The Quest for Community by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

Nisbet, a sociologist, argued that the great political problem of the modern age is not too little individual freedom but the collapse of the intermediate groups that stand between the person and the state: the family, the church, the guild, the village, the neighborhood.

As those bodies lose their functions, he said, individuals feel rootless and anxious, and they look for belonging in the only large institution left. The state obliges by taking on tasks once performed by smaller communities, and in doing so it gains power over people who no longer have competing loyalties. The result is a pairing of isolated individuals and a centralized authority, the soil in which totalitarian movements grew.

His remedy was not a return to an imagined past but a revival of real, self-governing associations with their own authority and purpose, so that freedom has a social foundation.

Why it matters

The book gave conservatism an argument that is neither purely economic nor purely religious: that liberty depends on a thick civil society. It anticipated later discussions of social capital, and its phrase about the state and the individual as the two surviving poles of society is still cited by supporters of subsidiarity and school choice.

About the author

Robert Nisbet (1913-1996) was an American sociologist who taught at Berkeley and at the University of California, Riverside, and later at Columbia. He was a critic of the centralized state and a defender of local associations. He wrote the book while a professor in California, and it is often paired with his later work on the history of the idea of progress.

Who should read it

Readers worried about loneliness, family breakdown and the growth of government, who want a historical and sociological frame for those concerns.