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Amitai Etzioni is director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies and University Professor at George Washington University. A sociologist by training and the author of a number of highly regarded academic works, he is best known as the founder of the communitarian movement, in which capacity he has had a significant impact on public policy in the 1990s. He is the editor of a journal, The Responsive Community, dedicated to communitarian studies; his most recent book is The Limits of Privacy (Basic Books). Michael Cromartie interviewed Etzioni in Washington, D.C., in March of this year.
Can you define communitarianism for us?
I started my social science training in Jerusalem under Martin Buber. Buber had written not only I and Thou but also Paths in Utopia, which is a very communitarian book. I spent a year with him in a private school where I saw a lot of him and read a lot as well. That left a very deep mark on me. While in the United States he often would quote the communitarians of the 1890s. While the Frenchman Emile Durkheim is considered the father of sociology, it is the German, Ferdinand Tonnies, who created the most important distinction in the discipline, between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). This distinction still dominates the social science community. Tonnies contrasted the small village community with the more impersonal atmosphere of the city. In the village, people know each other intimately, and as a result, the village fosters virtuous behavior. But it also leaves little room for individuality. In the city, people are relatively anonymous and therefore free to do what they please. But they are also no longer under the community's watchful eye. That very well captures the sociological side of communitarian thinking. Our argument has been that people need to cherish individual rights while at the same time taking the common good into account. That is communitarianism in a nutshell.
I should mention the "apple" that hit this Newton's forehead. I was paying for my sins by teaching ethics at the Harvard Business School, where I had been terribly unsuccessful. There I discovered that young Americans feel very strongly that they have the right, if they are charged with a crime, to be judged by a jury of their peers. But when they themselves are asked to serve on a jury, they say, "Find somebody else."
For some time now, we've been hearing that privacy is under siege. Why have you written a book advocating limits to privacy?
While there are many areas in which our privacy is threatened—by merchants, for example, who specialize in selling information about us—there are other areas in which less privacy would be enormously beneficial to the common good.
Last year the press violated Vice President Gore's privacy by publishing the fact that he gave less than $400 to charity in 1997. There was quite a bit of fuss about the revelation. After all, in the liberal understanding, his private life has nothing to do with his public life. Well, I am willing to lay a hefty wager that in 1998 Al Gore gave considerably more to charity, and that as we speak, there are scores of politicians who are phoning their accountants, reminding them to be sure to give more to charity. That is the way a village works. True, we should all have good consciences and do what is right all around, but most of us need the occasional helping hand. It takes a village to prevent the sin.
It was the feminists who first pointed out that the distinction between public and private is too simplistic. We do care about what happens in the home. If a parent abuses a child, we care. If a husband beats his wife, we care. Suppose you work in an emergency room where someone brings in a child who has cigarette burn marks on her arm. What is the first thing we do? Do we violate the privacy of that home by going and asking questions and checking? The notion that what is happening in the privacy of the home is none of our business is just one of those slogans that has no reality to it. We may properly argue about which things we should check, but there is no absolute distinction between public and private. I know I am going to stir a hornet's nest here, but this is my calling.
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