A recent post about Noam Chomsky brought an old classmate out of the woodwork. So, if ol' Noam exercised someone to send an e-mail rejoinder, perhaps Robert A. Nisbet will work similar mojo in this blog. As this blogger's favorite philosopher, Joaquin Andujar, was wont to say: "Youneverknow." If this is (fair & balanced) community-seeking, so be it.
[x American Enterprise Institute — AEI]
Robert Nisbet's Quest (This essay appeared in the 09/30/96, issue of the Weekly Standard.)
By David Brooks
Robert A. Nisbet, one of America's most eminent and influential sociologists, and for many years a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, died September 9, 1996, at the age of eighty-two. From his earliest work in the 1950s, Mr. Nisbet emphasized the nature of community and the relation of voluntary associations to the growth of centralized state power; on these and many other subjects, his writings anticipated current political debates and examined them with unequaled depth and originality. A bibliography of Mr. Nisbet's most important books follows this tribute.
Robert Nisbet was ailing when Hillary Clinton uttered the most remarkable line of the presidential campaign—"it takes a president" to raise a child. Nisbet died on September 9 of prostate cancer at the age of eighty-two, ending a distinguished career as a sociologist and public intellectual. But his life's work is a refutation of Mrs. Clinton's declaration. Nisbet was a devastating critic of the politicization of everyday life, of the way family, friendship, and community have been suborned by the state. He anticipated, by nearly half a century, much of the current talk about family, neighborhood bonds, and reducing the size of government. And many of the answers he gave, starting with his 1953 book The Quest for Community, are more sophisticated and certainly more culturally learned than the ones we're stumbling upon today.
Nisbet was impossible to classify—an anti-individualist libertarian may be the closest label--and to read him is to expect the unexpected. For starters, the historical epochs normally taught as high points, like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, were for him low points. And vice versa. He began his historical reflections at the Middle Ages, when, as he quotes Jacob Burckhardt, "Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation--only through some general category." Nisbet emphasized the complex array of intermediate organizations—family, guild, church—that intertwined to create a web of authority in which medieval people could lead their lives. Local attachments were strong, relations to central government weak. And that diffusion of authority allowed merchants to go through Europe without worrying about passports and permitted the creation of leagues of cities, such as the Hanseatic, Rhenish, and others.
It was in the Renaissance that the political and military began to take over and crush earlier, more local community structures, Nisbet argued. Philosophers forgot the distinction between state and society. Nisbet didn't pine for a return to the Middle Ages; he scorned nostalgia all his life. But a central problem with state power, he believed, was that it choked off new forms of community that would have allowed people to cope more comfortably with changes in technology, work, and ways of living. "The real demon of the modern mind," Nisbet wrote in a 1953 letter to Russell Kirk, is Rousseau. It was Rousseau who regarded the community bonds Nisbet cherished as nothing more than chains shackling naturally virtuous man. Rousseau introduced a civil religion that swept away custom and mediating institutions, and had individuals making a direct contract with the state. A strong government would actually increase personal liberty, Rousseau believed, because it would sweep away reactionary religious and civil bonds. Nisbet quoted Rousseau: "Each citizen would then be completely independent of his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state . . . for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured." In his 1988 book The Present Age, Nisbet summed up Rousseau by saying that he transferred prestige and trust from the body of the church and the community to the body of the state.
Over the subsequent centuries, the state got stronger and stronger, local authorities more and more powerless. People began to look to the state to realize their personal aspirations (Communists most notably), and they increasingly felt that to be modern meant to sweep away custom and strive toward efficiency and centralization.
Quantum increases in state power, Nisbet emphasized later in his life, come during wartime: "Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals tend to supersede relationships of family, parish and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change during wartime." And war gives government a pretext to dominate national life. For America, he came to believe, the crucial consolidation of central state power came around World War I. Woodrow Wilson tried to use government to construct a national community and to turn foreign policy into a moral crusade. Progressives like Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey argued for a stronger state apparatus, guided by politicized experts, so that government would embody, in Croly's words, a "national idea," bound together by a "religion of human brotherhood."
