SASE Thanks Founder Amitai Etzioni
SASE’s founder Amitai Etzioni has announced his retirement from public life. In his missive, sent through The Communitarian Observer, published by the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at the George Washington University, Etzioni, who founded our organization in 1989, shared links to his personal account of the trials he underwent as an activist professor and a video in which he gives a concise overview of his life story.
In the context of this retirement, Prof. Etzioni also took steps to ensure the future of SASE with a very generous donation to the organization. SASE is deeply indebted to Prof. Etzioni’s energy and generosity, both for the impetus of creating the organization in the first place, and for his timely donation to help the organization move confidently into the future.
The first SASE meeting was held at what was then the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 31 March-2 April 1989. At the time, it was simply called a “Conference on Socio-Economics”, and the newly founded Society for the Advancement Socio-Economics sponsored the second conference, in 1990, in Washington DC. Professor Etzioni was the driving force, in every respect, behind this organization in its early years.
It was just a year prior to this first conference, in 1988, that Amitai Etzioni published The Moral Dimension: Toward A New Economics. This book was a major foundational text for socio-economics, and for SASE specifically, and on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its publication, it was featured in a review symposium in the Socio-Economic Review, with texts by Jens Beckert, Bettina Hollstein, Edward Lehman, and David Marsden, and a response by Amitai Etzioni. This review symposium can be found here.
For SASE’s 35th annual conference, which will be held in Limerick, 27-29 June 2024, a presidential panel will be organized on Amitai Etzioni’s work.
This organization has enriched the lives of thousands over the years, both personally and professionally. Hats off to you, Professor Etzioni!
Please consider reading the text, “My Kingdom for a Wave,” and watching the video, The Making of a Peacenik: