The Sociologist - Robert Nisbet

A True Sociologist by Brad Lowell Stone

38 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEWSpring 1998

A True Sociologist:Robert Nisbet

Brad Lowell Stone

Henri Bergson once observed that a truegreat thinker says but one thing in his lifebecause he has but one point of contactwith the real. By this Bergson meant thatalthough a great thinker may have a vari-ety of interests, he typically embraces onegreat truth that animates each of his pur-suits and serves as a guide to lesser truths.Whether or not this holds generally, it istrue of Robert Nisbet, who passed away onSeptember 9, 1996, three weeks short of hiseighty-third birthday. In each of his thir-teen books, beginning with The Quest forCommunity (1953), and in virtually everyone of his numerous articles, includingStill Questing (Fall, 1993), his last con-tribution to The Intercollegiate Review,Professor Nisbet asserted that the modernpreoccupation with community is a mani-festation of the decline of natural commu-nitiesfamily, religious association, andlocal communitycreated by the struc-ture of the Western political state. He an-nounced this great truth when treatingtopics ranging from the idea of progress, tothe degradation of academic dogma, to thealienation of post-war Americans. Hisluminous writings make Nisbet one of themost important American conservativeintellectuals of the last forty-five years.

A Californian by birth, Nisbet attendedpublic schools in Maricopa and San Luis

Obispo before enrolling at Berkeley in 1932.With the exception of the period between1943-1945, when Dr. Nisbet served in thearmy, he remained at Berkeley for the nexttwenty-one years, first as an undergradu-ate, then as a graduate student, and finallyas an assistant professor. By his own ac-count, his Berkeley years were extraordi-nary. As an undergraduate, he came underthe spell of Fredrick J. Teggart, an unortho-dox cultural historian. In his autobio-graphical introduction to The Making ofModern Society (1986), Nisbet describeshimself as smitten by Teggart, a man whowas almost evangelical when he was de-scribing, say, the advantages of compara-tive history over orthodox, unilinear, nar-rative history or, in a different tenor, thebuilt-in conflict between family and state inthe history of mankind. So impressed wasthe young Nisbet by Teggart that he de-cided to pursue his Ph.D. in the Depart-ment of Social Institutions under Teggartsdirection. While in graduate school, hetook a course in Roman law from MaxRadin that sustained and supplementedTeggarts observations concerning the per-petual tension between the family and thestate, and he immersed himself in Otto vonGierkes study of intermediate associations

Brad Lowell Stone is a professor of sociology atOglethorpe University.


THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEWSpring 1998 39

in the Middle Ages. His dissertation was onthe Reactionary Enlightenment, chieflythe thinking of Bonald, Chateaubriand,and de Maistre.

These profoundly important intellec-tual resources were augmented, when Nisbetreturned to Berkeley after the war, by thewritings of Burke and Tocqueville whoserediscovery in American thought, Nisbetreports, started to really flower in the lateforties and early fifties. With the addition ofBurke and Tocqueville, each of the mainfonts from which Nisbet drew in his greatestwork, The Quest of Community, was inplace. The book was published in 1953, theyear Nisbet was appointed Professor ofSociology and Dean of the Faculty at thenewly established University of Californiaat Riverside. He remained at Riverside until1972. After two years at the University ofArizona, he assumed the Schweitzer profes-sorship at Columbia University. He wasmade Professor Emeritus by Columbiawhen he retired from teaching in 1978, atwhich time he moved to Washington, D.C.and took the post of Resident Scholar at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, a positionhe held until his death.

Dr. Nisbet enjoyed enormous success asboth an administrator and teacher. The joyhe might otherwise have had was dimin-ished, however, by the unfortunate revolu-tionary changes he observed in the post-war American university, as chronicled inThe Degradation of Academic Dogma (1971).Before the war, the reigning dogma of theuniversity encouraged faith in reason, thequest for truth, and acknowledged both ahierarchy of knowledge and a natural hier-archy among those providing and thoseseeking knowledge. This dogma was trans-formed and degraded after the war, ac-cording to Professor Nisbet, due to thelarge increases in the numbers of studentsand especially to the infusion of govern-ment funds. From this context arose a new

breed of professors who were less teachersthan money- and power-seeking entrepre-neurs, mostly of the political left. This newbreed took a perpetual adversarial stanceagainst traditional and natural forms ofauthority while seeking to bureaucratizeand politicize campuses.