The result, Nisbet claimed, was instead the form of democratic absolutism that Tocqueville had predicted, in which government power is "absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild." Whereas once government had stopped at the church, school, fraternal organization, and club, now it felt itself justified in being everywhere, except perhaps in foreign embassies. Local institutions like mutual-aid societies were robbed of their natural function, and so withered. Even the authority of parents was weakened, as government served in loco parentis.
Nisbet could tease fascinating observations from this central pattern. For example, in his 1975 book Twilight of Authority, he noticed the emergence of "Democratic Royalism." Presidents, especially since JFK, have turned the White House into a palace (nowadays we think of the way highways are shut down when the presidential motorcade goes by). The presidential image is as closely tended as in the days of Alexander the Great and Louis XIV. Executive-branch power accrues not to cabinet colleagues but to intimates who directly serve the presidential person. For Nisbet, this inflation prevails in all societies in which the intermediate authorities have been swept away and the individual citizen relates directly to the one central figure, president or king. In richer communities, authority is dispersed and the president leads a more austere life as first among a group of diverse leaders.
In a state-dominated nation, everything becomes politicized or it withers. Nisbet wrote key sociology textbooks, but looking at the welter of policy proposals from colleagues, he acknowledged, "the social sciences [should] be termed for what they so largely are: the political sciences." He thought religious leaders, especially on the religious right, had dangerously politicized religion. And he thought that conservatism had been corrupted by politics and had become bogged down with pro-defense-spending militarism, conservative social-policy meddling, and economic fiddling. Looking back on the Reagan years, he wrote, "In large measure conservatism has become, within a decade or two, an ideology seeking to capture democratic absolutism rather than secure from it social and moral authority distinct from political power."
Nisbet was also out of step with contemporary conservatism because he had no taste for its celebration of the individual. He criticized the "spell of romantic individualism" that propagated the illusion of purely individual achievement. Nisbet invented the term "the Loose Individual" to describe the dominant type in a politics-dominated world: mobile, loosely connected to neighborhood, church, and spouse, driven mostly by his hunger for economic opportunity. Most of his relations revolve around his career and the cash nexus. He is even loosely tied to property, as his own wealth comes more and more in the form of mutual-fund shares, stocks, and options, rather than, say, a local factory. Without a settled place, he becomes more obsessed with status, so that, Nisbet observes, people in our egalitarian age are more covetous of a Harvard degree than they were in FDR's more class-ridden day.
The odd thing is, Nisbet's writing is not particularly gloomy in tone (especially for someone who at some points in his career thought America was on the verge of military dictatorship). He was a successful and much recognized academic, at Berkeley, Columbia, and then as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and colleagues say he enjoyed his work immensely. He was also remarkably handsome, which must make life a little sweeter even as you contemplate the decline of civilization.
And he must have drawn pleasure from the nonpolitical aspects of life he celebrated. He lovingly quoted Burke on how we should structure our affections: "We begin our public affections in families. No cold relation is the zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighborhoods and our provincial connections. These are our inns and resting places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit and not by a sudden jerk of authority are so many little images of the great country in which the heart has found something it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality."
Probably Nisbet laid it on a little too thick about the decline of American culture, but his emphasis on the subpolitical and the local was prescient and has had obvious influence on the communitarian and civil-society debates of our own day. And there's something else that must be celebrated in his writing: Nisbet could scarcely go a page without bringing in some example, from Greece or Florence or India; from the third century, the fifteenth century, or the nineteenth century. Either you have a taste for this kind of ambitious field of reference or you don't, and certainly more people in the 1950s and 1960s had a taste for it than now. But if you don't press the historical comparisons too hard, it makes for unexpected and thrilling reading.
The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. New York: Harper Row, 1989.
The Making of Modern Society. New York: New York University Press, 1987.
Conservatism: Dream and Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
The Social Bond. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Twilight of Authority. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
The Social Impact of the Revolution. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974.
Degradation of the Academic Dogma. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Tradition and Revolt. New York: Random House, 1968.
The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1967.
Community and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
[David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times and has become a prominent voice of politics in the United States. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. He served as a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Brooks has written a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. He has been largely responsible for coining the terms "bobo," "red state," and "blue state." His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.]
Copyright © 2005 American Enterprise Institute
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