Amitai Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni
Professor Amitai Etzioni visited Community Links on July 15th 2009
Born	Werner Falk 4 January 1929 (1929-01-04) Cologne, Germany
Academic background
Alma mater	Hebrew University of Jerusalem University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Seymour Martin Lipset
Academic work
Institutions	George Washington University Harvard Business School Columbia University
Notable ideas	socioeconomics, communitarianism

Amitai Etzioni (born Werner Falk, 4 January 1929) is an Israeli-American sociologist, best known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He leads the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to support the moral, social, and political foundations of society. He was the founder of the communitarian movement in the early 1990s and established the Communitarian Network to disseminate the movement’s ideas. His writings emphasize the importance for all societies to have a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and between autonomy and order. In 2001, Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations, in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Etzioni is currently the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University.

Amitai Etzioni was born Werner Falk in Cologne, Germany in 1929 to a Jewish family. Etzioni's earliest memory is being thrown out of a car in Cologne, Germany in January 1933. Etzioni was only four years old when the car he was driving in made a sharp turn and in response, he grabbed a handle that opened the door. Etzioni was pulled back into the car at the last moment by his father, but as noted in his memoir, this memory foreshadowed the upcoming doom that would overtake his homeland during the Nazi rule. Later in 1933, Etzioni and his grandparents were walking through the forest next to Frankfurt when they came upon a forest fire. Suddenly, Hitler Youth ventured into the forest riding in two trucks. Etzioni's grandparents reacted by grabbing Etzioni and hiding behind nearby trees. The grandparents then took Etzioni and rushed down the hill without explaining to him what happened during their close encounter with the Nazi regime. When Etzioni had turned five, both of his parents had escaped to London to avoid the Nazi regime, which left Etzioni in the care of his grandparents. Etzioni was smuggled out of Germany soon afterwards to a train station in Italy by a non-Jewish relative who soon reunited Etzioni with his parents. Etzioni was stuck with his parents in Athens, Greece unable to enter Palestine since his family was awarded a bachelor permit instead of a family permit. The family was stuck midway between Germany and Haifa for a whole year. During this year, Etzioni attended a Greek school learning the language. When the paperwork was finally resolved, Etzioni found himself in Haifa, Israel in the winter of 1937 where he had to learn another language, Hebrew.