On May 31, Amitai Etzioni died quietly at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 94. As an academic and public intellectual, Amitai was a preeminent authority on socioeconomics and communitarianism. Amitai described communitarianism as “an attempt to break out of the age-old debate between the left and the right, between liberals and conservatives.” He set as his life’s work to lay out a “moral agenda based on convincing people rather than coercing them, on a sense of responsibility people truly assume rather than on duties imposed on them.” Central to his world view was the thesis that “instead of relying on the law to promote a good society, we should primarily use the moral voice.”
Amitai was a past president of the American Sociological Association, chairman of the Sociology Department at Columbia University, and the first University Professor at George Washington University, retiring at the end of 2022. He served as an adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He was a prolific writer and speaker, authoring more than 30 books, among them “The Active Society,” “My Brother’s Keeper” and “Spirit of Community.” Amitai spoke to the wider public through innumerable op-eds, law review articles, blogs, panel discussions and interviews. In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations.
Amitai was born in 1929 in Germany with the family name Werner Falk. He was fortunate to escape the Nazis and the Holocaust. Many others in his extended family did not. He eventually made his way to British Mandate Palestine, where he worked on a kibbutz and participated as a teenager in the successful struggle for Israeli independence; there, he took the name Amitai Etzioni. He emerged from that war as a strong advocate for peace.
Amitai often said his greatest pride was his family that included five sons and 11 grandchildren. Amitai married Hava Halevy in 1953, and they had two sons — Ethan and Oren — prior to divorcing. In 1966, Amitai married Minerva Morales, and they had three sons: Michael, David and Benjamin. In 1985, Minerva died in an automobile accident.
Amitai has written of his grief over her death and that of his son Michael, who died of a heart attack in 2006. When he married Dr. Patricia Kellogg in 1992, Amitai welcomed her two her children and, upon their birth, two granddaughters into his extended family.