The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda.

Imagine, if during a recent perusal of the book racks in airport or train station, along with the array of "success in business" and the various self-help books, one encountered a different genre: a book about how to be a better citizen, complete with suggestions for "fostering the commons." Imagine a book which provided serious analysis of the contemporary neglect of the nation's social infrastructure along with stimulating examples of countertrends, proposed a public philosophy which tried to break out of the prevailing liberal-conservative argument, and then asked you to join a movement based on these ideas. That, in rough outline, is the structure and strategy of Amitai Etzioni's communitarian clarion, The Spiritof Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda.

Etzioni, a widely read sociologist who has known government service during the Carter administration, presents a useful overview of the main lines of that body of thinking he terms communitarian. The themes of The Spirit of Community have emerged from several years of discussion and debate centered around The Responsive Community, the journal which Etzioni has guided since its foundation in 1991. The book concludes with "The Responsive Communitarian Platform," a document now beating the signatures of a wide range of endorsers, of whom this reviewer is one. Thus, while the book is very much its author's creation in style and tone, it presents itself as a voice of a larger community of discussion.

The book is divided into theoretical chapters, which come at the beginning and the end, and a series of topical chapters in which social analysis is interspersed with case studies and examples. The topics progress from the family to the school, to a view of local institutions, importantly including religious institutions, as the mainstay of communities, and then to policy issues such as safety and health. AI the climax of this topical order comes a discussion of communitarian politics in which the recovery of the moral voice through the building of social movement emerges as the "Archimedean leverage point of change."

Etzioni's theme is the need to strengthen "the moral voice" in American society, a voice which speaks to the capacity for "reasoned judgment" and "virtuous action," a voice whose natural home and practical condition is "the community." As a sociologist, Etzioni is not naive about the notion of community (though his emphasis upon the term inevitably calls up strong reactions). Etzioni's examples repeatedly give bite to the sociological truism that individuals need a social ecology of viable families and community institutions in order to develop and function.

The present danger to American society, argues Etzioni, comes not from repressive moralism, although he admits that this certainly exists, but from the social disintegration which attends moral fragmentation. "As rights exploded [after the 1960s], and responsibilities receded, as the 'moral infrastructure' crumbled, so did the public interest." As the examples of life under despotic regimes indicate, individual rights cannot be sustained apart from the willingness of citizens to take their responsibilities seriously. And that willingness needs communities for its nurture and support. Etzioni argues that the attenuation of the "moral voice" of communities-in the name of individual freedom--has been a major factor in a widely noted decline in the quality of life, as distrust, fear, crime, and addiction blight increasingly more human relations. The result is that individuals are further isolated, ironically opening the way toward acceptance of an authoritarian police state as the savior from an intolerable anarchy. In this perspective, much of the current liberal anxiety about the imposition of public standards appears myopic if not absurd. The historical current, Etzioni insists, is clearly flowing the other way, toward expansion of individual discretion. Conservative senators may fulminate against the National Endowment for the Arts' support of the Mapplethorpe exhibition, but even in a traditionally conservative city like Cincinnati no Jury would support its suppression. As this example illustrates. Etzioni's chief opponents are "radical individualists," a moral type he finds common among the cultural elite, though not only there. Radical individualism is marked by a strong "disinclination to lay moral claims:' preferring when at all possible to present objections to socially obnoxious activity as the expression of personal prelerenee. This moral posture, which philosophers identify as emotivism, or the belief that all moral utterances are no more than statements of personal preference, has for Etzioni become a major contributor to the suffocation of that "moral voice" which he seeks to make legitimate.

The Spirit of Community seeks to carve out a new consensus, one attentive to the social roots of individual well-being. The specific feature of Etzioni's argument is that this consensus must not be intimidated by socially and intellectually fashionable emotivists into playing down the centrality of "the moral voice." Politically, there is evidence that Etzioni is onto something significant. The cognitive style of technocracy-cum-emotivism lavored by many of the national elites seems to have worn thin on the electorate. By shifting the attention of a significant sector of public opinion and opinion-leaders toward "the moral voice" embodied in the struggle to foster living communities, Etzioni is helping define the direction American public discourse must take if there is to be a democratic renewal. As an interIocutor of some of the elites he criticizes, Etzioni may also be providing them with a means toward reinventing themselves for the nation's good as well as their own.