For twenty years now, commentators from across the political and philosophical spectrum have sounded a common alarm: American democracy is in crisis. Observers such as Michael Sandel, Christopher Lasch, Robert Putnam, and Mary Ann Glendon, despite their theoretical differences, have voiced a basic concern that our polity is in serious disrepair and that one of its chief ailments is a decline in the institutions of civil society. Though the literature addressing this dimension of “democracy's discontent, ”as Sandel phrases it, has proliferated in recent years, those concerned about the problem would do well to revisit the work of Robert Nisbet.1
Nisbet's corpus, more than five decades in the making, constitutes a treasury of insight into social life that repays close examination today. It is an indispensable supplement to the work of contemporary writers on civil society. Nisbet is an extraordinary diagnostician of modern social ills, and the acuity of his diagnosis owes much to his knowledge of history and attention to philosophical conflict.
At the same time, the prescriptive dimension of Nisbet's work remains incomplete, needing a more adequate theory of the state, human freedom, and the normative status of social institutions. In this regard, the social ontology and political vision of Catholic social thought offers the resources necessary to correct and complete Nisbet's already impressive achievement.
The Loose Individual in a Twilight Age
In his first book, the widely acclaimed Quest for Community (1953), Nisbet identified a strong strand of alienation and cultural unrest amidst the heady affluence, peace, and productivity of postwar America. Below the optimistic surface of the time, he observed, the intellectual, the artist, and the common man alike had experienced a disturbing change in consciousness.
The culture shapers of the nineteenth century, fervent believers in progress and the power of unassisted reason, had celebrated the independent individual as their ideal. These rationalists held “the essence of society to lie in the solid fact of the discrete individual—autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable—and the essence of history to lie in the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past.”2 Increasingly free from the shackles of tradition and the binding ties of church, kin, guild, and locality, the hearty soul could fashion for himself a life as unique as talent and ingenuity could make it.
Alexis de Tocqueville—for Nisbet a social observer of the keenest perception—readily identified this independent, if not rebellious, streak in the American mind. The American disposition, Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, was decidedly antitraditional: “The nearer the people are drawn to the common level of an equal and similar condition, the less prone does each man become to place implicit faith in a certain man or certain class of men.” Neither the clergy nor the professoriate retained automatic authority. Democratic equality, free markets, fluid property, and social mobility would be the hallmarks of the new republic.
While their proponents celebrated these changes as liberating, Tocqueville noticed certain baleful effects. Absent binding ties to place, class, and family name, Americans were becoming an ahistorical people, forgetful of the past, heedless of the future. Noting their preoccupation with the present, Tocqueville offered a sobering observation: “The woof of time is every instant broken [here] and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of the man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself.”3 Moreover, the very equality that “renders [the American] independent of each of his fellow citizens,” and ostensibly free from intellectual authorities, increases “his readiness to believe the multitude” and makes opinion “more than ever mistress of the world.”4 Without the sturdy roots of an inherited tradition, the lone thinker proved himself a weak reed, easily swayed by the current of popular opinion.
More than a century later, Robert Nisbet witnessed these effects in their maturity. It was, he lamented, a grim picture. While the watchwords of the nineteenth century had been progress, reason, freedom, and change, the twentieth century's lexicon featured alienation, decline, disintegration, and insecurity. Shorn of his social connections, the rugged individual had proven himself to be anxious, rootless, and prey to the lure of mass movements promising moral certainty and existential purpose. In fact, Nisbet insisted, the appeal of such ideologies as Communism and fascism reflected the emergence of a “twilight age” in the West, an age in which “human loyalties, uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tumbling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them. Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance. Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is commonplace.5
The characteristic personality type of a twilight age is the figure Nisbet dubbed “the loose individual.”6 This is the man bound by few constraints or compelling responsibilities, who is alienated from the past, from a sense of place, from meaningful connection to the natural world and its rhythms, and from tangible property. His freedom from the ties of class, religion, and kinship that defined his predecessors is accompanied, according to Nisbet, “not by the sense of creative release but by the sense of disenchantment and alienation.”7 His is an existence preoccupied by the self, by the disquiet of his inner consciousness.
