The Monochrome Society [Hardcover]

Amitai Etzioni (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Forum Books | Publication Date: May 1, 2001

Amitai Etzioni is one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our day, a man synonymous with the ideas of communitarianism. In this book, Etzioni challenges those who argue that diversity or multiculturalism is about to become the governing American creed. On the surface, America may seem like a fractured mosaic, but the country is in reality far more socially monochromatic and united than most observers have claimed.

In the first chapter, Etzioni presents a great deal of evidence that Americans, whites and African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans, new immigrants and decedents of the Pilgrims, continue to share the same core of basic American values and aspirations.

He goes on to show that we need not merely a civil but also a good society, one that nurtures virtues. He assesses key social institutions that can serve such a society ranging from revived holidays to greater reliance on public shaming. The most effective sources of bonding and of shared ideas about virtue, he insists throughout, come from the community, not from the state.

Etzioni also challenges moral relativists who argue that we have no right to "impose" our moral values on other societies. He responds to those who fear that a cohesive community must also be one that is oppressive, authoritarian, and exclusive. And he explores and assesses possible new sources and definitions of community, including computer-mediated communities and stakeholding in corporations.

By turns provocative and reassuring, the chapters here cut to the heart of several of our most pressing social and political issues. The book is further evidence of Etzioni's enduring place in contemporary thought.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Is America still a melting pot? Amitai Etzioni thinks so. Grappling with campus identity politics and burgeoning numbers of racial minorities, The Monochrome Society makes a case for Americans' basic sameness. Our differences are mostly skin-deep, Etzioni contends, and America's multihued skin belies its essentially monochromatic beliefs. He writes: "America is blessed with an economic and political system as well as culture and core values and much else that, while far from flawless, is embraced by most Americans of all races and ethnic groups." Society is not hopelessly fragmented; today's commonalities hold the key to tomorrow's problems.

Etzioni is one of the leading advocates of communitarianism, a school of thought that argues that moral problems are best addressed with reference to community, to shared ideals, and to tradition. Not content with the aeries of theory, Etzioni takes up a number of controversial public policy questions in The Monochrome Society, such as public shaming, Internet filters for children, and virtual communities. His conclusions are sometimes uncomfortable, but his arguments are well stocked with empirical evidence and engaging conversation with the best thinkers in academia and politics. --Eric de Place

From Publishers Weekly

"Young drug dealers, caught for the first time peddling, should be sent home with their heads shaved and without their pants instead of being jailed," proposed noted sociologist Etzioni (The New Golden Rule) to his more liberal friends, who rejected his idea forthrightly. But in "Is Shaming Shameful?," one of 13 essays here, he makes the case that a community's cultivated sense of personal shame including signs on the lawns of pedophiles and DUI bumper stickers on the cars of convicted drunk drivers is a civil, and useful, form of social regulation and inculcation of personal responsibility. Always provocative and thoughtful, he charts how racial polarities are changing and potentially disappearing in U.S. culture, and what this means for a society based on the contradiction of pluralism and uniform national identity. While some of Etzioni's suggestions such as public shaming, the promotion of "virtues" over "values" and his arguments against extending the First Amendment to children may appear to line up with the political and religious right, he is careful in his dialogue here with Robert P. George to separate himself from traditionally conservative politics. Though Etzioni, a professor at George Washington University, is frequently extremely insightful, as in his discussion of the social role that public holidays play in structuring moral education within the family unit, his theoretical claims can also feel shortsighted. He doesn't, for instance, consider possible vigilantism against those publicly shamed. But even when inflammatory, Etzioni is always thoughtful and deliberate.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691070903
• ISBN-13: 978-0691070902
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,100,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Dr. Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University for 20 years; part of that time as the Chairman of the department. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978 before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980, Dr. Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. From 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Etzioni served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1994-95, and in 1989-90 was the founding president of the international Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 1990, he founded the Communitarian Network, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to shoring up the moral, social and political foundations of society. He was the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, the organization's quarterly journal, from 1991-2004. In 1991, the press began referring to Dr. Etzioni as the 'guru' of the communitarian movement.

