One
Robert Nisbet's influential polemic The Quest for Community was rooted in two linked assertions about the Western world as he found it in the early 1950s: that there was under way a widespread search for community by a restless population of nominally liberated but actually alienated individuals, and that this “quest” was occurring even as the “political apparatus” of the Western democracies was relentlessly expanding into the everyday lives of its citizenry. Nisbet found that combination “very dangerous,” for although human beings are naturally sociable and can only thrive within organized groups, the sheer size, inner logic, and ruling temper of these invasive governments rendered them innately hostile to the humanizing qualities of association. Although it was driven to do so, “the modern State” (always capitalized in Nisbet's account) couldn't fulfill the intimate and civilizing functions of traditional society, and so the ongoing subordination of the day's alienated masses under the rule of these centralizing states would inevitably result in the decline of freedom and, with it, the devolution of civilized behavior. Despite the Allies’ recent triumph over fascism, then, the future seemed perilous to Nisbet, and in a book that was as cautionary as it was scholarly, he set about to clarify the historical origins of the trends that worried him.
These he located in a liberalism that had dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, and whose many notable achievements were now being threatened by either its institutionalized excesses or its foundational errors. The rise of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had led to a belief in and rigorous search for uniform, consistent, and final truths—truths analogous in their infallibility to the latest geometric proofs. Following the premise of Descartes’ method, this search began with a wholesale rejection of all the religious, cultural, and commonsense wisdoms that had preceded it. These mental biases were also allied with the revival of classical atomism, and in the very real and too often bloody sphere of politics, the new philosophical template quickly led to analogous ambitions and methods: a revolt against traditional practices and the groups that enforced them, an emphasis on the social atom (that is, the individual) as the primary constituent of political reality, and the rise of an aggressive secular state whose self-proclaimed virtue lay not in its compliance with traditional truths but in its emancipation of the individual from the oppressive rule of the old social groups. Politics was becoming a “science,” history was being reconceived as linear and progressive, and human events, it was presumed, would proceed as logically as a mathematical proof toward some infallible solution, whose arrival would be hastened by the adept interventions of a modernizing government.
In Nisbet's account, these interventions largely took the form of a relentless assault by “the modern State” on those “intermediate groups”—family, clan, tribe, sect, guild—whose traditional authority it aimed to usurp on behalf of the individual who was oppressed by them. The emancipation of the single self and the centralization of the modern State were, ironically, interdependent phenomena. The initial stages of a liberation from local rule concealed an eventual subordination of the deracinated individual to the powers of an ever-more absolute government. And insomuch as the threat of physical violence by alien forces could muster allegiances on a larger scale, frequent warfare became the modern State's preferred method for seizing authority from those intermediate groups.
Nisbet acknowledged, in passing, that life inside these traditional groups could at times be oppressive, but he insisted that the value of liberation had long outlived its advantages. Nor was the danger of this historical process limited to its reliance on near-perpetual warfare. The “abstract philosophy of individualism”1—its presumption that the single self was “autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable” and would flourish, therefore, once emancipated from the superstitious beliefs and unjust hierarchies imposed by “the dead hand of the past”2—was false at its core. The vitality of the individual was dependent instead on the quality of his associations, and the quality of those associations could only be sustained by a plurality of smaller groups. The “perspectives and incentives of the free creative mind [arose] out of communities of purpose,”3 and because, as Walter Lippman noted, “in the matter of theory, there [was] no real difference in the size and the claim [for expansive power] between communists, fascists, and democrats,”4 the ongoing destruction of those communities was the defining characteristic of the modern State in all its forms. Even in its democratic guise, the inherently “monistic” modern State would aggressively assume the functions of the old social groups until they had been sapped of all their practical authority.