As Nisbet surveyed the social scene at mid-century (and for four decades after that), he found one of its chief characteristics to be the decline of the institutions of civil society. This development disturbed him, since he regarded the associations found between the individual and the state as indispensable. These are the relationships that “mediate directly between man and his larger world of economic, moral, and political and religious values.”8 Traditionally, it is within these groups that man has discovered his sense of self, his moral compass, his status and roles, and a world of symbolism that renders the cosmos intelligible. But by the mid-twentieth century, Nisbet argued, the traditional primary relationships of family, neighborhood, church, trade union, charity, and so forth had lost their functional importance. At one time the household, for instance, had been the site of indispensable economic functions, as the example of the family farm and workshop attests. But this system collapsed under the pressures of industrialization and the centralizing impetus of capitalism. Likewise, Nisbet observed, the neighborhood and town no longer retained serious political significance, with the center of political gravity in America having shifted to the federal government.9
The family, the church, and other primary communities were still expected to play important roles in the moral formation and psychological development of their members. As Nisbet pointed out, however, once a social institution loses significant functions and a place of status in the larger culture, its capacity to exert authority and evoke allegiance of any kind diminishes. Such institutions “must seem important” in the broader social order, he wrote, “but to seem important they must be important.”10
Nisbet's reflections on the state of the family are especially relevant today. “The family,” he wrote, “is a major problem in our culture simply because we are attempting to make it perform psychological and symbolic functions within a structure that has become fragile and an institutional importance that is almost totally unrelated to the economic and political realities of our society.”11 The family, like class, has virtually no relevance for the formal category of citizenship and political participation; by and large, it is the individual who is the focal point of law, education, and cultural activities.
Nisbet was not sanguine about the prospects for traditional social institutions. “State and economy alike,” he averred, “have, in effect, bypassed family and community to go straight to the individual, thus leaving him so often precariously exposed to the chilling currents of anonymity and isolation.”12 Nor did he see new associations emerging that could fulfill both the functional and psychological tasks once accomplished by these groups; hence the unsatisfied thirst for communal belonging that struck him as ubiquitous and dangerous.
The American Scene at Twilight
Nisbet observes that America's founding principles and fundamental law actually support both a decentralized scheme of government and a vigorous civil society. Indeed, it is the burden of The Federalist Papers to demonstrate the degree to which the proposed constitution embodies the federalist principle. As James Madison insists in Federalist 14, the purview of the national government is strictly confined to “certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.” The states and localities remain effective political units, retaining “their due authority and activity.” In Federalist 10 Madison highlights the importance of associations, arguing that each of the vast array of groups formed according to rival interests in a populous republic checks the other and prevents the rise of a majority faction. In short, the Founders’ philosophical commitment to individual and associational liberty would be ensured by—and would also ensure—a limited, decentralized government.
When Tocqueville surveyed the American scene nearly fifty years later, he saw that federalism was alive and well: the states and localities brimmed with political energy, and the citizenry had perfected the associative principle. Tocqueville explains how townships enjoyed authority and independence, which evoked the civic energies of its members:
The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interests, the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions. He takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.
The kind of cooperation demanded by the “art of government” as practiced in the township happily fostered the social institutions that made for a vital civil society. Much to Tocqueville's surprise, he found that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”13 Political and social freedom go hand in hand: this is the great lesson that Nisbet draws from Democracy in America.
Regrettably, the lesson wouldn't last. Political power moved decisively from the localities and states to the national government, and this seismic shift affected the whole social order. No longer possessed of vital attachments to his township, the American now had a more abstract connection to his nation and he withdrew from civic engagement of all sorts. The American “citizen” came to resemble the European “subject” depicted by Tocqueville, the person who “considers himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits.” This subject feels no concern for such matters as “the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage,” because “he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government.”14
For Nisbet such a profound devolution represented nothing less than a betrayal of America's founding principles. In The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (1988), he writes that President Woodrow Wilson hastened the decline of the public order by inaugurating what Nisbet calls the “moralization of foreign policy.” Possessed of a fierce sense of righteousness, Wilson would not rest satisfied with the modest goals of national security and domestic peace; instead he envisioned an ambitious, not to say messianic, campaign to “make the world safe for democracy.” This venture placed America squarely on an interventionist path, with Wilson initiating a “military nationalism” that entailed a vast expansion of the armed services, a dramatic increase in centralized power, and the proliferation of a federal bureaucracy. The foreign and domestic policies of successors such as Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson only exacerbated what Wilson began. Nisbet argues that we departed so radically from the original constitutional order of federalism and limited government as to become the very thing the Founders feared most: “a highly centralized, unitary political Leviathan.”15
With the rise of a centralized, omnicompetent state has come ineluctably the direct rule of the federal government over individuals. As Nisbet laments in The Present Age, “There isn't an aspect of individual life, from birth to death, that doesn't come under some kind of federal scrutiny every day, and that means of course bureaucratic scrutiny.”16 The federal government, as Nisbet sees it, has arrogated to itself an unprecedented range of functions in such areas as education, labor, welfare, health, and scientific research. In so doing, the centralized state has eroded not only the authority and independence of state and local governments but also the autonomy of civil society, by undermining the authority of the township, family, church, university, and other institutions whose significance rests precisely upon the capacity to perform an indispensable function. Thus stripped of importance, the institutions in question no longer compel participation and allegiance, and the social bonds once forged within them wither. A robust civil society gives way to a sea of disconnected individuals.
