The Monochrome Society
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Amitai Etzioni is one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our day, a man synonymous with the ideas of communitarianism. In this book, Etzioni challenges those who argue that diversity or multiculturalism is about to become the governing American creed. On the surface, America may seem like a fractured mosaic, but the country is in reality far more socially monochromatic and united than most observers have claimed.
In the first chapter, Etzioni presents a great deal of evidence that Americans, whites and African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans, new immigrants and decedents of the Pilgrims, continue to share the same core of basic American values and aspirations.
He goes on to show that we need not merely a civil but also a good society, one that nurtures virtues. He assesses key social institutions that can serve such a society ranging from revived holidays to greater reliance on public shaming. The most effective sources of bonding and of shared ideas about virtue, he insists throughout, come from the community, not from the state.
Etzioni also challenges moral relativists who argue that we have no right to "impose" our moral values on other societies. He responds to those who fear that a cohesive community must also be one that is oppressive, authoritarian, and exclusive. And he explores and assesses possible new sources and definitions of community, including computer-mediated communities and stakeholding in corporations.
By turns provocative and reassuring, the chapters here cut to the heart of several of our most pressing social and political issues. The book is further evidence of Etzioni's enduring place in contemporary thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Young drug dealers, caught for the first time peddling, should be sent home with their heads shaved and without their pants instead of being jailed," proposed noted sociologist Etzioni (The New Golden Rule) to his more liberal friends, who rejected his idea forthrightly. But in "Is Shaming Shameful?," one of 13 essays here, he makes the case that a community's cultivated sense of personal shame including signs on the lawns of pedophiles and DUI bumper stickers on the cars of convicted drunk drivers is a civil, and useful, form of social regulation and inculcation of personal responsibility. Always provocative and thoughtful, he charts how racial polarities are changing and potentially disappearing in U.S. culture, and what this means for a society based on the contradiction of pluralism and uniform national identity. While some of Etzioni's suggestions such as public shaming, the promotion of "virtues" over "values" and his arguments against extending the First Amendment to children may appear to line up with the political and religious right, he is careful in his dialogue here with Robert P. George to separate himself from traditionally conservative politics. Though Etzioni, a professor at George Washington University, is frequently extremely insightful, as in his discussion of the social role that public holidays play in structuring moral education within the family unit, his theoretical claims can also feel shortsighted. He doesn't, for instance, consider possible vigilantism against those publicly shamed. But even when inflammatory, Etzioni is always thoughtful and deliberate.
