E Pluribus Unum : THE NEW GOLDEN RULE: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society.<i> By Amitai Etzioni</i> . <i> BasicBooks: 314 pp., $26</i>

Can we define the relation between the “I” and the “we” in politics--between individual citizens and their community? The question is as old as political philosophy. Aristotle declared us “political animals,” beings who could be fulfilled only in a political community, yet he noted too that a good citizen isn’t necessarily a good man. You can, after all, be a loyal patriot of an appalling polity sometimes--in Nazi Germany, for example--being a good person meant being the worst possible citizen.

For modern liberals, on the other hand, the key question is distinguishing public and private realms. For them, freedom means that, given a worthy constitutional framework (thus precluding a Third Reich), individuals ought to be able to pursue the good life as they define it, in their own space. John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” (1971), probably the most influential American contribution to political thought since “The Federalist,” rested on this sort of notion. Were individuals to deliberate rationally, setting aside personal interests or bonds, this philosopher proposed they would arrive at a few basic principles for society (those of a liberal welfare state) and that this was preferable to a comprehensive doctrine for all dimensions of life.

Responses to Rawls inaugurated a quarrel between liberals and communitarians in the American academy. It was mistaken, critics like Michael Sandel, Rawls’ Harvard colleague, protested, to imagine individuals as rational decision-makers when in reality they are “situated” in communities that shape their moral horizons. Besides, the health of any community requires its values to be deeply embedded and widely expressed--this creates civic virtue, the public spiritedness that rouses citizens to engage their country’s concerns rather than drift off into strictly private pursuits.

In the last decade these debates migrated beyond the universities, took on additional dimensions, and “community” has become something of a public buzzword. This is probably a long-term consequence of our post-1960s disquiet, a sense among many that America was once whole in a way that it isn’t anymore. It is also the setting in which sociologist Amitai Etzioni has sought to launch a “responsive” communitarian movement.

America, he has urged, needs moral revival because communal responsibility, local and national, was weakened by relentless pursuit of new rights and liberal individualism. While Etzioni believes that there is now a “curl-back,” a trend in the right direction, roughly since the advent of the Clinton administration, his new book, “The New Golden Rule,” maintains that there is still much to be done.

Etzioni’s rule is: “Respect and uphold society’s moral order as you would have society respect and uphold your autonomy.” Frankly, this is not a very novel notion; the quest for some equipoise between public values and individual aspirations has animated social and political theorizing for a long time, indeed centuries. So there must be another point, and that, evidently, is the desire to refute liberal critics who chastise communitarianism for being inattentive to individual liberty.

Given the debates between liberals and communitarians, this should be an important argument. Unfortunately “The New Golden Rule,” despite occasional insights, contains a bit too much moralizing and pop public philosophy and not enough well-grounded exposition.

The problem with Etzioni’s book really begins on the conceptual level. One expects that an author concerned with how individuals fit into communities would first think through the question of equality for us. Should individuals be equal in a community or not? If yes, is it just a matter of political status or socioeconomic equality too? What are the consequences of different types of inequality? Do two individuals have the same stake in a community’s “moral order,” are they part of the same “we,” if, say, a quarter-hour’s gamble on the futures market often yields one millions while the other’s sole life option is daily factory labor yielding the minimum wage?

We are simply told that yes, inequality can be harmful, but no, equality should not be a “virtue” in a communitarian society. A comparable evasiveness characterizes Etzioni’s narrative of contemporary America. In the 1950s, he tells us, this was a land of patriotism, secure two-parent families, prayer in schools and “respect for authority figures.” Despite flaws (social conformism, the status of blacks and women), it was a society of “shared values.”

Then came the 1960s--an era of “rights-talk,” spawning self-indulgent individualism. The family and sexual mores weakened, “etiquette . . . declined.” The problem, Etzioni says, is even more profound. Because of the West’s “belief in reason,” liberals imagined that morals, like contracts, are “worked out rationally”--this brings proliferating rights, tilting America to radical individualism.

Instead of “rights-talk,” we need “values-talk,” that is, “moral dialogues” generated within our various communities about “needs, wants and interests.” The sturdier our “moral voice,” the less coercion and less emphasis on legal rights our society needs. Infants are “barbarians at the gates,” writes Etzioni, citing such cases as a girl who had been confined to a backyard until she was 13; she was animal-like, “growling and aggressive.” Like all children, she needed acculturation, so we must have strong “moral infrastructures” of families, schools, local communities and, encompassing them, the “community of communities,” that is, the nation.

This account is most marked by what is missing from it. Like the word “power.” What do the structures of political, social and economic power in the country imply for communities and individuals? What relevance did they or their abuse have in the 1960s--and in the decades since then?

Did “rights-talk” cause upheaval and discredit authority or was it Vietnam, the deceptions of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and resistance to racial equality? Etzioni protests he is no conservative, yet African Americans and women might well wonder: Why does “rights-talk” become a problem only when we started asserting rights? Indeed, given Etzioni’s preoccupation with values, why doesn’t he address the cynical exploitation of racial fear for political gain, from Nixon’s “Southern strategy” on.

What has been more ruinous to our public culture than that? The aim was to undo the old New Deal Coalition--the very coalition whose policies laid the foundations of 1950s America. For if there was civic virtue then, it surely rested on the security fashioned by New Deal social liberalism and a compromise between strong unions and management. An assault on that compromise and the welfare state has, over the last 20 years, contributed to a dramatic growth in socioeconomic inequality with inevitable consequences for the “moral infrastructure.” If communitarians want the idea of “individual-in-community” to have serious content, they’ll have to face up to this larger context.