The Everything Expert

Sometimes Amitai Etzioni seems to be a one-man profession. A professor of sociology at Columbia University and director of New York City's Center for Policy Research, Etzioni, 46, has written two books on foreign affairs, debated Wernher von Braun on the space race, helped Betty Friedan start a "think tank" for women, testified as an expert on an abortion bill, and received a National Book Award nomination for a book on genetics. Two weeks ago, he was hailed by a New York Daily News headline writer as a "sexpert" for a talk on sexual ethics, and the same day he was named staff director of a politically sensitive investigation of New York State's spreading nursing-home scandal.

Etzioni's bustling omnipresence has earned him an array of detractors. Staid social scientists tend to view him as a pushy hustler, and the American Sociological Association's newsletter has received complaints that he is quoted entirely too much in its pages.

But his influence is not doubted. Etzioni is one of the new social science mandarins now beginning to dominate the profession: a politically astute opinion maker and entrepreneur who is acquiring considerable power by attracting the federal and foundation research dollar, handing out jobs, showering newspapers and magazines with articles on every conceivable subject, and producing hard-nosed, workable programs that politicians like.

At the Center for Policy Research, Etzioni presides over a burgeoning empire of some 20 staff members, plus sociologists, economists, historians, doctors, lawyers and planners who churn out a million dollars' worth of reports each year. A recent study of the problems of Spanish-speaking children in New York City schools was the basis for a court ruling to expand full-time bilingual education. In another project, engineers working with the center developed a new rapid-response telephonic device that Etzioni says "can restore the New England town meeting" for large organizations. Using it, the New Jersey League of Women Voters recently polled most of its 10,000 members, in progressive multiples of ten, within two hours.

Power Base. Etzioni's main theoretical effort and "life's work" is The Active Society, a long and turgid treatise on how to use the levers of social change. In it, Etzioni explains how social progress requires consensus and a power base to protect and promote change. Thus he considered Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty a doomed effort from the start because it gave the poor authority without a power base. He also opposes school busing as a means of integration because no consensus for it exists. "If you want it, fine--go out and convince enough people. But you can't cram it down their throats."

Though he is a committed man of the left, Etzioni does not have the conventional liberal preoccupation with individual freedom. In his talks on sex, for example, he argues that the sexual revolution must eventually become stabilized with some sort of new norms for sexual conduct and not just end with a nation full of "gushing ids." He has astounded scientists by suggesting they stop research likely to prove socially harmful, such as work on human cloning and subliminal communication techniques.

Born in Germany to Jewish parents who fled the Nazis in 1936, Etzioni was raised in Israel and fought as a commando against the British and then the Arabs in the late '40s. During the 1948 war, he made a name for himself by sending dispatches from the front to newspapers in Tel Aviv. Discharged in 1950, he worked as a reporter, wrote a book about his war experiences, then studied sociology under Martin Buber at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

On the Trail. He emigrated to the U.S., received his Ph.D. in a record 18 months at the University of California at Berkeley, and began his academic career by concentrating on studies of complex organizations, nuclear disarmament and the problems of ending the cold war. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1963, he joined the peace movement early in the Viet Nam War and published, in 1964, Moon-Doggie, a caustic attack on the space race as a waste of resources.

Almost any event can put him on the trail of a new issue. He got into genetics in 1967 when, having had three sons, he wondered if there was any way to make sure the next-born would be a daughter. He plunged into the literature of genetics and published several articles warning that the ability to predetermine the sex of children would have dire social consequences: the preference for boys is so strong that the rough equilibrium in births of boys and girls would be upset, leaving millions of males who could never find mates. These articles brought Etzioni an invitation to an international conference on the problems and ethics of genetics and resulted in his widely praised book Genetic Fix. Along the way, the Etzionis had two more sons. His next project: a book on the problems of the nuclear family.

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