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Sandcastle of Theory

A Critique of Amitai Etzioni’s Communitarianism

University of Reading, England

Amitai Etzioni’s communitarianism offers an attractive but impractical vision. The global threats that he cites as engines for a communitarian future are not convincing as the triggers for epochal benign change in human security arrangements. Communitarianism has four especially fatal flaws: it is too large an idea and as a consequence, it overreaches; it poses the wrong question, and therefore provides a wrong answer; it rests on the fallacy that history can register a grand benign transformation in security affairs; and it assumes, unreasonably, that struggles for power and influence among the greater powers will not occur in the future.

Key Words: communitarianism • community • realism • order • culture

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