Spirit of Community

by Amitai Etzioni

Book Overview

In The Spirit of Community/i>, Amitai Etzioni explains why the critical institutious of our society are in crisis and show what we can do to restore them.

Dr. Etzioni shares his beliefs that many of our problems can be trace to the broad range of individual rights many Americans feels they deserve.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671885243
• ISBN13: 9780671885243
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

We Want Liberty. Communism-Police State in New Guise.

We want LIBERTY. LIBERTY FIRST & FOREVER. Communism-Police State in New Guise. Amitai "Karl Marx" Etzioni is really just re-dressing the old Communist argument in the new form of Community. Community are by definion a form of coercion, i.e. police state. We do not want values, lifestyles, thinking imposed by the community. We want and need LIBERTY. We want free speech, free association. People want to be free to live their own life and free from a life they do not want. Readers Beware. Community is just one word for a police state, like the Marx-Lenin police state that caused 50 million death in the 20th. century. We want LIBERTY, not the false, fraud, sham called community.

Common Sense Revisted

Communitarianism, I believe, is the natural, common sense philosophy towards personal, social and political life that the majority of this nation holds. Before Dr. Etzioni and his cohorts in the DC area gathered, no one had put into words what many of us have felt and believed. The world is not one of absolutes; there are many shades of grey. Individual rights cannot rule supreme and the needs of the community cannot always overrule the needs of the individual. There has to be a middle ground and I believe this book speaks to that middle ground.Many people find it easy to complain and degrade our social and polical structures and people in general, without suggesting any solutions. Dr. Etzioni provides clearcut resolutions to the problems of our day, such as drug use, AIDS, and even the corruption of our politicians. What strikes me most about this book is how Etzioni shows that Americans have come to feel entitled to "rights" that are not really rights, and all this without having any responsibilities in turn.If you wonder constantly how the ACLU can mount so many campaigns against laws that seem perfectly reasonable to you, or if you are tired of hearing kids getting kicked out of school for giving a friend a cough drop (no drugs at all!!!) then you will enjoy this book. I couldn't put it down.