Robert Nisbet finished writing The Quest for Community in 1952. His book is preoccupied by the decline of community. It belongs to a long, conservative tradition within the discipline of sociology that has its classic roots in the work of Emile Durkheim—and notably his 1897 book, Suicide.
Durkheim argued that the main problem facing modern Western societies is not economic (poverty and inequality) or political (abuse of power). It is cultural, and it centers on a steady decline in communal attachments, leading to individuals suffering from a range of pathologies, including anomie, egoism, rootlessness, restlessness, and insatiable and unstable passions and desires. Anomie means “without law,” a condition in which individuals lack internal attachment and regulation; do not feel bound to others; fail to internalize their society's normal ambitions for work, career, intimacy and family; and generally suffer from aimlessness, tepid passion, and self-obsession.
The fear of anomie has continued into our own time as a suspicion that the discontents of the contemporary West derive from excessive individualism and an allied weakness or absence of communal attachment. In recent years, this fear has been expressed in the language of “social capital.” Above all, the work of Robert Putnam has documented the rapid diminishing, in the United States, of the ways and intensity in which people aggregate together across the spectrum of everyday life, whether it is dining with friends; joining sporting clubs, political parties, or trade unions; or working voluntarily for charities. The same trend can be observed throughout the West.
What is distinctive about Robert Nisbet's argument is the emphasis he places on the role of the state, and above all the central government, in what has come to pass, and on what might be done to remedy the problem. His argument is just as relevant today, more than a half century later. Before taking up that argument, it is worth reflecting on what was different in 1952.
In 1952 the Cold War was in its prime, and, with it, fears of totalitarianism. The Soviet empire was spreading. Four years earlier, George Orwell had published his dystopic projection of a totalitarian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hannah Arendt published her seminal Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. Mao's Communist revolution had just succeeded in China. A decade later, fear of the spread of the Soviet totalitarian model throughout Southeast Asia would suck the United States and its allies into what would become the Vietnam War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union ended all of this. The threat of spreading totalitarianism is now minimal, with the last effective representative, China, heading, as it industrializes, inevitably in a liberal direction. The only remaining hard-core examples of totalitarian states are dysfunctional—North Korea and Cuba. Even Communism in its moderate form, “socialism,” has lost virtually all credibility as a theory of social and economic organization. Nineteen Eighty-Four stands as a rather uninteresting fossil, living on as no more than a cue for the most banal reality television. Orwell got the future wrong.
In the 1950s an extensive literature grew about “mass society.” The fear was that the inevitable trend in modern industrialized societies was toward an economy dominated by large corporations (because of the capitalist imperative of mass production) and a government dominated by vast, faceless bureaucracies. It was believed that all sectors of work and daily life, from banking to education, were becoming ever more bureaucratized. This is what Tocqueville had predicted, in his enduring classic Democracy in America, as the “new despotism”—a despotism without violence or coercion. Tocqueville anticipated that increasingly helpless individuals would voluntarily cede more and more power to the central government in the misplaced belief that it would look after and protect them.
In “mass society” there is nothing left to mediate between an atomized mass of powerless individuals and the huge institutions of government and commerce. Franz Kafka was popular in the 1950s in part for caricaturing such a world—of vast, all-powerful, inscrutable, and irrational bureaucracy—in novels like The Castle.
The “mass society” theorists were proved wrong, at least in the short term. Putnam, in his Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), provided telling data to show that the 1950s and 1960s were in fact the golden decades of American community. Citizens socialized together and formed local organizations more than they had ever done before, at least as far as available data permit generalization. Putnam attributes this communal tendency in part to a war generation that had learned the virtues of selfless service and patriotic communalism.
Beginning about 1970, however, there has been a steady decline in social capital. This decline has become very strong in some areas of the West. It is manifested in a general trend for people to socialize less frequently with others, to be less likely to join clubs and associations, and to be less generous in donating money to philanthropic causes.
Putnam works within the assumptions of the conservative communalist tradition that includes Durkheim and Nisbet. However, his work qualifies the general thesis. It raises a problem with Durkheim's assumption that modernization, and with it secularization and increasing individualism, would result in an inevitable and continuous decline of community. Bowling Alone shows rather that communal attachment has gone through cycles. And the steady weakening since 1970 does not correlate significantly with increasing secularization (as indicated, for example, by declining church membership) or with other leading features of modernization, such as increasing mobility, more diverse and flexible work experience, or greater material consumption. Putnam's main positive variable is the behavior of the generation that went through the Second World War; his major negative variable is television.