Dr. Etzioni is the author of numerous books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), The New Golden Rule (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 1997 Tolerance Book Award, The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown Books, 1993), and The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics, (New York: Free Press, 1988). His most recent books are My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Outside of academia, Dr. Etzioni's voice is frequently heard in the media.

In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

Also in 2001, Dr. Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association's Outstanding Contribution Award.

Dr. Etzioni is married and has five sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Two Communitarianisms?, May 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Monochrome Society (Hardcover)

Etzioni has written an emphatically modern book. His interest is in how and what kind of community can be built out of the materials modernity has to offer. His characteristic move is to turn what others see as infertile ground for community into seedbeds of virtue. Many fear that increasing ethnic diversity will divide America into separate camps and make it less communitarian. Etzioni, in the title essay, argues that such diversity, properly understood, will weaken identity politics and make America more communitarian. Many fear that the Internet, like television, will entice its users away from meaningful contact with flesh and blood human beings. In a nuanced essay on virtual communities, Etzioni argues that virtual communities have important advantages that face-to-face communities lack, and should be combined with them. Few readers will find all of Etzioni's arguments persuasive but together they add up to a powerful defense against the oft repeated charge that communitarianism is nostalgic or moribund.

The Monochrome Society also carries forward an argument Etzioni has made before about the advantages of modern communities. Many fear that the revival of community will also revive unwanted invasions of privacy, and dangerous restrictions on freedom. But Etzioni argues that this fear is unwarranted in contemporary pluralistic societies, in which individuals are "able to choose, to a significant extent, the communities to which they are psychologically committed" Others have the opposite fear, that communities in contemporary pluralistic societies are too weak to foster virtue. But Etzioni argues that the weakness of contemporary communities, while troubling, is also exaggerated. The story of a "woman, convicted of welfare fraud [who] preferred to be jailed rather than wear a sign admitting, "I stole food from poor people," indicates the moral authority of at least one modern community, and Etzioni has many such stories to tell. Modernity has weakened communities, so that they will not be puritanical, while leaving them some resources, so that their task of fostering social virtues will not be quixotic.

In this way, Etzioni plants his communitarianism firmly on the middle ground between extreme advocates of liberty and extreme advocates of community. However, it is hard to see exactly where Etzioni stands on this vast middle ground because The Monochrome Society contains two communitarian visions. Call one Communitarianism A and the other Communitarianism B.

Communitarianism A, represented in such essays as "Is Shaming Shameful," argues that liberty depends on moral norms that are transmitted partly through the laws but mainly through institutions like the family and civic associations. It argues, also, that a good society promotes a limited set of core values and virtues. To support the arguments of Communitarianism A, one need not be a communitarian. One can be a liberal, like Arthur Schlesinger, who defends the idea that the United States is defined by a set of core values every bit as forcefully as Etzioni does in "The Monochrome Society." Or one can be a neoconservative; indeed, the arguments of Communitarianism A find a natural home in the pages of the Public Interest. Communitarianism A is directed not against liberalism but against liberalism gone extreme.

If the Public Interest is a natural home for the arguments of Communitarianism A, Dissent is a natural home for those of Communitarianism B, represented in such essays as "The Post-Affluent Society." Unlike Communitarianism A, Communitarianism B makes a frontal assault not only on certain extreme liberalisms but also on classical liberalism, or at least on the commercial spirit that has long been associated with it. Communitarianism B cannot utter the following words and phrases without putting them in scare quotes: "private property"; the "their" in "their property"; the "natural" in "natural rights." When Etzioni espouses Communitarianism B, he sympathizes with the voluntary simplicity movement, which views wanting more than one needs as at least prima facie evidence of an unhealthy concern with status. He writes hopefully of the emergence of a moderate counterculture grounded in postmaterialist values. Communitarianism B is not inconsistent with Communitarianism A but goes far beyond it in its desire for a transvaluation of the values of modern liberal societies.

