Word: etzioni
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...widespread is this sort of disaffection, says author John Taylor in a sizzling New York magazine article, that a double-barreled social phenomenon now threatens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights industry" -- the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly asserted, and whose transgression is -- always -- a matter for outcry...
...nation began fighting in the Persian Gulf. But a rethinking of the relationship between a citizen and his country is particularly apt at a time when America is waging its first major war in this century with a volunteer army. Encouraged by the suddenly reawakened sense of national community, Etzioni observes that often "war brings out latent things in a society...
...intellectual movements these days tend to be born over lunch. Supply-side economics flowered in 1974 when economist Arthur Laffer drew tax and revenue curves on a cocktail napkin. For communitarianism, the seminal breaking of the bread came last summer at the faculty club at George Washington University, where Etzioni teaches; his luncheon companion was political scientist William Galston, the issues director of Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign. Sensing a shared perspective, Etzioni plied Galston with hypothetical conflicts. Are sobriety checkpoints for drivers of motor vehicles an infringement of civil liberties? What should the police be legitimately allowed...
These questions represented to Etzioni case studies in which the aggressive ! defense of individual legal rights is at odds with the safety of the larger community. But Galston, who signed on as a co-editor of Responsive Community, stresses that his own approach "is not to water down or trump certain rights in the name of something else. Instead, we need to think in a fresh way about what rights we do have...
...Etzioni seems animated by his own agenda: intense hostility to legal efforts by civil libertarians to restrict police behavior and uphold individual rights. He says, "I'm hard put to find any organization that is so actively opposed to communitarian issues as the A.C.L.U." The American Civil Liberties Union already has critics to spare; George Bush made it a major theme of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Moreover, A.C.L.U. executive director Ira Glasser argues, "The problem with the Etzioni group is that they assume incorrectly that individual rights are not a public good...