Furthermore, although community has been in decline since 1970, the towns and cities of the West remain dotted with local associations. To choose two examples from Bowling Alone: Between 1970 and 2000 the proportion of people who spent a social evening with someone who lived in their neighborhood dropped from 60 percent to 50 percent.1 This is a drop, but not an apocalyptic one. Putnam's hallmark example is bowling clubs, in which membership dropped to one-quarter of the 1960s rates. But the bowling example is atypical in its extremity. More characteristic is the slow decline in golf-club memberships. Thus, for example, in Australia people in their twenties, thirties, and forties are playing more golf than their predecessors, but they are less inclined to join clubs. Overall, we are seeing a decline of communal engagement, but not its disappearance.
Robert Nisbet was prescient. He did not fear that the West was threatened by totalitarianism or by socialism. Nor is his work conservative in the reactionary sense that he longs for the restoration of a mythic small-town world—Norman Rockwell's America. Nisbet says that the “real problem is not the loss of old contexts but rather the failure of our present democratic and industrial scene to create new contexts of association and moral cohesion within which the smaller allegiances of men will assume both functional and psychological significance. It is almost as if the forces that weakened the old have remained to obstruct the new channels of association.”
The “forces that weakened the old” are twofold. There is the drive of industrialization, the capitalist logic of “creative destruction,” as Joseph Schumpeter termed it, a logic that remorselessly eliminates old institutions as it builds new ones. As Marx put it, in his most acute observation, the great revolutionary force in modernity is the capitalist economy itself. The second force described by Nisbet has been the central government, which encourages capitalism and thereby contributes to the erosion of local ties. The state facilitates the decline of community.
“Moral cohesion” is a pivotal category in this analysis. The basic unit for Nisbet, as for Durkheim, is the social group, not the individual. To take an obvious example, a child's conscience is shaped within his or her family. Family values are reinforced by other social groups, including the extended family, church, sporting clubs, and schools. Remove any group from this crisscrossing network and the communal glue weakens. A priest or minister reinforces personal morality; he strengthens the resolve of parents in constraining rebellious teenagers and may influence those teenagers directly. As church attendance declines so does the pastor's influence. Even in the United States, where the Christian churches have retained a vitality absent elsewhere in the West, the proportion of the population that attends services regularly has dropped to about 20 percent.2
So, community encourages and reinforces moral cohesion. At the same time, the faculty of conscience is individual, and to a very significant degree inborn. There is no sign that Western societies have become more anarchic and less law-abiding as people have become more likely to have their beliefs and values reinforced in private, at home, through watching television, rather than through active participation in neighborhood groups. Social capital may have declined in the past four decades, but the major social indices show that Western societies remain orderly, smoothly functioning, and, in realistic historical terms, low in crime and violence. (Increasing levels of psychopathology—notably depression—partly offset this optimistic appraisal.)
The ideal modern society balances individual conscience and collective moral cohesion. Nisbet's fear is that the balance is being lost.
Today, Western democracy is undergoing changes. The social-capital pessimists rightly note that fewer and fewer people are participating directly in politics—joining political parties or trade unions, attending political meetings, or forming local action or pressure groups. Yet new forms of political participation are emerging, such as talk radio and blogs. Politicians increasingly take note of public opinion as expressed directly by citizens responding to issues of the day via the new media. Democracy is itself dynamic and continues to evolve its own new forms.
What about the potential role of the state in encouraging modes of moral cohesion? Robert Nisbet argues for a new philosophy of laissez faire, but this is not the old anticommunity free-for-all. The state should check rampant individualism and unregulated free-market capitalism. He writes, “To create conditions under which autonomous groups may prosper must be, I believe, the prime objective of the new laissez faire. ”This is timely advice today, as the world tries to respond to an economic crisis induced by too much economic deregulation and a lack of scruples among financial elites.
However, there is not much of a role for social theory in the domain of economic policy. Necessity is forcing Western governments to intervene and regulate their economies. It is obvious to almost everyone that this needs to happen. Indeed, the history of capitalism is a history of cycles of laissez faire and increased state intervention. Roosevelt's New Deal policies followed the laissez-faire orientation of the 1920s; deregulation followed the stagflation of the 1970s, which had been induced by one-sided Keynesian interventionism. Perhaps the most recent significant moment in that free-market cycle was President Clinton's relaxation of the regulation of American banks, a deregulation that played a major role in the subprime home-loan collapse that precipitated the crisis of 2008.
Nisbet is more concerned with the social than the economic domain. He fears the ever-expanding tentacles of the state prophesied by Tocqueville. Instead, he advocates a state that fosters the independence of families, local communities, trade unions, and other voluntary associations.
