and the belongings and set out into the frontier of the American West. The political scientist Hugh Heclo has called Reagan’s public philosophy “communitarian individualism.” That public philosophy proposes that big government has undermined healthy individualism and community simultaneously. The “attempted mechanization of civic virtue through big government programs suffocates” the impulse of people to look after each other. Through such programs, “good samaritans are relieved of responsibility and those who are on the receiving end of Washington’s largesse begin to think that they have the right to support but no obligation to help themselves.” This is the individuality of entitlement, which needs to be supplanted by “individualism rightly understood [which is] the individualism of volunteer activity, private sector initiatives, and community based efforts to meet social needs.”25 That individualism rightly understood reminds us of Tocqueville’s self-interest rightly understood and of neoconservatism, which, as Etzioni observes in Social Problems “reckons its descent from Tocqueville.” As the title of the former flagship journal of neoonservativism, the Public Interest, suggests, neoconservatism, like communitarianism resists individualistic currents pulling us away from the public interest. As the lead editorial in the first 1965 issue says, “democratic society with its particular encouragements to individual ambition, private appetite, and personal concern, has a greater need than any other to keep the idea of the public interest before it.”26 Neoconservatism shares other features with Etzioni’s communitarianism as well: it is, at least in its inception, determinedly nonideological, interested in bringing social science findings to bear on public policy, and oriented mainly toward domestic policy. I bring up the neoconservative movement because it suggests that Etzioni’s communitarianism occupies not a new field, or a field occupied primarily by religious conservatives, but a field that the neoconservatives already occupied. It is an odd feature of Etzioni’s work that before he becomes a communitarian, he has worked out how his movement will differ Heclo, H. 1986. “Reaganism and the Search for a Public Philosophy.” In Perspectives on the Reagan Years. Ed. John Logan Palmer (Washington D.C., Urban Institute Press), 44–45. 26 Bell, Daniel and Irving Kristol. Fall 1965. “What is the Public Interest?” The Public Interest 1: 5. Admittedly the group had not yet acquired the neoconservative label, which Michael Harrington pins on them in 1973. But even in its most overtly conservative manifestations, a worry about untrammeled individualism remains. 25

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from theirs.27 Neoconservatives, taking their cue from Tocqueville, worry about the effects of the love of equality and especially about the effects of that love harnessed to a centralized administrative state. They are also, informed by recent experience on the left, cautious about social change. As Daniel Bell put it, “the underlying philosophical orientation was skepticism toward utopianism”; the writers for the Public Interest in the early years had “a hope for progress, but doubt that it may be possible.”28 Etzioni defines himself in part against the neoconservative approach. Although, as I have indicated, Etzioni is not without caution in the Active Society, he nonetheless has much greater hopes for social change instigated by social movements than neoconservatives do. In a 1977 essay, Etzioni expresses deep impatience with the neoconservative wish—Etzioni has Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell particularly in mind—to use “the market to introduce social change.” Even a college sophomore knows, Etzioni says, that the market maximizes choice only for those “with high buying power” and consequently locks inequalities 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 countered without political mobilization.” Even the “fear of instability and violence” can be a useful spur to change, and “the brief history of the turbulent sixties” suggests that conservatives greatly overplayed the dangers of youth violence. Far from insisting on a skeptical attitude toward social change, Etzioni proposes that we should be more mindful than we are of the likelihood that “a class of people may find their needs better served in a different social structure.”29 Since Etzioni, in his more directly communitarian phase, continues to embrace democratic social movements and intends communitarianism itself to be a major social movement,30 it seems reasonable to understand his communitarianism, not simply as a reaction to the individualism of the 1980s, or even, as Etzioni sometimes does, as a reaction to the moral confusion we have been living with since the late 1960s. Rather, it is a distinctive criticism of individualism linked to a distinctive theory of how social change is best effected that can be put in a fruitful dialogue with neoconservatism. Etzioni, I assume, would argue that by the time he was engaged in building the communitarian movement in the late 1980’s, neoconservatism was an appendage of the Republican Party. But the Public Interest was still publishing then and although it may have tilted to the right, it continued to publish articles on policy, informed by social science, from varied 27

