Amitai Etzioni RIP

Today I want to celebrate the life of one of the most interesting sociologists of the modern age - Amitai Etzioni may have lived to the grand old age of 94 but I was still sad to learn of his death this May. I vividly remember reading his “Social Problems” at University in the early 1960s and being deeply impressed with his 3-fold classification of ideologies; he was one of the architects of Bliar’s “Third Way”; and, on his 90^th birthday, was still convening civil dialogues on the variety of subjects for which he was famous but, generally, had to do with his lifelong search for the good life.

But it was German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck who brilliantly caught the man in this tribute

I first met Etzioni in the fall of 1972. Having just earned my Diploma in sociology at the University of Frankfurt, I was lucky to have been offered a quite generous scholarship that allowed me to study for two years at an American university of my choice, including travel to New York by one of the two remaining ocean liners, the QEII. For me, this was a welcome opportunity to leave behind the intellectual and political confusions of Frankfurt at the time, where I felt hard-pressed to choose between an academic and a political career. As to where in the United States I wanted to study, I didn’t need to think long. Sociology in Frankfurt was then divided between the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics, the so-called “Frankfurt School” being housed in the former. Experience had convinced me that if I wanted to make a contribution to the practical pursuit of democratic socialism – which I definitely did want – “critical theory”, as it called itself, was not enough. So I sometimes took classes in the other, less esoteric branch of sociology, among them a seminar held by the late Wolfgang Zapf that was devoted entirely to Etzioni’s book of 1968, “The Active Society”. That book, scoffed at by critical theorists who at the time were becoming enamored with a normative version of structural functionalism, was a revelation to me. Since with the scholarship I had the means to do what I wanted, I decided to indulge myself and go to Columbia to study with Amitai Etzioni.

Today “The Active Society” is almost forgotten. It never really registered with the sociological mainstream, for which it was too long, too complex, too much political science, too political I presume. To me, it is to this day one of the great books of the sociological tradition, perhaps even its culmination: a heroic attempt to give Parsonian functionalism, the dominant macro-sociological paradigm of the time, an activist twist – conceiving societies as self-governing rather than self-stabilizing, as collective actors rather than collective entities, actively self-transforming rather than passively being kept in a preestablished equilibrium by nature-like mechanisms of social integration. The book, in short, undertakes to explore how a human society should and must be organized to be able democratically to take charge of its future – no longer to be subject to sociological laws which it has no choice but to trust, but rather to discover and discuss alternative futures for itself, choose between them, and make real what it has chosen.

If this was close to themes in the Marxian tradition – the end of prehistory and the beginning of history – Etzioni didn’t really care, and he may not have been aware of it. Capitalism appears in the book’s index only once, pointing to a passage where it is claimed no longer to be a problem as Keynes had devised the tools to discipline it. All that was now required was for society to learn how to deploy those tools to make capitalism serve the collectively determined collective interests of society. The late 1960s when the book was written were the heyday of postwar democratic capitalism, and it was not only Etzioni who was convinced that the issue was no longer to fight capital but to build an effective democracy able to put it to good use. It was in the crises of the 1970s that the political optimism of the Golden Years vanished, and with it the hope for a politicized social theory offering “guidance” – one of Etzioni’s key terms – for a democratic politics in a democratized society.

Soon I found myself hired as research assistant, to work with him on the second edition of his first major book “A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations”, published in 1961, a standard text at the time in the sociology of organizations. I never learned more on the craft and art of doing sociology than in those twelve months or so.

For those who want to know more about the man, this is an excellent 90 page piece which does full justice to him.

And this 2017 retrospective gives a very useful flavour of the breadth of his writing

In the 1990s he became famous for his commitment to communitarianism