MONOCHROME SOCIETY

The Monochrome Society brings together 13 of Amitai Etzioni's recent essays, revised for publication in this new volume. Every collection of this sort raises the question: Why republish these essays together? Etzioni answers, rightly, that the new book is driven by his concern with "social virtues and the social foundations on which they rest." He might have said "the social foundations on which they rest now." For The Monochrome Society is a series of absorbing and significant reflections on how virtue-sustaining communities may be possible under modern conditions that, at first glance, seem stacked against them.
So Etzioni has written a decidedly modern book. Whether he writes as a public intellectual addressing policy dilemmas or as an academic sociologist proposing a research agenda, his interest is in discerning what kind of communities can be built-and how they can be built-out of the materials modernity has to offer. He frequently turns what others see as infertile soil for community into a seedbed of virtue. Many fear that increasing ethnic diversity will divide America into separate camps and make it less communitarian. Etzioni, in the title essay, argues that such diversity, properly understood, will weaken identity politics and make America more communitarian. Many fear that the Internet, like television, will entice its users away from meaningful contact with flesh-and-blood human beings. In a nuanced essay on virtual communities, coauthored with his son, Oren, Etzioni argues that virtual communities have important advantages-24-hour access, for example-that face-to-face communities lack, and should be combined with them. Many fear that recent economic trends promise increasing inequality. Etzioni finds reason for optimism in the shift from an industrial age to a knowledge age, because "knowledge defies scarcity." "Knowledge objects," unlike consumer goods, can be shared at minimal loss or cost.