CHAPTER ONE
1. Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (London, 1902), vol. 1, 50.
2. “Can the anonymity, mobility, impersonality, specialization, and sophistication of the city become the attributes of a stable society, or will society fall apart?” asks one of America's foremost sociologists, Kingsley Davis, in his Human Society (New York, 1949), 342. Questions of this sort form the moral perspective of a great deal of theoretical and empirical work in the contemporary sciences of human behavior.
3. See, for example, such studies as Philip Rahv, Image and Idea (New York, 1949), Newton Arvin, Hawthorne's Short Stories (New York, 1947), and the superb appraisal of Dostoevsky and his critics, “The Insufficient Man,” Times Literary Supplement, 20 September 1947.
4. The Protestant Era (University of Chicago, 1948), 245–6.
5. The Nature and Destiny of Man (London, 1941), vol. 1, 59.
6. Christian Polity (London, 1936), 87.
7. See Durkheim's Suicide (Paris, 1897), especially the final chapters. The writings of Durkheim's German contemporary, Georg Simmel, have had something of the same influence upon modern thought.
8. The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Harvard University, 1945), 7, 56.
9. National Resources Committee, Our Cities (Washington, DC, 1937), 53.
10. S. M. Molema, The Bantu, Past and Present (Edinburgh, 1920), 308.
11. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York, 1937), 117.
12. A Study of History (London, 1946), vol. 5, 63.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Elsewhere, I have dealt briefly with certain aspects of nineteenth century conservatism. See my article on de Bonald in the Journal of the History of Ideas (June 1944), on Lamennais in the Journal of Politics (November 1948), and on the origins of sociology in France in The American Journal of Sociology (September 1952).
2. It was to the Middle Ages that most of the nineteenth-century conservatives looked for inspiration in their revolt against revolutionary secularism, power, and individualism. The conservatism of our own day has deep roots in the medieval view of man and society.
3. The conservatives bequeathed three important ideas to modern thought: the conception of the atomized masses; the idea of personal alienation; and the vision of omnipotent political power arising from the disorganization of social institutions.
4. See the fascinating symposium on modern criticism in The American Scholar (Winter 1950–51 and Spring 1951).
5. Op. cit. p. 34. The reference to Niebuhr is primarily to his article, “The Impact of Protestantism Today,” in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1948).
6. My remarks refer essentially to sociology, social anthropology, and social psychology, but they have relevance to the other social sciences.
7. Time and Tide (26 November 1949).
8. In his Burge Lecture, 1947.
9. “The Hungry Sheep,” Times Literary Supplement (30 March 1951).
10. Ibid.
11. In The God That Failed, edited by R. H. Grossman (New York, 1949), 99.
12. Some of these paragraphs are taken from an article I wrote while serving in the Army in the Pacific in 1944. See “The Coming Problem of Assimilation,” The American Journal of Sociology (January 1945).
CHAPTER THREE
1. This approach is, happily, less common now than a generation ago. The writings of such men as R. M. MacIver, Talcott Parsons, Kingsley Davis, and Howard Becker, among others, have done much to place the study of the family in a more coherent perspective.
2. Colonial Policy and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1948), 3.
3. There is a kind of historical awareness implicit in this focusing upon the family, for the overwhelming majority of communal or sacred areas of society reflect the transfer, historically, of kinship symbols and nomenclature to non-kinship spheres. We see this in the histories of religion, guilds, village communities, and labor unions. Kinship has ever been the archetype of man's communal aspirations.
4. Margaret Redfield has pointed out that “Mother's Day, originally promoted by the florists, and still a source of profit to them, has its whole point in an organization of society in which parents and children lose touch with one another.” “The American Family: Consensus and Freedom, “The American Journal of Sociology (November 1946).
5. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942), 160.
6. E. H. Norman, in his Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 153, has pointed out the value of the extended family in Japan in making possible a relatively low-wage structure and, derivatively, greater profits and capital expansion.
