Amitai Etzioni is a seasoned political sociologist and leading voice in the communitarian program to offset the narcissistic and alienating individualism of liberal modernity. Communitarians emphasize the affective bonds that make community an indispensable feature of the human condition and, thus, the local conditions within which individual human beings are best able to understand and act on the common good. Notwithstanding republican antecedents, communitarians have effectively abandoned the universalistic tendencies of cosmopolitan Enlightenment republicanism to rights-minded liberals. In doing so, most communitarians have neglected international relations.

Etzioni is something of an exception. Important early work (Political Unification, 1965, and The Active Society, 1968, Part V) has much to say about international relations. Nevertheless, he bills From Empire to Community as a new approach to the subject—whether new to communitarians, or new because it is communitarian, or both he never makes entirely clear. The book is organized into three parts, together addressing ways in which “the American semi-empire can be converted into a legitimate new global architecture” (p. 1). These parts reflect Etzioni's early view that community depends on three sorts of bonds: normative (i.e., the affective bonds communitarians now emphasize), coercive (bonds that rely on the threat or use of violence), and utilitarian (instrumental bonds reflecting the reciprocities of interest). Part I is devoted to an “emerging global normative synthesis,” Part II to a “new safety architecture,” and Part III takes us “beyond global safety” to a plausible world of functionally oriented social authorities, regional communities, and perhaps a new “Global Nation” (p. 201). Part II reflects Etzioni's judgment that “the world is in a Hobbesian state and not yet ready for a Lockean one” (p. 116). Part II outlines developments that would make the Hobbesian world safe and Part III a safe-world Lockean. Part I sets forth the necessary conditions for what we might call a Rousseauian world within which safety and prosperity can be achieved.

Etzioni's claim to novelty in Part I is a normative synthesis of Western and Eastern notions of a good and well-ordered society. Westerners favor individual autonomy to the point that distrust and alienation swamp society; Easterners favor social conformity to an authoritarian degree. The author advocates a balance between autonomy and social order, and he believes that Western societies are moving toward stronger community with less need for coercion, and Eastern societies toward more freedom. The necessary synthesis would give priority to universal rights over particular preferences and rules in some sort of federal system of layering, and it would depend on moral suasion (pp. 44–45).

For Etzioni, moral suasion, or normative power, together with economic power, is soft power. Coercion is hard power. The use of soft power softens societies; he extols a soft version of Islam and alludes to “‘soft authoritarianism’ in Eastern belief systems” (p. 38). Oddly, the unremitting public demand for the exercise of hard power within the United States goes unexamined; instead, he remarks on the shift from individual rights to social order prompted by 9/11. More generally, the softness criterion for the communitarian middle ground is itself too soft and spongy to ground Etzioni's claims adequately.

The author's effort to spell out the Eastern contribution to moral suasion is little better. At times, moral suasion seems to include appeals to universal standards and the invocation of particularistic obligations. At other times, moral suasion and “informal social controls (‘normative controls’)” are distinct mechanisms for making people socially responsible (p. 22). People obey the latter because of social pressure: They fear shame and seek praise. Etzioni seems to assume that social pressure is less hurtful, and thus more conducive to the common good, than the use of force.

Yet constant social pressure may well be cumulatively more damaging than threats of force calibrated to specific acts. Nor should we take for granted that modern peoples are nearly as immune to social pressure as Etzioni implies. While new status markers displace old ones, status ordering fills the modern void, fosters antisocial conduct, distributes privilege in an awesomely unequal fashion, and supports the coercive capabilities of modern regimes East and West. Nevertheless, as he emphasizes elsewhere (The Common Good, 2004, Chap. 1), affective bonds and the particularistic obligations they give rise to have moral standing because they are indispensable to human flourishing. A glib discussion of Western autonomy and Eastern social order only detracts from this crucial claim.

Part II presents us with a dangerous world. Etzioni has no difficulty recommending that nation-states use their coercive capabilities to make themselves secure. He believes that the campaign against terrorism led by the United States has yielded what is in practice a Global Antiterrorism Authority. He is adamant that nuclear proliferation be curbed and suggests that adding this responsibility to the antiterrorism campaign, with the self-interested support of Russia and China, would foster the development of a Global Safety Authority also capable of intervening in chronic conflict situations and humanitarian disasters.

Part III begins with transnational communitarian bodies as major constituents in an emerging global civil society but finds them lacking as elements in the new global architecture. Transnational governmental networks are also lacking. That transnational communitarian and governmental networks may reinforce each other, in the process acquiring the legitimacy that makes their many activities authoritative without making them authorities, is a possible development Etzioni might have investigated. Instead, he projects the creation of additional global authorities. Thus, a Global Health Authority would displace the World Health Organization as the latter's sclerotic bureaucracy failed to respond, for example, to the threat posed by the outbreak of a new and virulent disease.

Etzioni has great faith in social evolution in response to need, but he is vague about the effects of bureaucratic inertia, political resistance, and provincial attitudes on the changing distribution of powers and functions in any large, complex society. It is here that he might have weighed the relevance of Asian models of social order. Yet Part III ignores the discussion of West and East framing Part I. In this respect and many others, the communitarian program that he sketches in Part III harks back to the liberal institutionalist vision of world federation.