Given the extent to which the emancipation (and so, too, alienation) of the individual had already been achieved by institutionalized liberalism, “the prime psychological problems of the age…[were] those not of release but of reintegration.”5 And since freedom, in Nisbet's view, could only thrive “in cultural diversity, in local and regional differentiation, in associative pluralism, and, above all, in the diversification of power, ”6 he proposed a new form of laissez faire: one that protected the rights of families, clubs, guilds and the like from the domination of the modern State, one that would “create the conditions within which autonomous groups, ”rather than simply autonomous individuals,“ might prosper.”7
Two
To evaluate the accuracy and relevance of this extended argument, it is necessary to place Nisbet's book within the context of its own historical moment. Completed by the end of 1952 and some four years in the making, The Quest for Community was written in the aftermath of the most violent and politically transformative century in human history, a stretch that included the scientific and industrial revolutions, the invention and proliferation of the electronic media, two world wars that resulted in some seventy million dead, a global depression, and Communist revolutions in Russia and China. The Western democracies had survived the Great Depression, but only through the institution of a welfare state and the artificial stimulus of total war, each of which had radically extended the influence of the nation-state over the everyday life of its citizenry. They had defeated fascism, but not without being allied to the totalitarian Soviet Union, whose postwar ambitions and nuclear capabilities posed an immediate and profound challenge. As Nisbet began composing his argument, the European continent, the erstwhile cradle of Western ideals, was in ruins. Forced to contemplate not only the horrific destruction of two world wars started on their home turf but also the moral abomination of the Holocaust, intellectuals were losing faith in the liberal ideal of collective progress as linked to notions of an inherently noble individualism.
America may have been spared the widespread destruction that had ravaged the continent, but it had not escaped the turmoil endemic to modern warfare. Hundreds of thousands of young men had been killed or wounded, and many returning soldiers were traumatized by their combat experience. The sheer size of the war's mobilization effort had created waves of social dislocation, including the mixing of races (not to be confused with real integration) and the sudden injection of women into the industrial workforce, only to be followed by their equally sudden removal. With the return stateside of so many young men ready to settle down, the suburbanization of American life rapidly accelerated, and this shift in residential patterns generated a number of unintended consequences. These included a stricter segregation of workplace from homestead, the subsequent removal of long-commuting fathers from their families’ daily lives, and the economic demise of the old rural town along with the cultural traditions that had once thrived there.
No public celebration of military victory or private recommitment to domestic normalcy was sufficient to soothe the simmering anxieties of the day, generated by decades of violent disruption and sociological change. This collective mood of angst-ridden alienation found many expressions: in the philosophy of existentialism, in the poetry of the Beats, in the rise of teen gangs who would “reintegrate” themselves in a criminal way, in the panic of middle-class adults who, in 1955, would rush to medicate themselves with the first round of heavily marketed tranquilizers, Mil-town and Equinal. To use the slang diagnosis of the day, the country as a whole was suffering from “nerves,” and this collective unease had its political ramifications. By 1947, just two years after Japan's surrender, America was already suffering from a wave of domestic paranoia about Communist infiltration—a fear that was much intensified by the Soviet Union's acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949 and the start of the Korean conflict in 1950. In the mutual distortions of our culture wars, this early postwar period has been alternately ridiculed as an era of robotic conformity or venerated as an Eden of domestic bliss, but it is best seen as a shocked and troubled lull—a pause between the categorical disruptions of the previous twenty years and their ultimately transformative implications.
