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The Everything Expert: a review of My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message by Amitai Etzioni (ROBERT S. BOYNTON, July 14, 2003, The Nation)

Etzioni's media profile faded in the late 1990s. The communitarian message didn't feel so fresh, and some of its policies seemed downright creepy. Despite Etzioni's embrace of Buberian "dialogue," his presentations felt more like monologues: No matter what the subject, "balancing rights and responsibilities" was always the answer. In 1994 the Guardian asked, "Is Etzioni just a Jerry Falwell in cap and gown? Could communitarianism be a thinking person's Moral Majority?" Etzioni dutifully records that the movement's media citations peak in the mid-1990s. "By the late 1990s, there were more and more days, then weeks, when no one called. Invitations to speak and to attend conferences ceased to pose scheduling problems; there were no longer any who wanted me to be in two places at the same time."

Much of the difficulty had to do with his "third way" communitarian message. The political blood-sport of the Clinton era made Etzioni's plea for nonpartisanship sound naïve, if not disingenuous. If Clinton could gut welfare while simultaneously praising communitarianism ("You are my inspiration," Clinton told Etzioni one New Year's Eve), maybe the movement was more style than substance. Were communitarian ideas merely protective coloration for politicians of the left and right? Was a movement admired by Bill Bennett, Dick Morris and George W. Bush itself worth admiring?

And the more closely people considered Etzioni's proposals, the more it became apparent that many were either stunningly obvious ("If the advocates of civil rights and those of public safety would stop butting heads, we would see all kind of ways to advance our security while minimizing intrusions on our liberty") or absurdly utopian (a "megalogue" on values between members of a super "community of communities"). Wish-and-make-it-so public policy.

I think the reason communitarianism never had the impact of, say, neoconservativism has to do with its message as well as its method of
implementing its ideas. Communitarianism speaks the language of reform, not revolution. It seeks to temper the primacy of the individual, to tame the logic of the market, to alleviate our reliance on government and its laws. It is more "liberalism rightly understood" than an ideology in its own right. Etzioni is less a prophet for a new idea than a publicist for a worthy, but not particularly novel, point of view.

Liberalism rightly understood--a liberalism which supposes responsibilities as well as recognizing rights; which tempers individuality; which tames logic of the market; which doesn't rely on government--is indeed a worthy, even a classic philosophy, that of our Founders and of Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville and Albert Jay Nock and myriad other great figures in the history of Anglo-American thought. It is reformist, even counter-revolutionary, precisely because the democratic revolution had already been won (largely in Britain in the 17th Century) by the time they all wrote. Our task as citizens of liberal societies is not revolution but perfection of the revolution already won.

If communitarianism has a great weakness though--and I believe it does, despite the generally high regard in which I hold Mr. Etzioni and his fellow believers--it lies in the failure to recognize that it must be essentially a retrograde rather than a progressive movement if it is to vindicate its eminently sensible critique of modernity. The community and civil society in which they rightly place so much faith are competitors with government and in particular with the social welfare state. The Communitarian Epoch can not be realized in conjunction with an era of big government, but will only come as we return to the social structure of an earlier day, when individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities, churches, and the like resume their place at the center of our lives and the role of government is drastically diminished. That's a difficult reality for folk of the Left--which most communitarians are or were--to grapple with and they've by and large failed to do so. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 30, 2003 11:50 AM