The Spirit of Community

March 1, 1993
Arguing that Americans must assume responsibilities commensurate with their rights, Etzioni, a founder of the Responsive Community movement, accessibly describes the movement's tenets of societal reconstruction. Communitarians, he avers, are neither majoritarians nor puritans, but believe that societal morality must be shored up through policies that strengthen child care, discourage divorce, promote moral education in schools and require high school graduates to perform national service. He calls for local communities to foster volunteerism and for a balance between self-help and social justice. Criticizing libertarians, Etzioni suggests moderate restraints on privacy like sobriety checkpoints and greater testing for HIV. To combat hate speech, he encourages not censorship but more speech. Perhaps least controversial is his Naderesque advocacy of public financing of elections, a ban on PACs and free broadcast time for candidates. Etzioni slights the question of income redistribution and the influence of pop culture, but his manifesto is a worthy starting point for debate.

April 1, 1993
Etzioni, who has acquired an international reputation for his advocacy of the "communitarian" point of view, defines communitarianism as a movement designed to "bring about the changes in values, habits, and public policies that will allow us to do for society what the environmental movement seeks to do for nature: to safeguard and enhance our future." In this book, he sets forth an agenda for correcting the "imbalance" between rights and responsibilities in American society. His agenda is focused in particular on rebuilding families and schools to instill in our citizens a sense of responsibility to the interests of the community as a whole. While many of Etzioni's recommendations are grounded in common sense, his book fails to grapple with the many important philosophical issues raised by his dual critique of liberalism and conservatism. A more satisfying study from a similar perspective is Philip Selznick's The Moral Commonwealth ( LJ 10/1/92). Recommended for larger libraries.-- Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York

Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 1993
It's very hard not to think, again and again, while reading this civic wake-up call, that "this" is the platform Clinton and Bush and Perot all should have run on. Etzioni, once a White House employee, is as distressed as many of the rest of us are at the lack of civility, citizenship, and fellow feeling in contemporary America. But he and others he's attracted into the nascent communitarian movement have a plausible, commonsensical program for restoring equanimity to our currently fractious republic. He pleads that we can shore up our morals in our families, schools, and communities because we agree on more "values" than we often think we do: for instance, if we can't agree on abortion, we can agree that lying and coercive violence are wrong. He argues that we must stress responsibility to each other as much as, and presently probably more than, individual or status rights: for instance, businesses that employ teenagers should recognize, besides their right to cheap labor, their responsibility not to exhaust kids' energies for school. He says that we the people must do the work of political reform, kicking the PACs not only off of Capitol Hill but out of our state legislatures, where it's easy to demonstrate their influence is more baleful. Moreover, he's full of concrete suggestions for realizing those major aims without trampling the Bill of Rights and enabling demagogues. George Bush hollowly promised a kinder, gentler America. Etzioni and his fellow communitarians show how that promise might be fulfilled. ((Reviewed Mar. 15, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)