7. Knowledge For What? (Princeton University Press, 1939), 83.
8. Throughout modern economic society the problem of incentives has become explicit. Both business and governmental planners find themselves with difficulties which, although economic in nature, begin in a structure of motivations that is non-economic. The almost total absence in earlier economic thought, socialist as well as orthodox, of concern for the problem of incentives is some indication of the changes that have taken place in the institutional framework and psychological substructure of capitalism.
9. This paragraph is a paraphrase of Mirra Komarovsky's penetrating study, “The Voluntary Associations of Urban Dwellers,” American Sociological Review (December 1946).
10. White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1951), xvi.
11. Op. cit., 145.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Adventures in Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1933), 55.
2. Ancient Law, Everyman's Library edition (London, 180, 99.
3. Communist Manifesto, section 1.
4. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1887).
5. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff (The Free Press, Glencoe, IL, 1950), 293, 414f.
6. See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), especially 199f. and 216f.
7. Le Suicide (Paris, 1897), 446.
8. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (London: Phaidon Press, 1950), 81.
9. Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated by F. W. Maitland (Cambridge University Press, 1900), 37.
10. Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892), 400.
11. English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1942), 106.
12. See especially Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (Princeton University Press, 1925).
13. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, edited by F. M. Powicke (Oxford, 1936). Of all specialized institutional studies of the medieval period this seems to me most illuminating of the culture as a whole.
14. “Medieval Political Thought” in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw (London, 1923), 28.
15. See the brilliant essay of Frank Tannenbaum, “The Balance of Power in Society,” Political Science Quarterly (December 1946).
16. Puritan and Anglican (London, 1901), 234.
17. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926), 97.
18. The State, trans. J. Gitterman (Indianapolis, 1914).
19. J. L. and Barbara Hammond; see especially their The Town Laborer (London, 1917).
20. Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, vol. 1, 47.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Law and Politics in the Middle Ages (New York, 1898), 308.
2. A Preface to Morals (New York, 1929), 80.
3. The most penetrating of all studies of this influence of the State is that of Jenks, referred to above. See especially chapters 4–7.
4. Miriam Beard, A History of the Business Man (New York, 1938), 327. This role of the State has also been stressed by such historians as Sombart, Hecksher, and Karl Polanyi. There is indeed much to be said for regarding capitalism as simply the forced adjustment of economic life to the needs of the sovereign State in the various national areas.
5. On the political aspects of Protestantism, see especially the works of J. N. Figgis Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, second edition (Cambridge, 1923) and “Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century” in Cambridge Modern History, vol. 3 (1904), ch. 22.
6. Although Protestantism, capitalism, and modern science have been extensively dealt with as contexts of the rise of modern individualism, the role of the State has been comparatively neglected. This is the result of a narrow concentration upon the State as mere power.
7. See Tocqueville's The Old Régime and the Revolution for the most illuminating account of the affinity of political power and equality. In his The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, 506, Halevy wrote: “Conservative parties know that law is a leveller, and that is why they plead the cause of tradition and custom as against legislative uniformity.”
8. It was with a kind of unwonted historical wisdom that leaders of the Revolution in Paris in 1790 made the term citizen the highest of address. It connoted freedom from old authorities and absolute subjection to France une et indivisible.
9. See the illuminating discussion by A. N. Whitehead of medieval and modern referents of the term “liberty.” Adventures in Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1933), 74f.
10. Wolsey (London, 1928), 218.
11. “The first and fundamental principle…is the supremacy of the law or custom of the community over all its members from the humblest free man to the King.” A. J. and R. W. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (London, 1903–36), vol. 3, 11. This is the finest of all general studies of medieval social thought.
12. C. H. Mcllwain, The High Court of Parliament (New Haven, 1910) is the classic study of this momentous fact.
13. Op. cit. vol. 1, 301–2.
14. Eli Hecksher, in his study of mercantilism, has pointed out how much more resistant to monarchical centralization the particularism of the Middle Ages was than the oft-cited universalism.
15. A. J. and R. W. Carlyle, op. cit. vol. 3, 74.
16. The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London, 1909), 151.
17. Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, translated by W. L. Moll (Cambridge, 1936), 235.