Academically trained, Robert Nisbet's approach to comprehending this period was scholarly and abstract. Though nominally a sociologist who had authored one of the field's standard texts, he was far more at home in the library than “in the field.” As a consequence, his worldview was rooted in a rigorous if at times too partial rereading of canonical texts, with an emphasis on political theory and a special fondness for Burke and Tocqueville as the prophetic opponents of modernity's excesses. Yet even as Nisbet analyzes these historically distant political philosophers, one can feel the force field of contemporary events affecting his judgment. The rapid expansion of the modern nation-state's powers, the perils of perpetual warfare on an ever grander scale, the fear that democracy would devolve into a populist tyranny (as had happened in Germany in the 1930s): these highlights of the author's argument in The Quest for Community, as traced through a selective lineage of Western thinkers, were also the stuff of everyday headlines during his lifetime. In particular, his emphasis on the state's insatiable drive to absolute power reflects both the Soviet Union's self-conception at that time and the fear running rampant through American society that the Communist mission of global domination would succeed. Indeed, the character of Nisbet's argument is so in tune with the zeitgeist that one could easily imagine assigning it in a seminar as the analytical complement to Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
To be an academic author attuned to one's era is by no means a criticism in itself. Although rarely recognized by the public, historically based scholarship serves a vital civic function by plumbing the past to locate the currents of change and patterns of causality most applicable to the day. At its core, The Quest for Community aimed to historicize the collective challenges facing the Western democracies in the early postwar period. Nisbet was supplying an intellectual narrative with cautionary implications, highlighting the dangers of what one might ironically call modernity's tradition of anti-traditionalism. Nevertheless, to be informed by one's time is also to risk being blinkered by its biases. Trends that seem formidable, if not inevitable, can evaporate quickly and dangers perceived as archaic suddenly revive. More than fifty years have passed since Nisbet's cautionary analysis was first published, and the political and cultural landscape has shifted significantly, at times in ways that call into question either the original accuracy or the current relevance of his argument.
Most conspicuously, the Soviet Union under Communist rule—the heir apparent to the horrific side of the French Revolution and the arch-exemplar of the absolute state, as defined by Nisbet in 1952—has collapsed, and in many regions, the greatest threat to the social pluralism valued by Nisbet is being driven by religious fundamentalism, not rational liberalism. Meanwhile, in the Western democracies, we are now facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, a financial meltdown whose causes appear to be rooted, in part at least, not in an over-extension of the state's power but its reckless withdrawal under the happy-talk aegis of deregulation. As for collective psychology, Americans have continued to medicate themselves in astounding numbers, but the diagnosis has now shifted from “nerves” to “blues.” If you believe that statistics on prescriptions accurately reflect the nation's state of mind, we have been suffering from an epidemic of depression.
Three
Those changes notwithstanding, some of the key concepts of The Quest for Community retain their cautionary cogency, if not always in ways that Nisbet would have stressed. Although he vastly underestimated the determinative power of science and technology separate from their uses by the state, Nisbet's grasp of the dangers of rationalism as an applied philosophy more generally—its innate need to subordinate, its intolerance for ambiguity, its misapplication of a material causality to the moral plane—remains valid whenever and wherever the technocratic mind is granted authority. Likewise, his rejection of the “unidirectional” progressive view of history that emerged from the post-Enlightenment triumph of rationalism has been doubly endorsed by the hard course of human events: most terribly in the Communist East, where a belief in the social paradise to come was used to justify the slaughter of millions, but also in America where periodic spurts of imperial expansion have ridden under the banner of the manifest destiny of democratic capitalism. Here too, alas, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, an influential cast of rationalist thinkers vainly concluded that there was a happy “end of history,” that the problem of human governance had been “solved” and that, as its geometric master, America was morally licensed to school the outer regions of the world in its foolproof methods. That such reasoning quickly led to a “war of choice,” the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, is perfectly anticipated by Nisbet's argument. So, too, with the Bush administration's rapid expansion of executive authority under the unending and vaguely defined “war on terror.”
Drawing on a long tradition of philosophical conservatism, Nisbet's warnings about the limits of individualism also remain highly relevant. His assertion that, after a certain point, a unidirectional agenda of liberation becomes destructive to the single self as well as to the community is indisputable, I believe, and proof can be found in the recent sociological record—most tellingly, perhaps, in all the baneful statistics that followed the liberalization of the nation's divorce laws in the 1970s. Men, as it turns out, do not do as well physically or psychologically once freed from the “old ball and chain”—nor, on the whole, do the children they have left behind. Human beings are innately social creatures who best thrive in intimate and stable “communities of purpose,” and because the multiple benefits supplied to the individual by such communities require in turn an allegiance inseparable from certain kinds of obedience, a relentless revolt against obedience proves harmful to the single self and the group alike. After a point, emancipation in democratic societies engenders alienation, and the pursuit of happiness so narrowly defined will eventually and ironically produce instead an epidemic of personal un happiness, whether “nerves” or “blues.”
