Political Philosopher Robert Nisbet is best-known today for his 1953 book The Quest For Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom.  It was described by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat  as “arguably the 20th century’s most important work of conservative sociology.” Written in the aftermath of the Second World War and the rise of Communism and Fascism, the book aimed to explain the growth and popularity of totalitarianism in the pre-war period. It also correctly anticipated many of the major political issues and conflicts that emerged in subsequent decades. In this book and in other writings, Nisbet accurately predicted that the building of large-scale public housing would lead to widespread dissatisfaction, that increased levels of family breakdown would produce social unrest and crime and that the universities would come to be dominated by the radical intelligentsia. Nisbet even foresaw the perils of a growth in what he called “pseudo-intimacy.”

The particular concern of The Quest For Community, however, was the decline of “intermediary” institutions and the rapid expansion of state power in nations around the world. Nisbet saw this centralizing tendency as both a consequence and a response to the alienation that many people felt in societies in which family ties and religious and voluntary institutions had been superseded by impersonal government bureaucracies. This phenomenon, he suggested, might become mutually reinforcing. For, as people came to be estranged from their families, their traditional beliefs and their bonds of community, they would look to the answers offered by radical political ideologies as a remedy for their feelings of isolation. Since Nisbet believed that these new political ideologies were behind the push for more state power, he argued that this would result in an even more rootless citizenry with still greater yearnings to achieve connection through political extremism.

Thus, commenting on the advent of Communism, he remarked:

Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as a kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mystery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; Marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalism hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come.

As Nisbet saw that such radical political movements represented a dangerous challenge to the values of personal liberty and democratic governance, his book examined the origins of these ideas and what might be done to prevent their further spread.

In explaining these concepts, Nisbet offered readers a broad survey of the major political thinkers of the Western World. In the process, he provided a series of dichotomies. Perhaps most important of these was a distinction that he made between what he termed “authority” and “power.” In Nisbet’s system of thought, the term authority is used to describe the mostly welcome effects upon the individual of the family in which he is raised and the community in which he lives. These influences may provide a sense of continuity, place and needed guidance, albeit without reliance upon unconstrained force. Power is a term that Nisbet used to describe the state’s potentially overbearing hand, one that is capable of crushing the individual. Nisbet sometimes allied these terms with the contrasting concepts of “pluralism” and “monism.” Nisbet associated pluralism with societies in which the existence of competing forces and institutions permitted different views and patterns of life to co-exist and to evolve alongside one another. Monism was the unavoidable result of an all-powerful state which in its desire to remake the nation eliminates competing forces, including independent religious bodies.

Of particular interest to Nisbet were two French writers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville. In a letter to his contemporary and fellow Conservative Russell Kirk, Nisbet called Rousseau the “real demon of the modern mind,” believing that his ideas of a government guided by the pursuit of “the general will” had played the greatest part in ushering in the violence and disorder perpetrated by the totalitarian regimes of the modern era. On the other hand, Nisbet regarded de Tocqueville as the most thoughtful, humane and realistic of all recent political philosophers.  Much of The Quest For Community and his subsequent books The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought and History of the Idea of Progress were therefore focused upon a detailed analysis of each thinker and his subsequent influences.

Another author to whom Nisbet held a great debt was Edmund Burke. Nisbet readily acknowledged this. Thus, in his books, he repeatedly quoted or paraphrased Burke’s comment that society was a contract “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Nisbet interpreted this remark with reference to the independent institutions and customs which will have grown up within a society over hundreds of years and that provide a sense of community, kinship and place. Nisbet worried that overpowering political centralization in the name of causes like radical egalitarianism would, almost inevitably, lead to the dissolution or destruction of these forms, traditions and associations.

Nonetheless, Nisbet was emphatic in pointing out that these elements of civil society arose not in order to foster a sense of community but in order to resolve practical problems. As Nisbet put it, quoting Jose Ortega y Gasset, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together.” Nisbet therefore saw the many facets of civil society in terms of their assorted functions over and above their value in the creation of a sense of community.

Consequently, while Nisbet is often characterized as a “communitarian,” this label is in some significant ways misleading. After all, most later writers who are called “communitarians,” like Amitai Etzioni and Robert Bellah, see the importance of community in largely therapeutic terms. By contrast, Nisbet perceived the creation of intermediary institutions first and foremost in terms of their functional, historical and traditional roles.

Moreover, Nisbet tended to be highly critical of political approaches and philosophies which viewed the purpose of government as providing the citizenry with some manner of healing. Nisbet connected these attitudes with an unwillingness on the part of the state to perform yet another important social function: passing judgment against and punishing evident evildoers.

And, although Nesbit is commonly identified as a sociologist, he was critical of the methodological approach that has become standard within the social sciences. He did not believe that much research into society and social patterns could be successfully undertaken through experimentation, and he believed that many social scientists were more nearly political advocates than real scholars. Hence, in his writing he made almost no use of statistics and data-driven research, and it is best described as political philosophy and political economy that has been informed by a thorough and considered study of history. The sociologists he did admire, like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, were students of society and social patterns, rather than experimenters or field researchers. These were also writers whose research led them towards qualified opinions, rather than determined political advocacy.

Nesbit’s own analysis and research did lead him to a limited set of prescriptive statements at the end of The Quest For Community. In these, Nisbet did not call for the creation of substitute institutions which would replace intermediate bodies which had been decimated or destroyed. Rather, he argued for what he called a “new laissez-faire.”  Only a reduction in the size, power and role of central government, he believed, could properly re-awaken and re-start the habits and practices of a healthy civil society.

