Commentary

As part of our commitment to informed policy analysis through moral dialogue, the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies will feature here some of the feedback received on its articles, as well as other writings on communitarianism. Please note that the comments featured here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute. (Comments in other languages can be found here.)

February 24, 2012:

The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard discusses Amitai Etzioni’s article “China: Making an Adversary,” published in International Politics:

Professor Etzioni’s view is that the US and the West have plenty of time to pursue the “Beijing hedge”: to work from the assumption that the rise of China is largely benign and make all efforts to draw China into the global system as a full stakeholder. Only if that fails should the West then go back to the drawing board.

By treating China as an enemy, the hawks risk bringing it about. Such a policy reinforces the hardliners in the Chinese power struggle. It is self-fulfilling.

I have in the past invoked the mishandling of Wilhelmine Germany before World War One as warning of what can go wrong if the status quo powers (then Britain) play their hand badly. The containment policy fed the Kaiser’s encirclement paranoia.

January 16, 2012:

The European Magazine interviews Amitai Etzioni about “The Construction of Europe.”:

The European: You are German by birth, American by choice. Looking back across the Atlantic now, what is your impression of the European state of affairs?
Etzioni: I am looking at Europe not as an American but as a sociologist who has studied the European Union from the very beginning. Today we can observe a tragic mistake: The introduction of more European centralism without the construction of a sense of community. It is impossible to impose constraints on nation-states from the outside unless those nations are bound to the larger entities by a sense of loyalty and commitment.

October 5, 2011:

Benjamin H. Friedman responds to Amitai Etzioni’s article “The Great Drone Debate.”

The trouble with Etzioni’s commentary is that it ignores critics of drone strikes that see the alterative as doing nothing, or at least doing something nonlethal. In that case, the question is whether the humanitarian toll and blowback is worth the benefit of the killing, not whether there is a better way to kill. I say we in the public lack the ability to make that judgment and should oppose the strikes until we have better information.

March 25, 2011:

Simone Chambers, Douglas J. Den Uyl, and Daniel Philpott offer responses in The Review of Politics (Winter 2011) to Amitai Etzioni’s article “On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy.”

Simone Chambers writes:

“Amitai Etzioni has written a stimulating and provocative defense of a communitarian conception of legitimacy [...] Etzioni thinks that the public justification or deliberative conception of legitimacy is problematic both at the empirical level and at the normative level. His core argument is that people are just not like that. Individuals do not deliberate about what is legitimate and not legitimate and then come to reasoned conclusions. But I want to argue that there is so much distance between his normative conception of legitimacy (core universal values) and his empirical conception of legitimacy (embedded moral dialogues) that only a conception of deliberation can bridge this gap.”

Douglas J. Den Uyl writes:

“…as we have read Etzioni, the basic thrust of his paper is not to criticize consent theories and liberalism. Instead his purpose is to move us beyond consent to more substantive principles, like moral norms, upon which to ground legitimacy. However, the desire to move toward grounding legitimacy in a substantive moral principle may not take one as far as one thinks it does. Contrary to the assumption of Etzioni, Nussbaum, Sen, and others, to have such a moral principle is not yet to have a political one.”

Daniel Philpott writes:

“That the truth is a good worth knowing is self-evident. But establishing this self-evidence requires an argument, the sort of “deliberations” that Etzioni abjures. Observations of widespread perceptions are not enough.”

February 10, 2011:

Wolfgang Streeck of the Max Planck Institute writes:

“Why have so many of us who are doing institutional analyses of the economy-in-society been so reluctant, quite unlike Amitai Etzioni, to elaborate a noneconomistic micro foundation for our sort of social science? [...]

Actually what often passes as liberal rejection of moral manipulation may be no more than fear of the flak one can expect when publicly raising issues of moral duty- a flak Amitai Etzioni knows well and clearly fears not [...]

Etzioni’s socio-economics are probably best understood as a ‘third way’: an attempt to use the available social science knowledge to reinforce moral argument; or, in the language of one of hismost important books, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations, to replace utilitarian and coercive with normative social control [...]

Socioeconomics faces a choice. It might seek to be a discipline competing for jobs and research money with other providers of social control technology. Alternatively, it could be a set of ideas contributing to a better-informed public understanding of the relationship between economy and society, and of the role of moral values and material interests in both.”

January 4, 2011:

At Biopolitical Times, Gina Maranto writes:

Anyone who has been broadly dissatisfied by the bioethical response to human biotechnologies will want to check out sociologist Amitai Etzioni’s penetrating critique [PDF] of the field’s failure to deal adequately with the the essential tension these technologies raise. Etzioni, who is University Professor at The George Washington University, argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics that by focusing almost exclusively on the individual patient’s autonomy, bioethics marginalizes the inescapable second element that must be addressed in contemporary medicine—the wider interests of society. Etzioni calls for bioethics to expand its framework and advances the case for a “responsive communitarian” approach that has as its goal balancing autonomy against the collective good without privileging either a priori.

December 20, 2010:

At InDepth, T.M. Moore writes about community and communitarians:

The new communitarians promise a reconstructed society of mutual support, encouragement, freedom, and prosperity. Their vision of revived communities includes everything that was best from their growing-up memories, together with all the newest innovations their fertile minds can concoct. They have the ears of politicians and community activists.

The new communitarians have only one fear: A revival of Puritanism. Is Puritanism, as the new communitarians think, a threat to community? [...]  Amitai Etzioni insists, “We hold that a moral revival in these United States is possible without Puritanism; that is, without busybodies meddling into our personal affairs, without thought police controlling our intellectual life. We can attain a recommitment to moral values – without puritannical excesses.”