The social impact of romantic revolt pales, however, before the dislocations caused by the rationalization of our public and private lives as practically enforced by the Industrial Revolution in all its many phases. Often perceived as opponents but better understood as sibling rivals sired by the same philosophical turn, the dual inclinations to rationalize our everyday practices and romanticize our self-conception have, together, co-opted the authority and atomized the allegiances necessary to a good life. Although conditions have changed in ways I briefly summarized above, it remains as true now as it was in 1953 that “the prime psychological problems of the age…are those not of release but of reintegration.” Rather than simply medicate our anxieties or depressions, treating them as discrete and biochemically based diseases of the social atom, we need to reconsider the size, shape, pace, and quality of our interrelationships, the ethos and the telos of our most common associations. In the place of Nisbet's reintegration, I prefer to use re affiliation, whose Latin root—to adopt a son—better evokes the sorts of long-term devotion, freely chosen, that have been gradually expunged from American life. But that edit is a refinement on what remains a profound observation about the course of Western history: a necessary reversal of emphasis in the well-established democracies from emancipation to association, from the assertion of individual rights to the nurture of sociability within communities of purpose.
In a number of ways, then, Nisbet's analysis remains relevant for a contemporary readership, and yet his work never rises to the quality of those classic authors he most admires, Tocqueville especially. His thinking lacks that openness to possibility and acceptance of ambiguity which one finds in truly prophetic authors. In his later years, Nisbet lampooned the rigid policies of what he liked to call the nation's “political clerisy,” but there is something finally clerical about his own overarching argument in The Quest for Community; after a point, the progress of the analysis has the stiff gait of doctrine. Too much is left out of Nisbet's account. Mesmerized by his fear and loathing of one institutional incarnation of liberal modernity, he slights the influence of others and so misses the full complexity of the dynamics driving social change.
Four
My resistance to The Quest for the Community begins with this ironic observation: its author argues repeatedly for diversity and pluralism in cultural organization even as the character of his argument tends to the reductive. Nisbet castigates the “monistic” State, cautions that a “unitarian” democracy will become increasingly totalitarian, and he recognizes rationalism's inherently authoritarian temper. Yet his own causal explanations are monothematic, and although he reads widely, he does so often with the intention of subordinating the evidence under a highly rationalized theory of Western history. In sum, Nisbet's analysis strongly stresses European over New World history, the determinative influence of political contention (including warfare as an exclusively political event) over economic motivations, and the intellectual architecture of political philosophy over the psychological impact of technological change. For this American scholar writing in the mid-twentieth century after two world wars and a global depression, no less than for Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irishman who was alive during the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution remains the most significant event in modern history, and Rousseau is blamed as its virtual father. Just as revealing, the temper of Nisbet's analysis is consistently admonitory—that is to say, far more energy is expended on warning against the dangers of the modern State than on imagining which modern forms of association might evolve to combat it, an exercise that is largely restricted to the last few pages.
These, then, are the features that, pursued to excess, most weaken his case. I am tempted to say that, at its best, Nisbet's argument is truly conservative (that is, striving to conserve the best of time-proven human practices by adapting them to contemporary circumstances), while at its worst, it can seem reactionary—that is, so impressed, in the negative sense, with its intellectual enemy that it begins to exaggerate that enemy's effectiveness and believe its most vainglorious threats. The modern State is, after all, a false notion of human governance—that is precisely why it is so dangerous. The pure rationalism of its design is not only hostile to all traditional cultures; it is incapable of generating a life-sustaining culture of its own, and so any government that adheres to its agenda of absolute authority is destined to collapse, as in fact the Reign of Terror, the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union all did. The awful wreckage preceding that demise more than warrants strong warnings against its form of governance. But to insist, citing Walter Lippmann, that “in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size and the claim [for expansive power] between communists, fascists, and democrats” is to adopt as one's own a fundamental error of the revolutionary proselytizers for the modern State. For governments do not exist in theory: they exist in practice, in specific lands, which have their own unique cultural and political histories, their own characters. In 1953, Communists were preaching that theirs was a uniform and fraternal global movement, but in practice the old local identities and rivalries still prevailed, and soon the Soviet Union was skirmishing with the People's Republic of China, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was invading the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, an action which then spurred China to invade Vietnam. By the mid-nineties, all four nations, their economies in shambles, had rejected their original ideologies, especially the centralized planning characteristic of Communist states.
