Amitai Etzioni

Sociologist

Amitai Etzioni is a German-Israeli-American sociologist. After receiving his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House on domestic affairs from 1979-1980. In 1980, Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is now the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies.

Etzioni is the author of twenty-four books, including The Monochrome Society (2003), The New Golden Rule (1997), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 1997 Tolerance Book Award, and My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (2003).

In 2001, Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. In the same year, he was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.