18. Collected Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. 3, 309.
19. On this, see Herbert A. Smith, The Law of Associations (Oxford, 1914), especially Appendix 1.
20. The Greek Commonwealth (Oxford, 1911), p. 76.
21. For an excellent account of this aspect of Cleisthenean legislation, see Gustave Glotz, The Greek City, translated by N. Mallinson (New York, 1930), 106f.
22. The solution to the problem that is offered by Plato is unmistakably totalitarian in design. But the efforts of Karl Popper, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, to support this indictment by dubious ascription of base motives and by labeling Plato a “reactionary” seem to me highly questionable. As I shall argue in chapter 8, there can be a totalitarianism of virtue as well as vice. Popper's whole approach is based upon the modern liberal's seemingly ineradicable suspicion that all authoritarianism is simply a reversion to the past.
23. Greek Political Theory (London, 1918), 234. See also the fine discussion along these lines by John Linton Myres, The Political Ideas of the Greeks (New York, 1927), 108f. Both Barker and Myres show a far more perceptive insight into Plato's totalitarianism than Popper does.
24. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926), 41.
25. J. Declareuil, Rome the Lawgiver, translated by E. H. Parker (New York, 1926), 314.
26. Historical Introduction to the Private Law of Rome (London, 1916), 387, 390.
27. J. Ernest Renan, Histoire des Origines du Christianisme, cited by Alfred Zimmern, op. cit., 146.
28. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modern Library edition (New York, 1932), vol. 1, 451.
29. See the eloquent passage along this line by Krishnalal Shridharani, My India, My America (New York, 1941), 131.
CHAPTER SIX
1. The bulk of this chapter is taken up with the political writings of Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau—specifically with respect to their ideas on the role of intermediate social groups. It is well, at this point, to express my great indebtedness for relevant insights on these matters to such students of political thought as Otto von Gierke, especially as translated and made available through the brilliant interpretative comments of F. W. Maitland and Ernest Barker; and also to the historical writings of J. N. Figgis, G. H. Sabine, C. E. Vaughan, and the early work of Harold Laski. There are others, but the studies of these historians have done the most, I believe, to bring to my attention the matters discussed in this chapter.
2. All quotations are from Bodin's Six Books of a Commonweal; translated by Richard Knolles (London, 1606).
3. All quotations are from the Oxford edition of Hobbes's Leviathan (Oxford, 1909), a reprint of the first folio edition of 1651.
4. This section on Rousseau is a slightly revised version of an article I wrote in 1943: “Rousseau and Totalitarianism,” Journal of Politics (May 1943). Quotations are mainly from the Everyman edition of Rousseau's political writings edited by G. D. H. Cole. This contains not only the Social Contract but also the three Discourses, a reading of which is so basic to an understanding of the Social Contract. The quotation from C. E. Vaughan is taken from his penetrating essay on Rousseau, which forms the Preface to his edition of Du Contrat Social (Manchester, 1918). Of all English interpreters of Rousseau, Professor Vaughan is, I believe, the most clarifying and convincing. See also his two-volume edition of the Political Writings of Jean J. Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1915) with its valuable comments.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Quoted by C. E. Vaughan in his Preface to his edition of Du Contrat Social (Manchester, 1918).
2. Cited by C. J. H. Hayes, Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931), 68.
3. On this aspect of the Revolution, the destruction or weakening of intermediate associations, I am indebted chiefly to the following works: Etienne Martin Saint-Leon, Histoire des corporations de métiers (Paris, 1898), Philippe Sagnac, La Législation civile de la Révolution francaise (Paris, 1898), and Marcel Rouquet, Evolution du droit de famille vers l'individualisme (Paris, 1909). I have profited also from accounts of the Revolution in the writings of Geoffrey Bruun, Crane Brinton, Bertrand de Jouvenel, A. D. Lindsay, and C. J. H. Hayes.
4. See the discussion of this aspect of the Revolution in F. W. Mait land, Collected Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. 3, 310f.