The artificial power of the state and thenatural authority of communities are dif-ferent and at odds, according to Nisbet.Whereas power is coercive and external,authority is internal in the sense that thosefollowing it believe in its legitimacy. As Dr.Nisbet observes, Community is the prod-uct of people working together on prob-lems, of autonomous and collective fulfill-ment of internal objectives, and of the ex-perience of living under codes which are setin large degree by the persons involved.Nisbet believed that the central fact in thetwentieth-century West is the progressiveweakening of natural authority and com-munity resulting from the penetration ofstate power into one context after another.The revolution on college campuses was farfrom isolated. Thus, for example, the al-leged disorganization of the modern familyis, in fact, simply an erosion of its naturalauthority, the consequence, in consider-able part, of the absorption of its functionsby other bodies, chiefly the state.

Different as they may be, power has cometo resemble community in the minds ofmany, according to Professor Nisbet. Thisis especially true among those who, becauseof the loss of genuine community, are LooseIndividuals, preoccupied with personalidentity and social meaning. The melan-choly fate of our age seems to be, therefore,that as natural communities wane, the ev-ermore restless quest for community com-bines with the apparatus of politicalpowerfurther eroding the natural com-munities that mediate between the indi-vidual and the state. In Nisbets view, as inTocquevilles, individualism and the con-



centration of state power are not at odds;they inevitably complement and feed eachother.

Professor Nisbet was convinced that theintermediate associations constituting thesocial world are essential to providing indi-viduals with identity and bearings and ashedges against the state. In Prejudices: APhilosophical Dictionary (1982), he notesthat the very concept of the social is a coin-age of the early nineteenth century, in whichan old word was given new meaning. So-cial, as a word, meant family, village, par-ish, town, voluntary association and class,not the state, and the nineteenth-centuryadvocates of social science sought knowl-edge that would make it possible for thesocial order to be largely autonomous, freeof the constricting bureaucratic control ofthe kind of state the French Revolutionyielded. Nonetheless, the social has beentransformed along with so much else in thepost-war West, and it has been social sci-entists who have been most directly re-sponsible for this transformation. For asodd as it may seem to the uninitiated, thevery large majority of social scientists havesimply come to hate the objects of theirstudy. Typically, almost uniformly, con-temporary social scientists are material-ists and strict determinists for whom thepluralistic social world is a contemptiblesource of inequality, parochial fears of cos-mopolitan rationality and unsavory preju-dice. Just as typically, for contemporarysocial scientists, the solutions to the prob-lems of the social world are political solu-tions. As Nisbet observes, Today, giventhe extent to which all of the social scienceshave become monopolized by political val-ues and aspirations, it would be more cor-rect if they were called political sciences.

In The Idea of Progress (1980), Nisbetrecords the consequences of thispoliticization. Despite the high expecta-tions once held for the social sciences, their

contributions have been minimal when notcounterproductive, and they have usuallybeen counterproductive. Nisbet suggeststhat the projects of social reconstructiondesigned by social scientists for govern-ment execution have simply done moreharm than good. Regarding social scien-tists themselves, Nisbet observes that asdirect social action replaces social obser-vation as the purpose of the social sciences,it combines with the widespread retreat toall the diverse forms of subjectivism whichhold up preoccupation with and study ofones self as the beginning of true wisdom.

To these observations one must immedi-ately add that numerous academics, publicintellectuals, and even politicians have re-cently rhapsodized over the virtues of com-munity and bemoaned their decline. Weare all witnesses to a most impressive dis-play of Gemeinschaft envy. In certain re-spects this is an encouraging sign, and Nisbetanticipated forty years ago much of what iscurrently being said by so-called civil soci-ety theorists and communitarians. Still,we should not lose sight of the fact thatNisbet had the prescience to first proclaimhis great truth when this truth was ac-knowledged by few others and when it wasstill possible to arrest certain trends. Todayone may sometimes hear very sensiblethings being said about the relationshipbetween community and state but this talkis often evidence of the owl of Minervasflight. The human wreckage caused by thedecline of family, neighborhoods, and lo-cal communities, and by the trivialization/politicization of religion, is at this pointtoo obvious to be denied. Certainly I wouldnot counsel despair, and I would agree withNisbets belief that the restoration of func-tions to natural communities would beginthe healing process. Nonetheless, there isalso wisdom with which I am certain Nisbetagreed in John Grays observation that


THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEWSpring 1998 41

attempting to repair damaged traditions islike trying to mend a broken spiderwebwith ones bare hands. Our well-being de-pends upon our not breaking communitiesin the first place.

