Books, Arts & Manners: Let’s Multilogue!

The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, by Amitai Etzioni (Crown, 323 pp., $22)

A FEW years ago the social scientist Amitai Etzioni and a number of like-minded colleagues began reminding Americans that our individual rights must be interpreted in conjunction with our duties to the community. These new “communitarians” note that we have come to think of rights as things we possess only in opposition to our communities. American “rugged individualism” had degenerated into the insistence upon our individual right todoaswe wish—regardless of the effect on anyone else. The result is that the families, churches, and local associations in which we learn to treat one another decently are ignored and undermined in the name of each individual’s “right” to create his own lifestyle.

BF

About the Author

Bruce Frohnen

Featured Tags

The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, by Amitai Etzioni (Crown, 323 pp., $22)

A FEW years ago the social scientist Amitai Etzioni and a number of like-minded colleagues began reminding Americans that our individual rights must be interpreted in conjunction with our duties to the community. These new “communitarians” note that we have come to think of rights as things we possess only in opposition to our communities. American “rugged individualism” had degenerated into the insistence upon our individual right todoaswe wish—regardless of the effect on anyone else. The result is that the families, churches, and local associations in which we learn to treat one another decently are ignored and undermined in the name of each individual’s “right” to create his own lifestyle.