5. Cited by Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, translated by J. F. Huntington (New York, 1949), 258.
6. Cited by John Morley in his biography of Rousseau (London, 1915), vol. 2, 132.
7. Op. cit. vol. 2, 627.
8. The Modern Democratic State (London, 1943), vol. 1, 151.
9. Hans Kohn in his Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944) has made emphatic this relation of nationalism to earlier forms of social unity. See his comments in the Introduction.
10. Addresses to the German Nation, translated by R. Jones and G. Turnbull (Chicago, 1922), 10, 11, and 190.
11. Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1930), 76, 94, and 96. “We have not the notion,” Arnold laments, “so familiar on the continent and to antiquity, of the State— the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals.”
12. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944), 139ff.
13. See the discussion by W. A. Phillips in Great Events in History, edited by G. S. Taylor (London, 1934).
14. In his Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau writes: “But how, I shall be asked, can the General Will be known in cases in which it has not expressed itself? Must the whole nation be assembled together at every unforeseen event? Certainly not. It ought the less to be assembled, because it is by no means certain that its decision would be the General Will; besides, the method would be impracticable in a great people, and is hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned: for the rulers well know that the General Will is always on the side which is the most favorable to the public interest, that is to say, most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly, to be certain of following the General Will.” In his Social Contract Rousseau qualifies this manner of interpreting the General Will, but the revolutionary significance of the passage above to apostles of the political community in the nineteenth century need not be elaborated.
15. Political Parties, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (reprinted by the Free Press, 1949), 218–19.
16. The dependence of my treatment of Bentham upon Halevy's The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism will be apparent to all who have read that great work. In addition I must express my appreciation to the anonymous writer in the Times Literary Supplement (21 February 1948) for his keen analysis of Bentham.
17. Ostrogorski has discussed the significance of these changes in a most illuminating manner; op. cit. vol. 1, 50ff.
18. This section on Marx owes much to A. D. Lindsay's essay, Karl Marx's Capital (Oxford University Press, 1925), to the recent work by Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (London, 1949), and to some of the writings of the nineteenth-century anarchists.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Democracy in America, Reeve translation edited by Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945), vol. 2, 318–19.
2. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 301. This is by all odds the most penetrating study of the nature of the totalitarian State even if its account of the historical origins of totalitarianism is debatable. It owes much of course to the earlier works of Peter Drucker, Herman Rauschning, and especially Emil Lederer.
3. Op. cit., 305.
4. The End of Economic Man (New York, 1939), 67.
5. On the Stalinist creation of the masses in Russia, see Arendt, op. cit. p. 3121
6. The most preposterous of all interpretations of German Nazism current in the nineteen-thirties was that which took Nazi propaganda at its word and declared Nazism to be simply a recrudescence of German familism.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture, Gifford Lectures for 1947 (London, 1948), 217.
2. Robert Sherwood, in his masterful study of Roosevelt and Hopkins, makes this emendation of Acton's aphorism. It is an important one. Over and over in history we have exemplified, it seems to me, the principle that the men who inherit, or easily gain, their power are less likely to intensify it at the expense of society than those men who have struggled for it in the service of a burning ideal.
3. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York, 1927), 73.
4. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Penguin edition (London and New York: Penguin, 1948), 235, 237–8.
CHAPTER TEN
1. Idealism and the Modern Age (New Haven, 1919), 35.
2. Human Society (New York, 1949), 53.
3. Journal of Social Issues, vol. (1945), 55.
4. See Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York, 1933), and George Homans, The Human Group (New York, 1950).
5. Evidences of this were repeatedly brought to my attention while I was engaged in personnel work with combat soldiers in the Pacific during the Second World War.
6. Individualism Old and New (New York, 1930), 81–82.
7. Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1930), 428–30.
8. John Dewey has made this point illuminatingly in his Art as Experience (New York, 1934). See the discussion beginning on p. 326.
9. Writers as philosophically far apart as Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot have emphasized the close relation between individual creative achievement and the small community. See Russell's Authority and the Individual (London, 1949) and Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (New York, 1949).
10. This point has been stressed recently by Wilhelm Röpke in his The Social Crisis of Our Time (University of Chicago Press, 1950).