Unlike George Kennan, whose balanced postwar political analysis of the Soviet Union proved truly prophetic, Nisbet is so focused on heightening the threat of rationalized absolute governance that he underplays its inherent weaknesses, and this also leads him to a loose, even irresponsible use of the term totalitarian, blurring the differences between the emerging social welfare states in the democratic West and fascist and Communist governments. One can make a strong argument against an intrusive federal government without equating its bureaucracy to an incipient Stalinism, and all such arguments must take into account the specific character of the traditional culture of the nation in question. Here, too, Nisbet argues in the abstract for the virtues of particularism and local traditions without bothering to actually take the particular into account. And this reliance on the theoretical also allows him to avoid considering the sins of contemporary localism, such as the persistence of that de jure racism which was, of course, rampant in America in 1953. It is easy in theory to define democracies as either pluralistic or unitarian, and, in defense against an incremental authoritarianism by the nation-state, to endorse the former, but social and moral realities rarely conform to such neat divisions. And it is simply a historical fact that in America a principled argument on behalf of local resistance to “big government” was long co-opted to defend an ethically indefensible system of segregation.
Furthermore, Nisbet's strong emphasis on the political and on political theorists provides an incomplete and therefore misleading picture of both historical causation and the origin of the ideas that inform and describe it in any given period. He acknowledges that “change is always, at bottom, the reaction of individuals to new circumstances and the consequent effort of individuals to make [those circumstances] meaningful, and to build them into new values and systems of allegiances.”8 But then he quickly rushes ahead to focus on the struggle that invariably arises between the systems supporting the new allegiances and those supporting the old—that is, on the purely political conflict that obsesses him. Implicit in such a description, however, is the observation that political conflict is always a secondary phenomenon, and that a richer understanding of historical change demands a thorough consideration of what those “new circumstances” might be, an intellectual task that he largely eschews.
Lasting transformations in both the scale and the quality of social organization have almost always followed significant technological and economic innovations: the discovery of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the subsequent serial upgrades in economic production, weaponry, transportation, and communication—categorical material and mental empowerments that then presented enormous moral and political challenges. Here and there, Nisbet acknowledges the roles of science and industrialization in the evolution of modernity, but he does so only to subordinate their significance beneath the emergence of his highly reified notion of the modern State. An overly narrow allegiance to his thesis partially explains, then, this fundamental weakness in Nisbet's analysis. But I also sense here another unfortunate expression of a reactionary temperament. For Nisbet's resistance to the progressive view of history that prevailed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is clearly wed to his overt rejection of the “economic determinism” that was so often associated with it, especially (though not exclusively) in Marxist theory. But one can resist economic determinism without obscuring the importance of technological and economic influence, which is precisely what Nisbet's argument does, leading to a distorted account of the primary processes responsible for the rationalization and atomization of modern life.
Such an accusation begs an example. In chapter 3, Nisbet cites the noted sociologist Robert S. Lynd to support his thesis that “neighborhood and community ties” have been diminishing.9 But he never acknowledges that Lynd's most important book, Middletown (1929), an in-depth sociological study of Muncie, Indiana, pointed to the motion pictures and the automobile as the key transformative agents in middle America's social life. With the new license it provided to range far and wide, the family-owned car, for example, reduced time spent in the neighborhood, decreased church attendance, challenged parental supervision over teenage behavior, and introduced significant consumer indebtedness as normative—a change which, in turn, became an incentive for more women to enter the workforce. The multidimensional impact of the automobile on the everyday life of the community, its evisceration of the very bonds of local association that most concern Nisbet, undercuts his central thesis because its origins are technological and economic rather than political; these changes (collateral damages, if you will) were introduced into everyday life by capitalist commerce in search of ever larger profits, not the modernizing state avid for power.
