ABSTRACT
The communitarians articulate in thoroughly convincing fashion many sociological home truths that have often been ignored in current discussions. In Amitai Etzioni’s books, most notably in The New Golden Rule, 1 he insists that society as a partially independent realm needs to be added to the state and the market in all considerations of social policy and collective goals. Recognition of the autonomy of society as against state and economy, which had become subjects of systematic study a few decades earlier, was a primary mandate for the very birth of sociology as a distinctive academic field in the late nineteenth century. Etzioni’s argument for a voluntary moral order independent of state coercion and market exchange is central to his case for communitarianism and makes it both more and less than a political movement in the conventional sense. Communitarian insistence that human nature is a social product through and through is unexceptionable.