The acuity and prescience of Nisbet's observations are remarkable. Nisbet's perceptive analysis anticipated by several decades the disturbing findings of social observers such as E. J. Dionne, who surveyed political disaffection in Why Americans Hate Politics, and Robert Putnam, who catalogued the collapse of communal organizations in Bowling Alone. Writing in 1969, Nisbet described the problem he first identified in The Quest for Community in 1953: Alienation, he noted, “is a conspicuous state of mind,” to the point that “the individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.” Nisbet then warned of the scope of the problem: “For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought. Not all the manufactured symbols of togetherness, the ever-ready programs of human relations, patio festivals in suburbia, and our quadrennial crusades for presidential candidates hide the fact that for millions of persons such institutions as state, political party, business, church, labor union, and even family have become remote and increasingly difficult to give any part of one's self to.”17
The New Laissez Faire
To reverse the trends of state power, social fragmentation, and individualism will require nothing less than a “revolution in ideas,” Nisbet insists. In The Quest for Community he proposes just such an alternative in what he dubs “a new laissez faire.”18 Unlike its namesake from classical liberalism, the new laissez faire would privilege the freedom of civil society, not merely the individual. Nisbet argues that a “unitary theory of democracy,” according to which the individual and the state are the central political actors, must be rejected, and instead democracy must foster the functional autonomy of groups and institutions. Moreover, under the new laissez faire the state would seek “to diversify and decentralize its own administrative operations and to relate these as closely as possible to the forms of spontaneous association which are the outgrowth of human needs and desires and which have relevance to the economic, educational, and religious ends of a culture.”19
In the concluding chapter of The Twilight of Authority (1975), Nisbet expands on this argument, sketching the central elements of the social pluralism he thinks essential for cultural renewal. The first of these is functional autonomy, according to which each significant social institution—from the family to the school to religious bodies to the economy—should enjoy maximum freedom in realizing its own proper ends, thus promoting a rich harmony of social voices rather than the dull monotone of state-imposed uniformity. Functional autonomy requires decentralization as a close corollary—that is, a revival of American federalism—for the centralization of power enervates the wider social order. But a decentralization of political power is not enough; the scope of “the political” itself must shrink, to counter the state's appropriation of once-social functions.20
Hierarchy and tradition are likewise indispensable elements of social pluralism. In an aggressively equalitarian age, invoking the first is sure to provoke criticism, but Nisbet is undeterred; he argues that an appreciation of what is high, exceptional, distinctive, and rare is essential to a civilized culture. Similarly, in a time of stifling legalism and litigiousness, he proposes a return to social life governed as much as possible by informal customs and traditions of interaction so as to promote freedom and social vitality.
Nisbet's Unfinished Work
From The Quest for Community to The Present Age, Nisbet's chronicle of the decline of the social order, the rise of the military Leviathan, and the consequent widespread experience of alienation is illuminating and persuasive. It reflects a capacious intellect capable of synthesizing material from a host of disciplines and sources. His powers of description are extraordinary. The prescriptive elements in his work are also compelling, but they require fuller development and a more satisfying foundation. To achieve social pluralism requires moving beyond historical description and sociological analysis to social ontology—that is, to philosophical and theological anthropology. The vision of man, society, and politics found in Catholic social thought provides the resources needed to establish the pluralism Nisbet desires.
