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

The Future of Capitalism - IV

“Acknowledgements” are normally the least-read section of any book – into which are pored often embarrassingly-excessive expression of thankful debts. Indeed if the book is American, the section will read like an Oscar speech.

But Paul Collier’s “Acknowledgements” (unusually in the end-section) made me think about the whole issue of who an author thinks (s)he is writing for – and how that affects the style and content of a book

He explains that, having started with a review of some books, he realised that what was really needed was

“a synthesis of moral philosophy, political economics, finance, economic geography, social psychology and social policy”   

and that he then proceeded to identify and work with a small “brains trust” of individuals in these various fields he was able to find within the enclaves of Oxford University

We imagine that an author is writing for us – if not personally, that he has a mental picture  of the sort of person likely to pick the book up…But Collier reveals here that the people whose opinion he sought and  listened to were a small group of specific individuals. This perhaps explains a couple of things - one of which I only noticed when I went back to reread the book. First, as I had signalled last week, I found it curious that he failed to acknowledge the range of others who have explored similar themes – from GDH Cole, through Paul Hirst to the Third Way and beyond. I’m sure Collier is familiar with those strands but perhaps not the specialists he consulted….

It’s rare for me to return to a book for a second, closer reading within a month of the first read. But it’s perhaps something I should do more often since, this time around, I found myself scribbling quite a few question marks and remarks against sections that I simply couldn’t understand. I had the feeling, quite frankly, that one of the experts on his Brain’s Trust had advised him to include something which he didn’t quite feel he could explain properly….

And, as several of the reviewers have noticed, there were too many sections which aere too scrappy and need a lot more thought….particularly in Part II in the chapters on the “ethical company, family and world”

Future of Capitalism - Useful References and follow-up reading

The wide ranging nature of Collier’s book threw up an unusually wide assortment of papers and blogs….

Branko Milanovic honoured it with two separate posts – the first suggesting that it smacked of “nostalgia for a past that never was”; the second exploring what he has to say about healthy families, organisations and worlds

The radical American economist James K Galbraith (son of JF) reviews it along with a new book from Joseph Stiglitz and a forthcoming one from Branko Milanovic

The author of “TheThird Pillar” can be heard discussing his book in transcript and on podcast

The Denmark Lesson; short piece commenting on Collier’s Danish comments

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). An overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas more than a decade after his death

Associationalism for 150 years – and still alive and well in Denmark; Kaspersen (2002)

Beyond the Third Way (Geyer 2001)

Can Democracies tackle illiberal and “inward-looking” drives?; Daniel Danaiu (Romanian Jounral of European Affairs June 2019) A broad-ranging overview of recent trends and writing by an ex-Governor of the Romanian National Bank

The Fix – how nations survive and thrive in a world in decline; Jonathan Tepperman (2016) one of the positive analyses selected by Collier

There’s a useful discussion here on how the concept of meritocracy has become obsolete…

Can the genie be put back in the bottle? part III of the discussion of Collier's Future of Capitalism

Half-way through writing this post I discovered that the great Branko Milanovic was also these days thinking and writing about Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism” but beat me by a day!

And another book has appeared suggesting that markets and the state (alone or combined) are not sufficient to deal with our social needs – by an ex-Governor of the Bank of India. It is The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Community Behind; Raghuram G. Rajan (2019) the main thrust of which can be found in this article,

To someone with my background, this critique is an obvious one. Indeed its relative rarity reflects the grip which technocrats have developed on our minds these past few decades.  

Our collective memories have become so short these days, people need to be reminded of the “Big Society” (Cameron 2010) and “The Third Way” (Blair 1997) both of which were doomed to failure by virtue of their elitist support and origins - although the “Third Way” was more philosophically grounded by the writings of Anthony Giddens. It was also less focused on Britain – with support from not only Bill Clinton but also Gerhard Schroeder (as witness this 1998 manifesto)

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..

The last post reminded us all that the discussion about the respective roles of state and market goes back at least a hundred years (and was evident in deeds if not words in the late 19^th century as both the UK and Germany started to respond to working class pressures); and suggested that there were two ways we could look at what might be called the “communitarian” option – as a set of policies and beliefs; or as an historical settlement reflecting specific conditions.

My suggestion of “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly sensible propositions was, I appreciate, a bit opaque. In phrasing it in this manner, I was conscious of the charge which the famous Angus Deaton had already made of Collier’s and Rajan’s books – that the “genie (in this case of “meritocracy”) could not be put back in the bottle”… meaning exactly what?? It’s odd that he just leaves the (obvious) question dangling at the end of his comments..

Does he perhaps mean that we have as a society experienced certain new things we will not readily give up? If so, what things?

Or has something contaminated the appreciation we had previously for certain values and behaviour? If so, what exactly is this contaminant of “meritocracy”? Michael Young wrote his famous “Rise of Meritocracy” as a satire in 1958 - its full title is actually The Rise of Meritocracy 1870-2033 – an essay on education and equality).

Is Angus Deaton really saying that human nature has changed so dramatically since 1970 or so that we no longer have the capacity to choose our own future? Whatever happened to “free will”?

It is understandable that Etzioni was unable to persuade his fellow north Americans to adopt “communitarianism” in the 1990s – in “the land of the free” its emphasis on social responsibilities perhaps smacks too much of the country’s early Puritan settlers – the decline of whose spirit I discussed last week - and of the contemporary Amash sect

I sense a lot of historical whitewashing going on in these exchanges. Paul Collier is quite open about his contempt for leftist writing (and seems particularly hostile to Wolfgang Streeck, a favourite of mine) – which explains the absence of some obvious names from the index to his book.And the “Third Way” scribblers are also absent (despite their centralist position) presumably because they have been guilty of ideological sloganizing….
But why is Paul Hirst and his associationalism missing from the book  - despite a recent celebration of his work? Perhaps the publisher is too left-wing? Or the phrase “associative democracy” too narrow for the scope of Collier’s book? Such excisions from the history book don’t do anyone any favours…

Collier refers to a talk he was invited to give to the Danish social democrats in 2017 where he met the new leader whom he recently praised in this article – which also suggests their party as a good example of the sort of pragmatism which he considers European social democracy needs these days - although a lot of us thought that New Labour's emphasis on "triangulation" and "evidence-based" approach was as pragmatic as you get......
 Remarkably, my googling had just unearthed this fascinating history of the development over a 150 year period of “Associationalism” in Denmark

My point therefore about “stress tests” is that clearly some countries are more disposed to communal ideas than others. Take, for example, my own country – Scotland. We may be part of o United “Kingdom” but the “1707 settlement” expressly retained our educational and religious freedoms in which schooling, for example, has always been more open; one of the most famous books about this bears the title “The Democratic Intellect”. And we have also been more open to ideas of support for community endeavour – with community planning and social enterprise being amongst the central planks of the Scottish government for the past 20 years.

Indeed there is an argument that it is the smaller countries who are most able to offer the sort of support for civilised ideas of the healthy family, organisation and society which Collier has made the core of his book.