Amitai Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni was born in 1929 in Cologne

Etzioni was born Werner Falk in Cologne, Germany, in 1929 to a Jewish family. His family fled the Nazis and reached Mandatory Palestine, where he learned Hebrew in Haifa and took the name Amitai. The family settled in Kfar Shmaryahu, and he later attended a boarding school in Ben Shemen.

In 1946 he left high school to join the Palmach, where he took the surname Etzioni. His unit fought in the defense of Jerusalem and in the Battles of Latrun.

After the war he spent a year in a program founded by Martin Buber. He earned a BA in 1954 and an MA in 1956 in sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1958 he received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, after 18 months of study.

He taught at Columbia University from 1958 to 1978 and served as a senior adviser to the White House in 1979 and 1980. From 1980 he was a professor at The George Washington University and directed its Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. He founded the Communitarian Network in 1993 and was president of the American Sociological Association.

His writing called for a balance between individual rights and social duties. He died on 31 May 2023.