11. Op. cit., 162.
12. Ibid., 142.
13. Such historians as Kenneth Scott Latourette, Edwyn Bevan, and Gilbert Murray have stressed the immense appeal that lay in early Christianity's organization in small, compact, social communities. For the Roman masses Christianity offered not merely heavenly redemption but social identity and protection in this world.
14. “The Impact of Protestantism Today” in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1948).
15. Walter Lippmann has written brilliantly on this point. “When Luther, for example, rebelled against the authority of the Church, he did not suppose the way of life for the ordinary man would be radically altered. Luther supposed that men would continue to behave much as they had learned to behave under the Catholic discipline. The individual for whom he claimed the right of private judgment was one whose prejudgments had been well fixed in a Catholic society…. For what he believed in was Protestantism for good Catholics.” Preface to Morals (New York, 1929), 14.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. “Institutional Vulnerability in Mass Society,” The American Journal of Sociology (January 1951).
2. “Leviathan and Little Groups” in The Aryan Path (October 1941).
3. Churches in the Modern State (London, 1913), 51–2.
4. Op. cit. vol. 2, 319–20.
5. Op. cit. vol. 2, 300–301.
6. Paths in Utopia (London, 1949).
7. Works that have stressed the crucial role of associative pluralism and diversification of social power in the structure of liberal democracy are, unhappily, not numerous. It is a pleasure however to mention the writings of such men as Ernest Barker, A. D. Lindsay, John Dewey, R. M. MacIver, Lewis Mumford, Sidney Hook, and Frank Tannenbaum.
8. It is unfortunate that no single, systematic historical study of inter mediate associations exists. The nearest approximation is the massive study done by Otto von Gierke three-quarters of a century ago in Germany, but, except for the fragments translated by F. W. Maitland and Ernest Barker, this work is virtually inaccessible and, in any event, it was written from a point of view that killed much of the work's substance.
9. Op. cit., 59.
10. “The Balance of Power in Society,” ibid., 501. Italics mine.
11. TVA: Democracy on the March (New York, 1944), 139.
12. Op. cit., 98.
13. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York, 1940), 319.
14. The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 475–6.
15. J. N. Figgis, op. cit., 70.
16. Op. cit. passim.
THE STATE AND FADING COMMUNITY
John Carroll
1. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 106.
2. I have presented the argument for this estimate in The Existential Jesus (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009), 243–4.
3. I have reflected on these themes at length in Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008; U. S. edition, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010).
4. Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
5. I am much less optimistic about Western high culture. Fortunately, the nihilism and rancorous self-hatred typical of the cultural elites has not significantly eroded the way in which the vast majority lives, nor has it damaged the workings of liberal democracy, or intruded upon the values expressed in popular culture. But that is another story.
MODERNITY’S NEW WORLD DANGERS
David Bosworth
1. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), 211.
2. Ibid., 2.
3. Ibid., 217.
4. Ibid., 95.
5. Ibid., 212.
6. Ibid., 244.
7. Ibid., 256.
8. Ibid., 81.
9. Ibid., 61
10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: New American Library, 1964), 277.
THE ENDURING ACHIEVEMENT AND UNFINISHED WORK OF ROBERT NISBET
Jeanne Heffernan Schindler
1. For Sandel “democracy's discontent” manifests itself in two primary anxieties: “One is the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives. The other is the sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us, “Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 3. Arguably both stem from the decline of civil society noted by Nisbet.
2. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), 2.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 99. Nisbet is similarly concerned about the loss of a sense of history, as he explains: “Man, it is said, is a time-binding creature; past and future are as important to his natural sense of identity as the present. Destroy his sense of the past, and you cut his spiritual roots, leaving momentary febrility but no viable prospect of the future” (Quest for Community, XXIV).
4. Tocqueville, vol. 2, 10.
5. Robert Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), xi.
6. Nisbet's designation follows Dr. Johnson's evocative description of the man who “hung loose upon society.” Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 87.
7. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 7.
8. Ibid., 43.
9. Ibid., 53.
10. Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority, 76.
11. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 54. Writing some three decades later, Wendell Berry echoes and expands upon Nisbet's insight in his extraordinary essay “The Body and the Earth.” It is a vital supplement to Nisbet's reflections here. Berry's main theme in this piece is the danger of human estrangement from nature, especially as evidenced in contemporary attitudes toward agriculture. Human ignorance and arrogance, he argues, have wrought devastating environmental effects upon the very soil and water that sustain us, and, since life is intricately interdependent, those effects have in turn negatively affected the human community as well. Berry is as concerned with social as with environmental degradation, much of which can be seen as the aftermath of industrialization and a thoughtless embrace of technology. In much the same vein as Nisbet, Berry discusses the fate of the household and marriage in an industrial world, sensitive to the same problem of function and meaning as his predecessor. His observation merits quotation at length: “The first sexual division comes about when nurture is made the exclusive concern of women. This cannot happen until a society becomes industrial; in hunting and gathering and in agricultural societies, men are of necessity also involved in nurture. In those societies there usually have been differences in the work of men and that of women. But the necessity here is to distinguish between sexual difference and sexual division…. Women traditionally have performed the most confining—though not necessarily the least dignified—tasks of nurture: housekeeping, the care of young children, food preparation. In the urban-industrial situation the confinement of these traditional tasks divided women more and more from the ‘important’ activities of the new economy. Furthermore, in this situation the traditional nurturing role of men—that of provisioning the household, which in an agricultural society had become as complex and as constant as the women's role—became completely abstract; the man's duty to the household came to be simply to provide money. The only remaining task of provisioning—purchasing food—was turned over to women. This determination that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. “See The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 113–14.
12. Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority, 76.
13. Tocqueville, vol. 1, chapter 5; vol. 2, chapter 5.
14. Tocqueville, vol. 1, chapter 5.
15. Nisbet, The Present Age, 29, 3, 44, 41.
16. Nisbet, The Present Age, 60.
17. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, xxiii.
18. Ibid., xxii; The Present Age, 139; The Twilight of Authority, 252.
19. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 262.
20. Ibid., 107.
21. Robert Nisbet, The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 46–47.
22. Ibid., 45–46.
23. Nisbet, The Present Age, 112.
24. Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority, 213.
25. Evangelium Vitae, §2.
26. Gaudium et Spes, §60.
27. Centesimus Annus, §49 in The Social Agenda: A Collection of Magisterial Texts, eds. Robert A. Sirico and Maciej Zieba (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), 31.
28. Ibid., §§ 24–25.
29. Ibid., §31.
30. Hittinger helpfully identifies a development in Catholic social thought beginning with the Pian encyclicals according to which institutions possess “social munera” (missions or vocations) akin to the threefold mission of priest, prophet, and king (the triplex munera Christi) that every baptized Christian is called to respond to. See his “Social Pluralism and Subsidiarity in Catholic Social Doctrine,” in Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives, ed. Jeanne Heffernan Schindler (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 11–29.
31. In this instrumentalist mode, Nisbet states even more clearly that with reference to the social goods of cohesion and prosperity, “religion is not indispensable so long as there is some other pattern of meanings and purposes which will do the same thing.” “Moral Values and Community” in Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968), 136.
32. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, XXIV.
33. Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority, 259.
34. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 249.
35. Ibid., 248.
36. Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority, 221.
37. Nisbet, The The Present Age, 58.
38. A concrete example of this can be found in Michael Sandel's illuminating discussion of obscenity jurisprudence. In what would spark fierce constitutional controversy, the city of Renton, Washington, passed an ordinance restricting the location of pornographic theaters, and it did so precisely on the grounds that such establishments would damage civil society. As Sandel recounts, the city council argued that the presence of “adult” theaters “‘gives an impression of legitimacy to, and causes a loss of sensitivity to the adverse effect of pornography upon children, established family relations, respect for marital relationship and for the sanctity of marriage relations of others,’ and that locating such entertainment in close proximity to homes, churches, parks, and schools ‘will cause a degradation of the community standard of morality’ “(Democracy's Discontent, 78). One can find a similar rationale in laws designed to discourage sexual vice, such as the statute overturned in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which prohibited the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons.
39. “Moral Values and Community,” 141.