In this way, Nisbet acknowledged many of the principles of nineteenth century liberalism, even though he believed that its emphasis upon the individual was disproportionate and that it offered an incomplete vision of the elements needed for a flourishing culture. Nisbet’s philosophy was therefore eclectic, as it combined elements of traditional conservatism with nineteenth century liberal thought.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Nisbet was friendly with an assortment of leading Conservative figures of his lifetime. These ranged from so-called paleo-Conservatives like Chronicles of Culture Editor Thomas Fleming to National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. and on to so-called neo-Conservatives like Nathan Glazer. This meant that Nesbit was not closely aligned with any single political camp. It should be noted that he was, however, actively hostile to the ideas of Ayn Rand and other radical libertarians who disregarded the importance of historical forms and customs and who were scornful or indifferent to the role of families. As he put it, “There has never been a time when a successful economic system has rested upon purely individualistic drives.”

Hence, Nesbit was not an unconditional supporter of capitalism. In his book Conservatism, he observed that many nineteenth century Conservatives were suspicious of what might come from an economic system in which wealth was determined by money and the possession of financial instruments rather than land and real property. Here and elsewhere, Nesbit argued that men who gained riches through the worth of pieces of paper might prove to be weak defenders of the concept of private property or of the notion, expressed by Burke, that liberty gained its meaning within a context of civil society and order and not in an atmosphere of license and permissiveness.

These points drew Nesbit towards an interest in the subjects of entail and primogeniture, matters which he addressed in a number of his books. Through these discussions Nesbit connected the radical dimensions of both the French and the American Revolutions to their rejection of these traditional methods of passing on family lands. While he did not see this as necessarily bad, he thought that it was noteworthy as part of a larger trend in which the role of the family was being gradually diminished.

This concern for the family did not cause Nesbit to think that laws should treat individuals in terms of their membership in groups . Rather, Nesbit consistently argued that the law must be applied so that its judgments are rendered upon each individual acting as an autonomous figure. A system of law which treated people in terms of their status in a group, he thought, devalued itself and was inherently flawed.

At the same time Nesbit believed that the power of the individual was profoundly limited and that the rise of the totalitarian state depends upon this. As he noted in The Quest For Community,

[w]e may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know it…To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms.

Nisbet argued that this totalitarian impulse had not abruptly appeared ex nihilo when the Soviet and Nazi regimes gained power.  Rather, he said, its intellectual roots were in the ideas of Rousseau and in early non-Marxist socialists.

Consistent with this, Nisbet frequently contrasted the rise of totalitarian regimes in continental Europe with the relative stability enjoyed by the United States. This, he supposed, derived in part from the differences in their legal, governmental  and philosophical traditions. That France and Russia lacked the Anglo-American traditions of legal precedent and balance of powers or of philosophical empiricism, he said, had made them more susceptible to radical political movements and ideologies.

Nonetheless, Nisbet argued that the first twentieth century regime which arrogated nearly unlimited power to itself may have arisen in the United States. This was the wartime government of Woodrow Wilson. Pointing to its use of arbitrary powers of arrest and detention, its indifference to restraints upon search and seizure laws and its censorship, Nisbet suggested that it had anticipated many aspects of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. From this, he concluded that totalitarian designs and impulses were often readily apparent within democratic governments, and that it was important and necessary for genuine Conservatives to be conscious and on guard for this. In fact, on a number of occasions Nesbit suggested that the growth and the appeal of welfare and other government hand-outs would most likely erode America’s democratic ethos over time and make totalitarianism’s eventual triumph possible, if not likely, in the United States.

This did not mean that Nisbet was supportive of anything akin to anarchy though. Indeed, his antipathy towards totalitarianism and the notion of the “omnicompetent state” caused him to be relatively sympathetic to at least some of the attitudes and beliefs behind the Cold War. This is evident in his monograph Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship. The book argues that Franklin Roosevelt often showed naiveté in his relations with Joseph Stalin.

This viewpoint was offered with ambivalence, however, as Nesbit believed that an obsession with boosting national military might inevitably led to an unwelcome growth in state power. For this reason, Nesbit was critical during the 1980s of the Conservative movement’s enthusiastic embrace of an expanded military.

Conversely, Nisbet’s hostility towards anarchic radicalism caused him to be damning of the student protests of the 1960s. This was something which had confronted him directly in his role as an administrator and teacher in the California state university system.

Continued interest in Nisbet’s ideas is not only motivated by the prescience he showed but by his felicitous writing style and the self-deprecating humor he occasionally displayed in his books. This is most evident in his 1983 title, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. A work of extraordinary elegance, Prejudices offers its readers a series of pithy, provocative takes on a great many widely used philosophical and political terms and concepts.

Yet his opinions on these subjects did not always correspond with the main currents of Conservative thought.  One example is provided in his analysis of the subject of abortion. Based on a detailed reading of the history of abortion practices and beliefs about it dating back to its seeming proscription in the Hippocratic Oath, Nisbet argued that the fixity and rigidity of the modern anti-abortion movement represented a striking break from older attitudes on the subject. Displaying his inclination towards paradoxical argument, Nisbet further suggested that the anti-abortion movement had an anti-family aspect to it in as much as it called for the state to regulate decisions made within the family.

—Essay by Jonathan Leaf