From the perspective of Catholic social thought, one of the cardinal strengths of Nisbet's approach is its resolute rejection of reductionism on the one hand and determinism on the other. In his magisterial introduction to the study of sociology, The Social Bond, Nisbet warns against “the reductionist fallacy” of explaining higher levels of reality by exclusive appeal to the operation of lower levels.21 Moreover, he insists that social life has a substantial reality that cannot be reduced to the behavior of individuals: “We do not really see ‘individuals’ in the sense of discrete, elemental human particles in the world around us. ”Rather, we se.“ human beings only in the roles, statuses, and modes of social interaction which are the stuff of human society. And these roles, statuses, and modes of interaction are social—that is, they belong to an order of reality that is every bit as solid and differentiable as are the atoms dealt with by physicists, the molecules and substances by chemists, and the tissues and organs by biologists.”22
True to his principles, Nisbet examines the highest reaches of human experience, including man's experience and symbolization of the sacred. Unlike some of his determinist colleagues who would view religion as mere epiphenomenon, Nisbet views the sacred as “the historical and continuing core of culture.”23 Our religious symbols and norms testify to human freedom; we are more than atomic clusters, we are more than the sum of material processes of any kind—biological, physiological, or economic.
Still, Nisbet is reluctant to address the question of religious truth per se. This is a significant lacuna in his work, because he himself acknowledges that ideas matter and does not hesitate to offer stringent normative judgments on a range of disputed questions. “Everything vital in history reduces itself ultimately to ideas, which are the motive forces.”24 If this is true, then our ideas about God and, in turn, the nature and destiny of man must matter especially. But if this is true, then it will not suffice to appeal to the importance of “the sacred” or “traditions” or “customs” generically understood. For as both history and contemporary experience attest, conceptions of the sacred and the ways of life to which they give rise differ dramatically, and not all will sustain the vision of a free social order that Nisbet proposes.
Here is where a Catholic anthropology is especially pertinent. To protect human freedom from a degrading determinism or the predations of political power, one must demonstrate that there is something sacred and inviolable about each human being. Christianity has a singular capacity to do this, for it affirms the transcendent origin and destiny of every person. As Pope John Paul II expressed it in Evangelium Vitae, “Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase…[which is] a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.”25
But the dignity of the individual affirmed here does not imply the individualism Nisbet fears. To the contrary, created in the image of a Trinitarian God, man is intrinsically social, precisely designed for community. It is only in and through community that man realizes his fundamental vocation to love. As the Second Vatican Council put it in Gaudium et Spes, God “willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”26 This fraternal spirit is expressed first in the intimate life of the family, and moves to “intermediate communities” that give rise to “specific networks of solidarity,” within which the human person develops his gifts morally, intellectually, and spiritually.27 Gaudium et Spes continues:
Man's social nature makes it evident that the progress of the human person and the advance of society itself hinge on one another. For the beginning, the subject and the goal of all social institutions is and must be the human person that for its part and by its very nature stands completely in need of social life. Since this social life is not something added on to man, through his dealings with others, through reciprocal duties, and through fraternal dialogue he develops all his gifts and is able to rise to his destiny.28
In specifying this social context, papal documents underscore the importance of civil society as the connective tissue of a polity. John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus insists, “The social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good.”29
This description dovetails with Nisbet's celebration of intermediate groups, voluntary associations, and the like. But an important difference emerges in The Quest for Community. In the preface to the 1970 republication of the book, Nisbet strenuously objects to the idea that he is nostalgic for an earlier way of life or the old forms of community. “Only the archaist,” he insists, “would say that these specific bonds are necessary”—hence Nisbet's plea for new groups and associations independent from, and as a curb upon, the overweening modern state. The problem with this formulation is that it does not recognize the possibility that some social institutions both perform an essential function and do not admit of significant alteration.
Catholic social thought, by contrast, recognizes that not only do human beings enjoy a nature with distinctive ends and prerogatives, but that social institutions do too. As Russell Hittinger has argued, the Catholic Church understands that social institutions, like marriage, the family, the church, and the state, are vested with authority to carry out an irreplaceable mission.30 And in the case of certain of these, such as marriage and the church, the precise form of the institution is indispensable. Thus, whether or not these are deemed archaic or irrelevant, the family, rooted in heterosexual, monogamous marriage, and a hierarchical church are designed by God with a structure uniquely suited to their purposes.