Two separate points need to be made here. First, history has proved Tocqueville right in his prediction that central government would continue to expand, ever increasing its power and range of influence. This has brought with it an allied problem, the overbureaucratization of society. This, in turn, was the leading fear of the greatest of sociology's modern founding fathers, Max Weber. Weber saw that the major threat to the West was not declining community but a disenchanted world dominated by bureaucracies run by “specialists without spirit, and sensualists without heart. ”The future would be rational, efficient, and comfortable, but equally banal, prosaic, and spiritless.
Nisbet's worries are in accord with those of Tocqueville and Weber. His response is to advocate a new role for the state, that of fostering local community. Is this plausible? It is possible to adapt the tax system to favor families, charities, sporting clubs, and other types of voluntary associations. Governments already do this in different ways, and to differing degrees, depending on their social philosophies.
On this front, the greatest curse of the modern state is its inherent tendency to take over functions that have previously been fulfilled by voluntary associations. For example, government social-welfare bureaucracies have tended to remorselessly expand, colonizing areas of social life in which private charities (notably those run by churches) used to provide services for the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the disadvantaged. In effect, government acts unwittingly to destroy local associations. And where it does continue to fund independent welfare bodies, such as nursing homes run by churches, it nearly always requires them to become more and more bureaucratic, mimicking its own processes.
Governments that curb their own anticommunal tendencies might contribute to the restoration of “moral cohesion.” But there seems to be an iron law of bureaucracy: bureaucrats only tolerate their own processes, and they are inwardly driven to expand them into every corner of social life. Bureaucrats are secular missionaries with their own handbook for redemption, one which is underpinned by a doctrine of rigorous documentation, calculability, step-by-step itemized planning, and accountability.
Adapting the tax system to favor voluntary associations, including families, is a modest and indirect initiative. In general, it is not a function of the state, in my view, to change culture or custom. How we humans gather together is not the business of government. Social engineering should stick to the broad area of political economy—including economic planning and development, infrastructure, education, health, and welfare.
The rich texture of everyday life evolves according to some mysterious, unfathomable logic, generated from deep inside the social organism: how people choose to gather together, how they express themselves, what they value, the habits they develop, and even how they regard themselves.3 It cannot be predicted, certainly not planned. Here was one of the key misunderstandings of socialist philosophy.
The drift away from community is a reflection of the changing fabric of everyday life. Modern citizens seem to prefer community in small doses: the yearning for cozy, intimate, and secure communal life is not so much to be acted upon, but rather soothed by fantasy idealizations propagated by magazines, television, and other media. New technology has played a major and inevitable role here, stimulating changes to our patterns of work and leisure, and new interactions between the two. First, there was the impact of television; now, the personal computer and the Internet.
There have been losses and gains. The losses have been outlined by Nisbet and documented by Putnam. The social golfer who turns up at a new course simply to play and then immediately leave misses out on the camaraderie of gathering together for an hour or so each week after the match among a familiar group that loves their course and club, and that shares convivial banter over drinks about the day's absurdities. Putnam mounts a strong argument that it is the experience of voluntary association that strengthens democracy.4 Club members learn the general habits of active communal responsibility through running their own club—through maintaining the course, running the clubhouse and its facilities, planning the annual calendar of competitions, and managing the club's finances.
On the other hand, as small-town and suburban community has been in retreat, there have been gains. Modern Western societies are extraordinarily dynamic—industrialized, cosmopolitan, metropolis-oriented, liberal democratic in their politics, versatile in their modes of work and leisure. People choose ways that suit them. Some new forms of community have appeared, as reflected in the increasing significance that many find in their social relations at work. The high-rating television series Friends drew upon the increasing importance of the small friendship group for many—it has become their primary informal community.
Moral cohesion is built in complex ways. For instance, sport has become increasingly important across the West. It teaches the values of excellence, courage, hard work, and, in the cases of team sport, selflessness in the service of a higher entity, the group of teammates. The Olympic Games have become, and by a huge margin, the most important global gathering. They draw upon the classical Greek ideal of “athletic religion,” with its own moral code transcending, for participant and spectator alike, the material ambitions of everyday life. The Olympics foster both pan-nationalism and patriotism. This patriotism ties love of country to individual excellence in the performance of acts of virtuosity and grace. All in all, there is powerful moral binding at work here.
We are in a period of declining communal participation, and this brings with it some threat to moral cohesion. But not much can be done about this. Customs and mores are not susceptible to social planning. The state can act at the margins, through such indirect mechanisms as tax policy. More importantly, the state has the task of curbing its own native drive toward bureaucratic expansionism—for central government, this task is third in overall significance, after the effective management of the political economy, and national security. Reassuringly, there is the background reality that modern Western societies are robust and very good at self-correction.5
JOHN CARROLL is professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He recently published The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited with ISI Books.