Robert Nisbet's Quest
BROOKS, DAVID
Robert Nisbet’s Quest by David Brooks ROBERTNISBET WAS AILING when Hillary Clinton uttered the most remarkable line of the presidential campaign—“it takes a president” to raise a child. Nisbet...
...He began his historical reflections at the Middle Ages, when, as he quotes Jacob Burckhardt, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation— only through some general category...
...Nisbet was a devastating critic of the politicization of everyday life, of the way family, friendship, and community have been suborned by the state...
...A strong government would actually increase personal liberty, Rousseau believed, because it would sweep away reactionary religious and civil bonds...
...Whereas once government had stopped at the church, school, fraternal organization, and club, now it felt itself justified in being everywhere, except perhaps in foreign embassies...
...Nisbet invented the term “the Loose Individual” to describe the dominant type in a politics-dominated world: mobile, loosely connected to neighborhood, church, and spouse, driven mostly by his hunger for economic opportunity...
...For example, in his 1975 book Twilight of Authority, he noticed the emergence of “Democratic Royalism...
...And he thought that conservatism had been corrupted by politics and had become bogged down with pro-defense-spending militarism, conservative social-policy meddling, and economic fiddling...
...He is even loosely tied to property, as his own wealth comes more and more in the form of mutual- fund shares, stocks, and options, rather than, say, a local factory...
...He anticipated, by nearly half a century, much of the current talk about family, neighborhood bonds, and reducing the size of government...
...Local institutions like mutual-aid societies were robbed of their natural function, and so withered...
...In richer communities, authority is dispersed and the president leads a more austere life as first among a group of diverse leaders...
...Probably Nisbet laid it on a little too thick about the decline of American culture, but his emphasis on the subpolitical and the local was prescient and has had obvious influence on the communitarian and civilsociety debates of our day...
...It was Rousseau who regarded the community bonds Nisbet cherished as nothing more than chains shackling naturally virtuous man...
...These are our inns and resting places...
...He was a successful and much recognized academic, at Berkeley, Columbia, and then as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and colleagues say he enjoyed his work immensely...
...In his 1988 book The Present Age, Nisbet summed up Rousseau by saying that he transferred prestige and trust from the body of the church and the community to the body of the state...
...Rousseau introduced a civil religion that swept away custom and mediating institutions, and had individuals making a direct contract with the state...
...Most of his relations revolve around his career and the cash nexus...
...from the third century, the fifteenth century, or the nineteenth century...
...Without a settled place, he becomes more obsessed with status, so that, Nisbet observes, people in our egalitarian age are more covetous of a Harvard degree than they were in FDR’s more class-ridden day...
...Progressives like Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey argued for a stronger state apparatus, guided by politicized experts, so that government would embody, in Croly’s words, a “national idea,” bound together by a “religion of human brotherhood...
...It was in the Renaissance that the political and military began to take over and crush earlier, more local community structures, Nisbet argued...
...The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality...
...He criticized the “spell of romantic individualism” that propagated the illusion of purely individual achievement...
...Philosophers forgot the distinction between state and society...
...For America, he came to believe, the crucial consolidation of central state power came around World War I. Woodrow Wilson tried to use government to construct a national community and to turn foreign policy into a moral crusade...
...Nisbet died on Sept...
...He thought religious leaders, especially on the religious right, had dangerously politicized religion...
...Over the subsequent centuries, the state got stronger and stronger, local authorities more and more powerless...
...Either you have a taste for this kind of ambitious field of reference or you don’t, and certainly more people in the 1950s and 1960s had a taste for it than now...
...And he must have drawn pleasure from the non-political aspects of life he celebrated...
...Nisbet wrote key sociology textbooks, but looking at the welter of policy proposals from colleagues, he acknowledged, “the social sciences [should] be termed for what they so largely are: the political sciences...
...But a central problem with state power, he believed, was that it choked off new forms of community that would have allowed people to cope more comfortably with changes in technology, work, and ways of living...
...And vice versa...
...In a state-dominated nation, everything becomes politicized or it withers...
...Local attachments were strong, relations to central government weak...
...Looking back on the Reagan years, he wrote, “In large measure conservatism has become, within a decade or two, an ideology seeking to capture democratic absolutism rather than secure from it social and moral authority distinct from political power...
...The result, Nisbet claimed, was instead the form of democratic absolutism that Tocqueville had predicted, in which government power is “absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild...
...Nisbet was impossible to classify—an anti-individualist libertarian may be the closest label—and to read him is to expect the unexpected...
...But if you don’t press the historical comparisons too hard, it makes for unexpected and thrilling reading...
...Nisbet quoted Rousseau: “Each citizen would then be completely independent of his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state . . . for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured...
...We pass on to our neighborhoods and our provincial connections...
...People began to look to the state to realize their personal aspirations (Communists most notably), and they increasingly felt that to be modern meant to sweep away custom and strive toward efficiency and centralization...
...And that diffusion of authority allowed merchants to go through Europe without worrying about passports and permitted the creation of leagues of cities, such as the Hanseatic, Rhenish, and others...
...Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change during wartime...
...Quantum increases in state power, Nisbet emphasized later in his life, come during wartime: “Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals tend to supersede relationships of family, parish and ordinary walks of life...
...Nisbet didn’t pine for a return to the Middle Ages...
...No cold relation is the zealous citizen...
...And war gives government a pretext to dominate national life...
...He lovingly quoted Burke on how we should structure our affections: “We begin our public affections in families...
...The odd thing is, Nisbet’s writing is not particularly gloomy in tone (especially for someone who at some points in his career thought America was on the verge of military dictatorship...
...And there’s something else that must be celebrated in his writing: Nisbet could scarcely go a page without bringing in some example, from Greece or Florence or India...
...Nisbet emphasized the complex array of intermediate organizations— family, guild, church—that intertwined to create a web of authority in which medieval people could lead their lives...
...And many of the answers he gave, starting with his 1953 book The Quest for Community, are more sophisticated and certainly more culturally learned than the ones we’re stumbling upon today...
...He was also remarkably handsome, which must make life a little sweeter even as you contemplate the decline of civilization...
...The real demon of the modern mind,” Nisbet wrote in a 1953 letter to Russell Kirk, is Rousseau...
...9 of prostate cancer at the age of 82, ending a distinguished career as a sociologist and public intellectual...
...For Nisbet, this inflation prevails in all societies in which the intermediate authorities have been swept away and the individual citizen relates directly to the one central figure, president or king...
...Clinton’s declaration...
...The presidential image is as closely tended as in the days of Alexander the Great and Louis XIV...
...Even the authority of parents was weakened, as government served in loco parentis...
...Nisbet could tease fascinating observations from this central pattern...
...Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit and not by a sudden jerk of authority are so many little images of the great country in which the heart has found something it could fill...
...Nisbet was also out of step with contemporary conservatism because he had no taste for its celebration of the individual...
...Executive-branch power accrues not to cabinet colleagues but to intimates who directly serve the presidential person...
...he scorned nostalgia all his life...
...Presidents, especially since JFK, have turned the White House into a palace (nowadays we think of the way highways are shut down when the presidential motorcade goes by...
...But his life’s work is a refutation of Mrs...
...For starters, the historical epochs normally taught as high points, like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, were for him low points...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 3
