Amitai Etzioni (1929–2023)

Amitai Etzioni was born Werner Falk to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. He was only four years old when the Nazi regime came to power in 1933. Both of his parents fled the country, and he was smuggled out to meet them in Italy. The family was stuck in Athens, Greece for a year, unable to enter the British Mandate of Palestine until their paperwork was resolved. Finally, he began to learn Hebrew at their new home in Haifa. At this time, he adopted the Hebrew first name Amitai. In 1946, at age 17, he dropped out of high school to join the Palmach, the elite fighting force of Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community. He took the Hebrew surname Etzioni, which he had used as a pen name when he started writing at age 15. After fighting in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, Etzioni spent a year studying at a special academic institute established by Martin Buber. In 1951, he enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology. In 1957, he went to the USA to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a research assistant to Seymour Martin Lipset and received his PhD in sociology in 1958. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in New York that same year, and rose to become a full professor and the chairman of the Department of Sociology in 1969. From 1979 to 1980, he served as a senior adviser to the White House and in the latter year became the first University Professor at George Washington University. In 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. In 1989, he founded the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics (SASE), an international, interdisciplinary organization, and served as its first president. The following year, he founded the Communitarian Network, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization dedicated to support 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 to 2004. Etzioni was a member of the Science Information Council of the National Science Foundation, and a member of the Social Problems Research Committee of the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as a consultant to many organizations. He contributed more than 80 articles to professional journals and books and wrote numerous books, of which the best known is The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (1968). He frequently appeared as a commentator in the news media.