Nisbet might resist this contention, for he tends to assign an instrumental value to institutions and traditions. Hence his assertion that “there is no single type of family, anymore than there is a single type of religion, that is essential to personal security and collective prosperity.”31 At times it seems that he is more concerned with what works than with what is. In a similar vein, Nisbet observes that a strong connection to the past is important “if only for its functional necessity to revolt.” “How can there be a creative spirit of youthful revolt, “he asks,” when there is nothing for revolt to feed upon but itself?”32 Indeed, Nisbet thinks that the disenchantment of the age “would be no misfortune were it set in an atmosphere of confident attack upon the old and search for the new.” But he offers little analysis, let alone normative appraisal, of the ideas, institutions, and traditions that are the objects of said revolt. In certain places his work suffers from a corresponding inattention to qualitative differences, which leads him to make such breezy and dubious comparisons as between the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the modern “political clerisy” devoted to centralized power: the operations of both groups, he casually remarks, lead to a stifling homogeneity, uniformity, and monism of power.33
The lack of subtlety in this kind of comparison ill befits a mind as searching and powerful as Nisbet's. Perhaps his training and enculturation in sociology is to blame; philosophical and theological waters are deep and formidable. Or perhaps Nisbet's exquisite sensitivity to the liberty of the individual primed him for an allergic reaction to any aggregation of authority. After all, there are distinctly libertarian notes in his conception of freedom. He notes, for example, that so long as there are competing authorities and “so long as man has even the theoretical possibility of removing himself from any that for him has grown oppressive and of placing himself within the framework of some other associative authority, it cannot be said that his freedom has suffered.”34 To invoke Isaiah Berlin's formulation, freedom for Nisbet often appears as “freedom from”—from the claims of authority of various kinds. Freedom, he stresses, “lies in the interstices of authority” and is safeguarded only to the extent that one has the possibility of release from any given authority.35 Ironically, this formulation of freedom threatens to undermine the very institutions of civil society Nisbet considers valuable, for it implies that every social tie is tentative and every authoritative claim defeasible. It is difficult to see how crucially important social institutions such as marriage and the church, which depend upon irrevocable vows and obedience—to say nothing of institutions like the family, in which obligations precede an act of the will—could retain their meaning given such an understanding of freedom.
Nisbet is, of course, especially concerned about freedom from state power. Rather than limiting itself to what it does best—namely, “maintain order”—the modern state routinely impinges upon the liberty of its citizens; the scope of its law virtually limitless, the tentacles of Leviathan invade every quarter.36“There comes a time,” Nisbet cautions, “when no matter how much ‘representation’ we as citizens have, laws—of taxation and disposition of property, of choice of schooling, of penetration even of the bedroom, of pornography and obscenity, of race, color, and sex, and of all else involved in the business of living—become burdensome to even the thickest-skinned.”37
While Nisbet's basic instinct regarding the state's undue accumulation of power is unobjectionable, it needs refinement in light of a more adequate conception of freedom and political authority. According to Catholic social thought, freedom is the fulfillment of our nature; it is the state of comprehensive flourishing that requires the cultivation of virtue, an enterprise that entails the initiative of the individual but also, crucially, the aid of a host of other agents, from the family to friends to the church and school to the neighborhood and state. In accord with the principle of subsidiarity, the state should not usurp the proper authority and functions of any other unit, but by the same token it enjoys its own legitimate sphere of competence. And, contrary to what seems to be Nis-bet's emphasis, that sphere includes not only the minimalist liberal task of maintaining order but more importantly the promotion of the common good, which includes the moral health of the citizenry. Thus, in light of Catholic social thought's conception of freedom, restrictive laws in a range of areas Nisbet deems “private”—for instance, pornography and sexual relations—would not in principle violate individual liberty properly understood. In fact, they may be critical to achieving virtue—the sine qua non of the life of freedom. Further, such laws might be indispensable to maintaining the kinds of institutions, associations, and traditions that comprise civil society.38
Nisbet's vision of social pluralism is a rich and appealing one, formulated over more than five decades of keen observation. His essential insight that “neither moral values, nor fellowship, nor freedom can easily flourish apart from the existence of diverse communities each capable of enlisting the loyalties of its members,” coupled with his warnings about how state power erodes our primary associations, merits long and careful consideration.39 To do so in light of a Christian anthropology and the insights of the Catholic social tradition promises to enrich this consideration, since the subject of the social order takes on ontological depth and transcendent meaning.
JEANNE HEFFERANAN SCHINDLER is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and an affiliate professor in the School of Law at Villa-nova University. A specialist in Christian political thought, she edited the volume Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (Lexington Books) and is currently coediting with her husband, David C. Schindler, an introduction to the work of German philosopher Robert Spaemann.