Etzioni, Social Problems, 20–27. 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: Crown Publishers), 18–20. 28

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perspectives (as Etzioni acknowledges, his own work occasionally found a home in the Public Interest). Neoconservatives like Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson still shared concerns, about character and moral culture, with communitarians. But in My Brother’s Keeper, Etzioni, perhaps because he had always understood the effectual truth of neoconservatism to consist in obeisance to the market or the Republican Party, takes the movement’s focus to be “deregulation . . . blocking legislation and cutting taxes.”31 As I have already argued, this assessment, even applied to Reaganism, is hard to defend. Any explanation of communitarianism’s rise is bound to be speculative, but communitarianism arguably catches fire, at least in the United States, not primarily as a response to a perceived community vacuum, but as a response to the relative political success of Reaganism. A Democratic party looking to find its way after three consecutive presidential losses was open to a new political philosophy, particularly one that could not easily be dismissed as big government liberalism. That is not to deny that Etzioni’s political philosophy is itself principled. Its consistent features include attentiveness to social science research, willingness to follow that research across political and ideological boundaries, refusal to let the idea of rights, self-evident truths, or human nature dissolve in relativism, and insistence that politics has to confront the messy question of what the good society is. If Etzioni’s influence has waned, that is a great loss. But there is no reason to believe that the decline of communitarianism is permanent. I doubt very much that this decline has much to do with being middle of the road (people still read David Brooks), or failure to stick to one’s knitting (many public intellectuals— Noam Chomsky, Richard Posner, and Martha Nussbaum, for example, do not), or Etzioni’s position on China (which, in any case, would account only for his personal loss of a megaphone). Nor has communitarianism simply been absorbed into our way of thinking about things or become old hat. Etzioni concedes that much of what communitarianism set out to do is not yet done. It has not, for example, filled “the gnawing moral vacuum with moral dialogues and soft morality, rather than state-driven imposed values,” or inspired a full blown social movement.32 It also matters that the communitarian movement rose just after the Berlin Wall fell and peaked just before September 11, during the 2000 presidential primary elections. The two leading democratic candidates, Bill Bradley and Al Gore, had both been associated with the communitarian movement from almost its beginning. Gore’s campaign was not especially communitarian but Bradley’s was in part about what sounded a lot like a somewhat top-heavy version of communitarian dialogue. Bradley would “take what is a national problem and 31 32

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

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convert it into a public issue and then engage the idealism of the American people in support of that public issue.”33 The Republican primaries pitted Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” against “national greatness” conservatism, both of which concerned the character of American community and to what goals it should dedicate itself. In retrospect, of course, though the period was hardly free from domestic and foreign policy challenges, the period in which communitarianism’s relatively optimistic vision was able to flourish now seems a pleasant rest between the end of the Cold War and September 11th, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the long recession. One struggles to imagine a debate today about what Americans should do, as Bradley put it, in a time of “unprecedented prosperity,” or a worry that, as Francis Fukuyama put it at the beginning of the period, we have “centuries of boredom” to look forward to.34 Although the debate over security and privacy that followed September 11th was, as Etzioni points out, hospitable to some communitarian ideas, and although Etzioni’s foreign policy ideas have received respectful attention, communitarianism may have declined in the recent past because peace and prosperity are more hospitable to its concerns than war and deep recession.35 If so, the decline should be reversible. My account of the rise and fall of communitarianism is speculative, but so is Etzioni’s. It is not easy to say what drives the relatively small historical change with which we have been concerned, the cresting and breaking of Etzioni’s communitarian wavelet. That difficulty brings me to a final challenge to Etzioni’s communitarianism, which is in important respects a theory about history. Etzioni sets his thought in the context of two great historical changes. We have touched on the first without naming it. In the Active Society Etzioni asserts that we are in the midst of a great historical change. The modern age had been defined by advances in technologies of production, like the steam engine, but the postmodern age will be defined by advances in technologies of knowledge, like the computer. The postmodern age promises great improvements. For example, the shift from reliance on material objects to reliance on symbolic ones may reduce the “strains of scarcity.” It also increases the capacity of societies to control and transform themselves. But it’s all too possible that the postmodern age will be marked by the more effective exploitation of the many by the few.36 Communitarianism answers the question, how can societies exploit the 33

New Hampshire Democratic Primary Debate, Jan 5, 2000, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH. 34 Fukuyama, Francis. September 199. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16: 18. 35 I do not mean to suggest that periods of great national stress are not hospitable to cultural politics, but they do not seem to me to be hospitable to what Etzioni himself characterizes as a concern for moral dialogue and soft morality. 36 Etzioni, The Active Society, 9–10.