Moreover, Communitarianism A is inegalitarian because it emphasizes how moral norms are internalized by "nonrational means, such as "group enthusiasm generated through rituals and appeals." When Etzioni espouses Communitarianism A, he tend to speak of elite "designers" of community who, with the help of expert knowledge, determine how to balance face-to-face and virtual elements of community, or how to "recast" holidays to serve the needs of communities better. Communitarianism B, on the other hand, emphasizes dialogue, a highly egalitarian mode of generating the core values to which a community devotes itself. But there is a tension between egalitarian dialogue and inegalitarian persuasion that does not dissolve altogether in Etzioni's observation that human beings are "both persuadable and deliberative creatures."

Similarly, Communitarianism A emphasizes the authority of communities, where authority is understood to restrict the scope of rational choice severely. In a section of "Social Norms: The Rubicon of Social Science," Etzioni argues that many, though not all, norms "are passed from one generation to the next; and they derive authority by virtue of their being a part of tradition rather than reflecting deliberations." Communitarianism B, on the other hand, is so reluctant to restrict individual freedom that the same tradition whose authority contrasts so sharply with reason in one essay becomes merely "one major source of options people consider," in another, in which Etzioni also insists that the "conflict is not between choice and tradition." The Monochrome Society defends communitarianism well against a number of stock charges. But perhaps it does not do enough to rescue communitarianism from a charge Etzioni is impatient with, namely that it is vague. Communitarianism A and communitarianism B are not contradictory, but they define such different visions of community on such different points on the political spectrum that their tensions cannot easily be ignored.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roadmap to the Good Society?, June 18, 2001

By 

Sean Patrick Donlan (Dublin, Ireland.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Monochrome Society (Hardcover)

The Monochrome Society (along with the recent Next: The Road to the Good Society) continues Amitai Etzioni's role as a leading voice in 'communitarian' thought. In chapters ranging from social philosophy to sociology, law, and social policy, he pursues practical means of understanding and evaluating the challenges of modern culture and society. What's more, Professor Etzioni brings clarity and civility to an often confusing and combustible public debate.

At the book's more philosophical end, Etzioni stresses the complex intellectual and affective sources of individual choice. One example, explored in 'Suffer the Children', is the penchant of civil libertarian groups to portray children as 'mini-adults'. Based largely on tacit and deeply questionable assumptions about human agency, this approach significantly distorts attempts to address the needs of children. More generally, in 'Social norms: the Rubicon of Social Science', Etzioni notes that the failure of jurists and political theorists to appreciate social norms may seriously effect the approach to, and efficacy of, social policy. A person's choices, he writes, 'reflect the culture or values of their community, their social formulations of the good.... often in ways of which they are unaware (229)'. Similarly, Etzioni asks 'Is Shaming Shameful?' or is shaming, on the basis of social norms, a more humane, effective, and democratic alternative to punishment?

While The Monochrome Society revolves around a 'concern with social virtues and the social foundation on which they rest (xiii)', most of the book focuses on specific public issues. Etzioni discusses, for example, both the possibility of cross-cultural moral judgments and the related, surprisingly widespread, agreement on values among America's diverse racial and ethnic groups. In 'The Post-Affluent Society', he notes the movement towards, and virtues of, a lifestyle of 'voluntary simplicity' and modest consumption. He writes as well about the role of holidays, of a 'stakeholder' approach to corporate governance, and the potential of 'virtual' communities. Each of these chapters provide hopeful and constructive contributions to public debate.

Throughout the book, Professor Etzioni underscores the fact that advocates of 'civil society' must be clearer about the substance of the institutions they champion. A voluntary group may as easily be dedicated to racial hatred as to bowling. Ultimately, it is the part institutions may play in the creation of a 'good' society that matters most. Written in an uncomplicated style and gracious manner, The Monochrome Society is a significant and practical contribution to that end.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strengthening Society's Moral Voice, July 2, 2001

By 

Ronald B. McCabe (Wisconsin Rapids, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Monochrome Society (Hardcover)

Amitai Etzioni is one of the most insightful observers of American society, a brilliant intellectual, and a great writer. He has best articulated the political and social "third way" between Left and Right that has powerfully shaped the agendas of the Clinton administration, Tony Blair's New Labour Party in Great Britain, and the new administration of George W. Bush. The Monochrome Society can serve as either a provocative introduction to Etzioni's thinking for first-time readers or as a fascinating demonstration of the power of communitarian thought for readers familiar with his work. Neither group should miss this book.