Amitai Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni was a German-born Israeli-American sociologist known both for his early work on the sociology of organizations and for founding communitarianism as an organized social and political movement in the late twentieth century. In The Active Society (1968) he examined how modern societies could become more self-aware and self-directing social actors capable of guiding their own change, and from the 1990s onward he argued, in works such as The Spirit of Community (1993), that individual rights needed to be balanced against social responsibilities and the health of community institutions, a position that shaped public policy debate on the proper relationship between the individual, the community, and the state.