Much later, in The Present Age, Nisbet would point to Woodrow Wilson's centralization of federal power during World War I as the pivotal point in American history when the expansive state became an intrusive threat to community life, but he fails to acknowledge there, too, that a dramatic centralization of industrial production had preceded the nation's entry into World War I. In its reflexive flight from economic determinism, Nisbet's analysis cannot comprehend that Henry Ford may have been a more transformative figure in Western history than Woodrow Wilson. Not just the product that Ford built but the highly rationalized means he refined for its manufacture and distribution, and the techniques he utilized to boost sales on a national scale, had a more pervasive and enduring influence on the shape and pace of American life than any political decision made during the same period.
To mention either Wilson or Ford is to be reminded of the most glaring omission in The Quest for Community: an almost total neglect of the American experience. A reader from Mars following Nisbet's account, so focused on the origins and implications of the French Revolution, would never realize that the American Revolution had ever taken place, much less that it not only preceded the French revolt but also produced a stable government that long outlasted it. If, in 1948, one wished to study the political lineage of liberal thought and the ways in which the emancipation of the individual related to the structures of power, how could one avoid examining the writings of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, who were designing a democratic government in actual practice and not just in theory? The overwhelming continental bias of Nisbet's book may have been a reflection of his academic interests, but it highlights the limits of his analysis as cautionary prophecy. World War II marked a decisive end to Europe's domination of global politics. The center of power was to be found in the New World, not the Old (a truth that Nisbet's hero Tocqueville intuited as early as the 1830s), and the genuine dangers that rationalization and atomization posed to the world would assume, therefore, an especially American flavor.
As Nisbet's contemporary Marshall McLuhan noted in Understanding Media: “Everyone experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”10 In the Soviet Union, as the intrusiveness of the state became omnipresent, its rationalized schemes, as enforced by an overweening bureaucracy, were felt by the average citizen at every turn. But in America, even as the federal government expanded its powers, the primary experience of the rationalized regulation of everyday life was still felt in the privately owned workplace, during the forty hours or more per week spent on the assembly line or in corporate America's vast managerial bureaucracies. In the Soviet Union, the new mass media were completely controlled by the central government, but in America the content of broadcast radio and TV, like that of cinema before them, had been licensed to commerce. Fixated on continental history and abstract political theory, Nisbet cannot comprehend that by 1953 the power to propagandize in America had already been ceded to the consumer corporation, or that the form that propaganda had assumed—seductive entertainment—would prove far more effective than the earnest agitprop of the commissar.
Nor does Nisbet's argument anticipate the construction of the enclosed mall and how, starting in 1956, these tightly controlled, supremely rationalized sales environments would quickly replace our civic squares and town parks as the primary meeting places of the nation's citizens—nor how, in a second wave of commercial rationalization, the big-box store and corporate agriculture would further eviscerate the sociable economy of the small town. Indeed, the very fear and loathing of the modern State that most characterizes Nisbet's analysis would be used to advance the cause of “privatization,” the actual impact of which, however, would be to transfer the state's power not to the local associations that he favored but to large, often multinational corporations whose only allegiance is to their investors, whose only purpose is profit-making, and whose standard methods of operation are fully committed to rationalizing and atomizing everyday experience.
Robert Nisbet was right to worry about the health of communal life in the modern democracies in the early postwar period, and he was right to propose (however vaguely) a project of protecting those “communities of purpose” that allow human beings to thrive in the richest sense. But although he grasped the philosophical origins of the threat, he missed its most potent contemporary incarnations. These were to be found not in a modern State modeled after the totalitarian logic of the Reign of Terror, but in the technology-enhanced commercialization of everyday life, as it was being designed by corporate labs and directed by corporate boardrooms, and as it was being experienced in the malls and movie houses of Middletown, America.
DAVID BOSWORTH is the author of two books of fiction and numerous essays on cultural change in America. He teaches at the University of Washington's Creative Writing Program and resides in Seattle.