Moreover, in addition to the occasionalsensible comments on community one mayhear, the recent communitarian revival hasproduced many statements that expresswhat Nisbet feared mostthe combina-tion of the quest for community with thestate apparatus of power. In these cases therhetoric of community is employed to sanc-tify the state, as Bruce Frohnen demon-strates in The New Communitarians and theCrisis of Modern Liberalism. Frohnen showsthat communitarians such as CharlesTaylor, Amitai Etzioni, Garry Wills, andRobert Bellah reject as too confining theappreciation for tradition and transcen-dent standards that is central to Nisbetsvision. The new communitarians believethat virtue is identical with political virtue,that individuals need a tutelary state, andthat while families, parishes, and voluntaryassociations are useful in generating a con-cern for the wider community, such com-munities must be condemned if their exclu-sivity threatens their tolerance or if theirnatural hierarchies of authority undermineequality. Real communities are deemedworthwhile if, and to the extent that, theyserve the unrivaled object of newcommunitarian loyaltythe nation-state.

According to Nisbets The Social Phi-losophers (1973), the intellectual groundfor views such as those of the newcommunitarians was prepared long ago byHobbes and by Rousseau, the prime cata-lytic agents in modern political thinking.Hobbes denied that humans are naturallycommunal beings; he believed the naturalhuman condition was one of perpetual war;and he maintained that the artificial politi-cal order is the solution to our naturalcondition. For his part, Rousseau believed

that the vile nature Hobbes attributed tohumans is not natural but the product ofsociety, as initiated by the violent and un-natural institution of private property.Hobbesian man is, in fact, the man of com-merce, artificial social distinctions, and so-cial dependency, in Rousseaus eyes. Thus,although Hobbes proposed his great Le-viathan as a solution to the problem of basenatural propensities and Rousseau pro-posed his ideal state in The Social Contract

as a solution to the problem of society, theresulting visions are essentially the same: acommonwealth containing individuals andthe state, without communities or interme-diate institutions to mediate between them.

Early in his career, Nisbet called Rousseauthe real demon of the modern mind. Hesays, Rousseau is the first of the modernphilosophers to see the State as a means ofresolving the conflicts not merely of institu-tions but within the individual himself.Naturally, Rousseau claims in Emile, hu-mans possess self-love, amour de soi, whichis always good and always in conformitywith order. With the emergence of society,however, reason, imagination, and the sen-timent of his connections with others cre-ate within man the possibility of a trans-formed and perverted form of self-love thatdepends upon social comparisonamour

Robert Nisbet



propre. For Rousseau, amore-propre fostersthe desire for recognition and praise, creat-ing perversities in the human heartjeal-ousy, envy, imperiousness, vindictiveness,competitiveness, and deceit. What waswhole and satisfied becomes divided andvicious. Yet for Rousseau there is redemp-tion. The state can resolve individual con-flicts by resolving the institutional conflictsat their source. In Nisbets words, forRousseau the State is the means by whichthe individual can be freed of the restrictivetyrannies that compose society. InRousseaus own words, Each citizen wouldthen be completely independent of his fel-low men, and absolutely dependent uponthe state: which operation is always broughtby the same means; for it is only by the forceof the state that the liberty of its memberscan be secured.

Rousseaus preoccupation with the di-lemmas of psychological man, his disdainfor society, and his belief in the power of thestate to create national community havebecome commonplace in our time.Rousseau may have first used the term civilreligion but today many worship at itsaltar. As Nisbet observes in Still Quest-

ing, More and more we are hearing fromFederal government and from the clerisy ofpower that hangs onto Washington themagic words National Community. Hecontinues by saying that it should be theprime business of any conservative groupor party to expose the fraudulence of thisphrase. Consequently, he says in conclu-sion, any serious conservative group inAmerica confronts a double task. The firstis to work tirelessly toward the diminutionof the centralized, omnicompetent, andunitary state with its ever-soaring debt anddeficit. The second and equally importanttask is that of protecting, reinforcing, nur-turing where necessary the varied groupsand associations which form the true build-ing blocks of the social order. To these twoends I am bound to believe in the continu-ing relevance of The Quest for Community.

So am I. Yet this double task seems moredaunting than it did before Nisbets death.Robert Nisbet was blessed with a generouscharacter, an extraordinary historical-consciousness, a great passion for his work,and great eloquence. Others may recognizeand announce Nisbets great truth but noone is likely to be as effective a truth-bearer.

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The Sociologist - Robert Nisbet