Hill, Fred Donovan. "Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community." University Brookman 18, no. 3. (1978).

Abstract:

Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and sometimes quite powerful and realistic, exponent of some of the major European sociologists and social philosophers. He has persistently related the ideas of such original thinkers as Tocqueville and Burke to the developing problems of the contemporary world. In this lies his chief value as a writer. It is one of the purposes of this essay to explain how and why this is so. Another purpose is to provide an evaluation of Nisbet’s ideas on community and their relevance to the problem of the isolated individual in twentieth-century society.

 

Although Robert Nisbet’s view of history is complex and multifaceted, its essentials are clear: the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”; and though Nisbet prizes the values of modernity, he is not so naïve as to believe that their triumph has brought only good to the lives of men and women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Rather, he is intensely aware of the erosion of one set of values by the other: that is, he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism. In Nisbet’s philosophy, all of these values should have a place; and it is only the totalist ideologies—sometimes of traditionalism, sometimes of modernism—that seek the complete suppression of one set or the other…

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