Twilight.of Authority

...Nisbet lists four conditions of restoration—functional autonomy, tradition, decentralization, and hierarchy—but he neglects the fact that because certain mechanisms inherent in liberal democracy were responsible for its decline, authority can hardly be restored within the same political framework...

...Nisbet writes, however, as if the "old order" could be isolated from the "new disorder," as if certain trends in the first were not responsible for the ills of the second...

...indeed, it is a testimony to its intellectual liveliness that one wants to debate the author on so many of his points...

...When it comes to the present, Nisbet argues that American government has become an empire in the last forty years, Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet Oxford University Press $10.95 particularly in the 1960s—with enormous bureaucracies, an arrogant White House staff, an emphasis on the military, and the enthusiastic cooperation of collectivist intellectuals—and he buttresses his argument by convincingly comparing our society to imperial Rome and other power centers of history...

...This is not only Roman history, it is also an old story...

...It is significant that he uses the term "transpolitical" to describe both the action of draft evaders and the dispatch of troops to Vietnam, as if anything not approved by Congress, anything unfit for the liberal-democratic framework, were ipso facto excluded from politics...

...Three years $20...

...Does he forget that this purity was lost long ago—when the natural communities of the South were smashed in the Civil War by the North's political will...

...Cicero, a canny, practical politician, believed in the feasibility of an alliance between the old senatorial and the new equestrian classes, and thus in the restoration of the republican order...

...Organic social ties have been decomposing in the modern world, and symptoms of this malady include the centralized State, the military mentality, pervasive bureaucracy, and socialism...

...the depoliticization of large groups such as blacks, hippies, religious and other communes...

...Critics more attuned to Nisbet's thesis will call him a "Ciceronian" fighting a rear-guard action against the "Caesarian" trend...

...the growth and spread of local, neighborhood movements...

...At that time there was no empire, Honest Abe was in the White House rather than Tricky Dick, and capitalism was not only unhindered but showed a healthy imperial appetite...

...is one of the liveliest, best written, best edited journals of ideas and politics we know...

...Throughout the world, he writes, we now witness the retreat of the State and the decline of sovereignty...

...One of us must be hallucinating, for I, on the contrary, see increasingly powerless masses regimented by increasingly monolithic and despotic States...

...Nisbet concludes that "military socialism" is almost everywhere on the rise, except near home...

...Nisbet sidesteps this difficulty by painting the near-future in colors that, quite frankly, I do not recognize around me...

...Two years $15...

...I suggest that Nisbet refuses to engage in this much-needed analysis because, given his own system of reference, he would have to call the conditions of a restoration "transpolitical...

...As for the cop-outs in whom Nisbet finds a hopeful sign of depoliticization, I see them as marginal forces that revolutions always need for doing the dirty jobs: they are the materiel of ultra-leftist mobs in Portugal, Red Guards in China, and terrorists everywhere from Argentina to Japan...

...Perhaps he is right, but one does not have to be a Marxist or other kind of determinist to perceive Nisbet's own ideological bias—namely that his own quest for community hides an individualism which he considers fundamental and against which he measures the rest of history...

...The scholar's task is not to choose between Caesar and Cicero but to study the mechanism of decay and consolidation, of authority and anarchy...

...In the logic of this perspective the Washington Post becomes Brutus murdering Nixon-Caesar...

...In other—and equally civilized—countries, Watergate would never have become equated with Gotterdammerung...

...Still, Twilight of Authority is an exciting work that graces an otherwise tired Bicentennial...

...militant although politically inarticulate minorities...

...The thesis of the book, such as there is, is reminiscent of Nisbet's celebrated earlier work, The Quest for Community...

...As one reads Twilight of Authority, it becomes increasingly clear that since Nisbet the normative sociologist favors the sturdy conservative values of local ties, kinship, voluntary associations, and capitalist enterprise, Nisbet the political thinker regards liberal democracy as the last word in the political realm...

...Yet be- cause he often sacrifices the political to the sociological rather carelessly, Nisbet overlooks the damage that liberal democracy may do to just those conservative 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 values...

...I regard this as the central flaw of the book, because the author creates the impression that when a community allows its values to fade, it does not have to pay a heavy price for their restoration, that a simple act of will suffices...

...the medieval warlords, Charlemagne's military (?) empire, the Romanjurists of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance principalities, and, naturally, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau...

...Unfortunately, his last chapter, entitled "The Restoration of Authority," is weakened by the absence of an adequate prior discussion of the reasons for the collapse of authority...

...This is a defensible diagnosis, but unfortunately Nisbet weakens it by placing it in a historical overview in which practically everyone is blamed for the decomposition: Augustan Rome...

...white-hot nationalism and a ma-niacal stress on sovereignty...

...I am also skeptical when he blames raison d'etat for Nixon's lies and the Watergate affair, foreign interventions unapproved by Congress and public, greater and more impersonal government power, bureaucratic projects hatched for the "happiness" of the people, and equalization as the dominant ideology...

...If Nisbet's judgment of past and present is marked by tacit sociological preferences at the expense of historicopolitical realities, what about his vision of the future and its potentialities...

...But by not trying to solve the problem implied in the title of his last chapter, Nisbet evades the painful analysis of how to restore authority, and prefers again to substitute sociology for politics...

...One wonders, for example, about the title it, self, since Nisbet does not keep authority in focus...

...Indeed, instead of merely giving us a largely sociological definition of hierarchy, tradition, etc., it would have been more useful to inform us of the achievable political conditions under which we might expect the four pillars of authority to reoccupy their place in the nation...

...Caesar, in contrast, saw the old order as corrupt, inefficient, and without authority...

...Does this grotesque image, to which the book indeed refers, imply that from the vantage point of their politics Nisbet and the conservatives with him have no institutional solution to offer the nation...

...The Baltimore Sun THE ALTERNATIVE, Post Office Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Enclosed is $ Please enter a ^ new ^ renewal subscription to The Alternative for: ^ One year $8...

...Please print) Name Address City State Zip The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 31...

...The book's unity and organization suffer from the fact that many portions appeared as distinct magazine articles and also from the contradictions throughout between Nisbet the sociologist and Nisbet the political historian...

...He chose to unite in his own person the military commander and the popular tribune, as a new State authority...

...The Alternative...

...I have no quarrel with this description, but I disagree when Nisbet asserts that such developments are somehow unnatural...

...In the name of this individualism he judges empires to be cancerous growths, but since his historical overview shows that the times of cancer may he more frequent than the periods of health, he should give empire , a more careful conceptual analysis than he does...

...This is an ahistoric, voluntaristic view, one which has plagued American conservatism for decades...

...If internal disorders and external imperialism are "transpolitical," then Nisbet is rightly scandalized by Nixon's lies and Watergate, but if they are political acts, then Watergate was merely the instance of a maladroit President being chased out by men who used the mechanisms of liberal democracy more skillfully...

...he did not believe anyway that the legions could be sent back to the barracks or that the optimates and populaces, both with insatiably ambitious leaders, could be throttled...

...Yet Nisbet does not find strong enough words to castigate the Vietnam-Watergate complex, for he deplores America's loss of her individualistic and communitarian purity to the politics of power...