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Liberal Angst
| Article
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10166 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1993 |
2,171 Words |
| Author
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Charles J. Sykes
Charles J. Sykes is the author of The Hollow Men: Politics and
Corruption in Higher Education and ProfScam: Professors and
the Demise of Higher Education. His most recent project was
the National Review College Guide, which he coedited with Brad
Miner. |
THE SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY
Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda
Amitai Etzioni
New York: Crown Publishers, 1993
323 pp., $22.00
Communitarianism is a movement still heady with the excitement of its sudden celebrity and influence. That much is clear from the jacket photo on the cover of the movement's new manifesto, The Spirit of Community. Rather than picturing founder Amitai Etzioni in the usual authorial way, his publishers have included a somewhat grainy photo of an obviously pleased Etzioni sitting next to Al Gore at a "Communitarian Teach-In." Etzioni himself seems incapable of restraining a penchant for name-dropping--admirers of the movement, he tells us, include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry Cisneros, Jack Kemp, Alan Simpson, and, as we must all know by now, Bill Clinton.
As a candidate, Clinton's posturing as a "New Democrat" drew heavily on communitarian themes (in one campaign speech he mentioned the word responsibility twenty-eight times). His inaugural address was virtually a communitarian anthem. "It is time to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing, from our government or from each other," he declared. "Let us all take more responsibility, not only for ourselves, but for our communities and our country." Etzioni has been quoted as saying that Clinton "has communitarian bones in his body."
All of this is rather impressive for a movement that began with a meeting of fifteen ethicists, social philosophers, and social scientists in 1990.
Indeed, as Etzioni's book makes clear, much of the attention is deserved. Communitarians profess themselves to be weary of the usual ideological categories of liberal and conservative, right and left; and their ambition is nothing less than the creation of a "new social, philosophical, and political map."
While Etzioni tosses off assorted jabs at "authoritarians" on the right, he saves his heaviest ammunition for what he calls the radical individualists of the Left, represented in groups like the ACLU, which have advanced willy-nilly the concept of unfettered individual rights. Although it is clear that Etzioni is making his appeal to liberals, he sounds remarkably like a social conservative on issues ranging from multiculturalism and character education to family
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