While the philosopher Robert Nisbet was born in Los Angeles on September 30, 1913, his parents actually lived at the time roughly one hundred miles to the north and east in the tiny desert oil town of Maricopa, California. His mother had gone to Los Angeles to deliver him. By his own account, she had two motives for this. First, she wished to bear him in a Christian Science nursing home. Second, she wished that her oldest child be born in a city. Even so, his parents were active members of the Maricopa community. In particular, his mother drew her friends from a circle of fellow Christian Science churchgoers. Nisbet’s father was a lapsed Presbyterian, if one whose mother had converted from Judaism.

This dichotomy between the values of the small town and an interest in the larger world would characterize his life and work.

When he was six, Nisbet’s family moved for two years to Macon, Georgia. There he lived alongside his grandparents and a large extended family. Nisbet’s grandfather had served as a Confederate soldier, and Nisbet drew close to him and often listened to his stories of the Civil War. In later years, Nisbet spoke fondly of life in this rural area where his grandfather served as the county assessor, and he said that when he read the Southern conservative manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and The Agrarian Tradition in the late 1930s that it immediately resonated with him because of his own experiences living in the Deep South.

Still, two years after his family had moved to Macon, it left, returning to Maricopa, where his father became the manager of a lumberyard. During the course of his childhood, they then moved to Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo. Both were small, harmonious towns.

In 1931 Nisbet matriculated to the University of California at Berkeley. But for time spent in the military during the Second World War, this was where he would spend the next twenty-two years of his life: first as an undergraduate, then as a doctoral student and finally as a professor.

Like many Berkeley students in the early 1930s, Nisbet was initially liberal or even radical, and he was a supporter of the New Deal. But, by the end of the 1930s, Nisbet had moved towards many of the Conservative positions for which he would come to be known. These were influenced by his own happy memories of small town life, by exposure to the ideas of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and the ideas of his Berkeley professor and mentor Frederick Teggart.

Influenced by Arnold Toynbee, Teggart was deeply pessimistic about the future prospects of the Western World but committed to writing about its systematic development. Teggart passed on a number of these beliefs and interests to Nisbet, who became his doctoral advisee. And, following Teggart, Nisbet became a professor in the school’s Department of Social Institutions. It should be understood that this was a department which was oriented towards the study of political economy and theory and social patterns, not experimental sociology.

In 1953, Nisbet published his first book The Quest For Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. While it was the first of seventeen books that he wrote, it remains the main one for which he is remembered, and it has gone through many editions. In it, he articulated his basic philosophy. This is centered on “Conservative pluralism,” a belief that society functions best when “intermediary institutions” are vibrant and the central government is not overpowering. Nisbet saw these intermediary institutions as valuable in their own right and as a bulwark against the forces working towards totalitarianism.

In that same year, Nisbet left Berkeley for the University of California, Riverside. The University was just opening its school of Arts and Letters, and Nisbet became its first dean. He would eventually become the University’s Vice-Chancellor. He would also serve on the faculty of the University of Arizona and at Columbia in its Albert Schweitzer chair. Then, in 1978, he became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where he remained for eight years.

Married twice and divorced once, Nisbet was the father of two daughters. He died in 1996, three weeks before his 83rd birthday. Born just before the First World War began, he had lived through the rise of Communism and Fascism and passed away after the Berlin Wall’s fall.