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new postmodern possibilities of control and transformation without abandoning, even while deepening, our dedication to democracy.37 The second change, emphasized in Etzioni’s communitarian work, is a longer standing trend toward individualism, which emerged as a “grand corrective to the social formations of the Middle Ages . . . and the paradigms that legitimated them.” Modernity, so understood, means “an emphasis on universal individual rights” and “the virtue of autonomy, of voluntary action and consensual agreements.”38 If Etzioni finds himself on a boat, whether an ocean liner or a rowboat, these are the historical currents for which he must compensate in order to stay on course to an active, democratic society that balances rights and responsibilities, one that preserves individual freedom while recognizing, as Alexis de Tocqueville did, that “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.”39 Etzioni thinks that not only Reaganism but the history of the past four centuries, justifies communitarianism, which represents a decision to throw one’s weight, even as one recognizes the importance of individual freedom, on the side of community. I bring up Tocqueville again because he shows why that decision is open to criticism.40 For Tocqueville, the advance toward equality of conditions, and away from the fixed ranks characteristic of aristocratic societies, a “democratic revolution,” was and could be expected to be thereafter the main driver of history.41 This democratic revolution, unlike the liberal revolution, does not obviously favor individualism. Although the forces that favor individualism are “manifest,” “one does not perceive at first glance” the forces that cause democratic people to cluster together.”42 In this context, clustering together is not a good thing. Equality of conditions means that while no individual will tolerate another individual’s assertion of superiority, individuals will have neither the strength nor a principled reason to assert themselves against the public, before which they feel their “insignificance and weakness.”43 Consequently, equality of conditions, as a driver of history, tends to cause “the entire society” to form “a single mass.”44 Etzioni, “Response,” 334–37. Etzioni, Amitai. 1996. The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality 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 Chicago Press), 491. 40 I consider the relationship between Tocqueville and Etzioni in a 2005 manuscript, “Alexis de Tocqueville and Amitai Etzioni: Interpreting and Acting in History,” posted by the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies 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. 37 38

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In light of his assessment of history, Tocqueville, although he sings the praises of associational life, makes a pragmatic decision that is diametrically opposed to the communitarian decision: he throws his weight on the side of individual freedom. To “give to particular persons certain rights and to guarantee them the uncontested enjoyment of those rights; to preserve for the individual the little independence, force, and originality that remains to him . . . appears [to Tocqueville] the first object of the legislator in the age we are entering.”45 I have not shown that Tocqueville’s reading of history and the pragmatic decision that follows from it is superior to Etzioni’s any more than I have shown that my reading of the rise and fall of communitarianism is superior to Etzioni’s. What I do wish to suggest is that until the question between Etzioni and Tocqueville is settled, or more broadly until we can be confident of the historical current in which we sailors find ourselves, it is hard to know whether strenuous rowing is going to get us to our destination. I think, though, Etzioni is right when he says that the most important premise advanced in the Active Society was its least

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historical premise, that, to repeat, “people have basic human needs, needs that cannot be manipulated.”46 This premise, along with the conviction that society must be responsive to those needs, and that such responsiveness is possible only in democracies, may be said to constitute what Etzioni called, in praising Tony Blair, a “true north,” or “real inner core” that animates Etzioni’s career.47 Etzioni is a man of true north. But he has also, for his entire career, tested his convictions and thought through their implications in light of social science research and the arguments of those with whom he disagrees. There is good reason to think that some time not long from now his work and the work of those whom he has inspired will regain its influence. If I may risk another travel metaphor, Etzioni will ride again.

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

46 45

Tocqueville, Democracy, 672.

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Etzioni, “Response,” 335. Etzioni, Brother’s Keeper, 324.