Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist.(Review)

Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist By Brad Lowell Stone ISI Books, 152 pages, $19.95

With the rise of "communitarian" thought on the American Left and of "civil society" theory on the Right, Robert Nisbet (1913-1996) only grows in stature as one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century. Nisbet's academic career began at the University of California-Berkeley as a student of Frederick J. Teggart, who emphasized the innate conflict between state and family in human history and encouraged Nisbet toward a 1939 dissertation on "The Reactionary Enlightenment."

Nisbet absorbed here the intoxicating work of the early-nineteenth-century French writers Bonald, de Maistre, Lamennais, and Chateaubriand. Their defense of small, historic, and rooted institutions against the claims of the revolutionary modern state inspired Nisbet's first book, The Quest for Community. It was part of that "freshet of books," all appearing in the early '50s, which would spark the conservative intellectual revival in America. The others were Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics, and William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. In his book, Nisbet described human society as a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. He highlighted the spontaneous order that grew out of custom and tradition, one compatible with true liberty. He respected "the inherited authority and status of traditional communities"--families, churches, villages, craft guilds, and so on. Such true communities were functional, embraced some transcending ideal or "dogma" bore an authority resting on consensus and legitimacy, maintained task-centered hierarchies, and rested on senses of honor, solidarity, and group pride. For most of human history, Nisbet argued, such communities--rather than individuals--were the basic units of society.

But the modern state had risen to challenge and dissolve these primordial human collectives. The centralizing state was the foe of kinship. It used war to crush localisms and particularities. The concepts of "democracy" and "equality" also proved effective in disrupting traditional hierarchies and authority. The modern state especially welcomed and contributed to the disintegration of the family, with the welfare state absorbing many of the family's former functions. Nisbet emphasized the growing alliance between the "intellectual" class and centralized government, and the intimate connection between the welfare state and the "warfare state." (My favorite concrete example of Nisbet's observation: In 1966, with the American role in Vietnam growing in parallel with Lyndon Johnson's domestic agenda, one presidential aide described the administration's goal as seeking "great societies at home and grand designs abroad.")

Author Brad Lowell Stone, a sociologist at Oglethorpe ...