After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980, Amitai Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. From 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.
Amitai Etzioni served as the president of the American Sociological Association, and was the founding president of the International Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. He founded the Communitarian Network, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to shoring up the moral, social and political foundations of society.

Amitai Etzioni is the author of twenty-four books, including The Spirit of Community (Crown Books, 1993). His most recent books are My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Reclaiming Patriotism (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Also in 2001, Amitai Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences, as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association's Outstanding Contribution Award.
In 2020, Amitai Etzioni founded and curated CivilDialogueS.org, a new platform where verified people meet to deliberate and form a consensus on urgent matters.