Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging

Let me tell you about the most dangerous person in politics. He does not carry a flag or a weapon. He is a man at a kitchen table at eleven at night, with no one to call, no club to attend, no congregation to miss him on Sunday. His job is fine. His wages are fine. He is just alone, and he has been alone so long that he has stopped noticing.

Now let me ask you a question a sociologist asked in 1953. What does that man want? Not a policy. He wants to belong to something. And whoever offers him that, whether a movement, a party, a cause or a government, will find that he gives his loyalty, and perhaps a great deal more, for the price of a place at the table. Robert Nisbet saw that, and wrote a book about it, and it remains one of the best things a conservative can read.

The man and his career

Robert Nisbet was born in Los Angeles in 1913 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate and began his teaching career. He taught at Berkeley, was a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later held professorships at the University of Arizona and at Columbia University, where he was the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities. In his later years he was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He died in 1996.

He was a sociologist by trade, which in those years was a profession not known for sympathy with conservatives. He was, in his own account, drawn by the classic European thinkers, and his book The Sociological Tradition (1966) remains a standard history of the discipline. Among his other books are The Twilight of Authority (1975) and Conservatism: Dream and Reality (1986). But the book that made his name was his first major work, The Quest for Community, published in 1953.

The argument of the book

Define the terms first, since the whole argument rests on them.

• Intermediate associations: the groups that stand between the individual and the national government: the family, the church, the neighbourhood, the guild or trade association, the local club, the town. Some writers call them mediating institutions or, in Burke's phrase, the little platoons.
• Community: a group in which people know each other, have obligations to each other and share a purpose beyond the transaction of the moment.
• The state, in Nisbet's usage: the central political power with the authority to command.

His thesis can be stated briefly. In the modern West, the central state grew by weakening the intermediate groups. Rulers found that the family, the church, the guild and the village held loyalties that competed with their own, so they took away their powers one by one and set the individual free of them. The result, Nisbet argued, was a double movement: the individual was freed from the old authorities, and he was left alone in front of the new one. And people cannot live alone. The want of community does not go away. It looks for a home, and the home it finds is the central state, or a political movement that promises to be one.

The argument in numbered steps

1. Human beings need belonging. It is a basic need, not a luxury, and it is met first in small groups of people who know us.
2. Intermediate associations meet that need. The family, the church, the neighbourhood and the workplace give a person identity, obligation, help in trouble and a share in something larger than himself.
3. When those associations weaken, the need remains unmet. A population that has lost its groups does not lose its hunger for them.
4. The unmet need is available to be exploited. Movements that promise a total community, with a leader, a cause and an enemy, offer an easy answer to loneliness and purposelessness. Nisbet saw this as the key to the appeal of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.
5. The central state, in turn, finds the lonely individual an easy subject. A citizen who relies on the government for every need and belongs to no group strong enough to say no has little protection against it. The weakening of the groups and the growth of the state feed each other.
6. Therefore a free society must protect the groups. The defence of liberty is not only a matter of constitutional limits on government. It is also a matter of keeping alive the institutions that stand between a person and the state.

Steps four and five are the most important, and they overlap with another account of the same decade. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) described the "atomised" masses of the interwar period as the raw material of the mass movements that followed. Nisbet, working in his own vocabulary, was describing the same terrain. The historical pattern, with its treatment of the family in particular, is traced in Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident.

The debt to Tocqueville and Burke

Nisbet did not invent the idea. He borrowed it, and said so. The two great sources are Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke.

Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), saw that Americans were a people who formed associations of every kind, for business, for religion, for amusement, for the founding of schools and hospitals. He thought this was no accident, but the thing that kept democratic equality from sliding into despotism. If people were left isolated and equal, each caring only for himself and his family, a government could gather power over them gently, and they would hardly notice until it was done. The associations are the antidote because they teach people to act together without waiting for the government. See Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No and Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads.

Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), wrote the line that has become the motto of the whole tradition: "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections." Love of country begins with love of the neighbourhood and the family. A revolution that sets out to abolish the platoons for the sake of an abstract humanity ends by having no one to love. See The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now.

What Nisbet added was a modern application, grounded in the history of the state and in the experience of the interwar years. He gave the old insight a sociologist's evidence.

The strongest objection

Here is the case against him, as its defenders would make it. The old intermediate groups were not all benign. Families can be oppressive, churches can persecute, guilds can exclude, and small towns can be narrow and cruel. The state, in extending its power, often freed individuals from these petty tyrannies. The central government ended slavery and ended segregation, over the resistance of local institutions. A romantic view of community overlooks that people were often glad to get away.

That deserves a direct answer. There are three parts to it.

First, concede the history. Some local institutions have done wrong, and sometimes the national government has been the only means of correcting it. The abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are examples, and no honest conservative argues otherwise. The Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress and the courts the power to protect individual rights against the states, and that power is proper.

Second, distinguish protecting persons from replacing groups. Nisbet's claim was not that the state should never act. It was that the state should not destroy the groups themselves. A government that protects a child from abuse in a family is doing its job. A government that begins to treat the family as an obstacle to be managed is doing something else. The same goes for churches: the state may punish a crime committed by a minister, and should not claim authority over what the church teaches.

Third, ask what the alternative is. If the person who flees a narrow community finds no other, he is not free but lonely. The point of a free society is that there are many groups, and a person can leave one for another. The danger is the situation in which there is only one, the state.

What it implies for modern loneliness

Nisbet died in 1996, and he never saw the world of the smartphone. But the book speaks to it with unnerving directness.

Three observations, offered as arguments rather than as statistics.

First, the groups that used to anchor people have been under strain for decades: lower rates of marriage and of church membership, fewer people in civic clubs, more people living alone. The political scientist Robert Putnam documented the decline of American civic life in Bowling Alone (2000), and the title has become a shorthand for the problem. In 2023 the United States Surgeon General issued a public advisory on the problem of loneliness and isolation. You can read both and weigh the evidence for yourself.

Second, the Nisbet thesis would predict that the lonely turn to larger sources of belonging, and we can see the pattern in the way politics itself has become, for many, a source of identity. When a party or a cause becomes the main place a person finds community, politics grows more bitter, since every defeat is felt as a loss of home. A culture with many places to belong has a lower political temperature.

Third, the thesis predicts that the state will be invited to fill the gaps. When families, congregations and neighbourhoods cannot help a person in trouble, the person looks to a government agency, and the agency has a way of treating the problem as a case to be managed. The programme is often well meant. It is also a substitute for what has been lost, and it tends to make the loss worse, as why a church charity knows things a federal program never will explains.

A modest note of humour might help here. If you want a quick test of your community's health, ask how many of your neighbours you could call at two in the morning when your car has broken down. If the answer is none, the person who will arrive is a tow-truck driver with a subscription app. That is a fine service and a poor substitute for the man across the street.

What a conservative should do about it

The remedy is not a federal programme for friendship. It is for citizens, and the list is not long.

• Marry, and stay married, where you can. The family is the first intermediate association, and the one the others grow from. See the family came before the state, so why does the state act like a parent?.
• Join something. A congregation, a volunteer fire company, a Rotary club, a parent association, a league. It does not matter which. It matters that you show up.
• Support the institutions that already work. Give time and money to local churches and charities in preference to distant ones.
• Resist policy that crowds the groups out. When a law pushes a function from a local body to a federal one, ask what the local body loses. The principle of subsidiarity says that a task belongs to the smallest unit that can do it, and Pius XI Put Subsidiarity in Writing in 1931, and Washington Should Read It explains where it came from.

That is the programme. It begins at the kitchen table and ends at the town hall, and nothing in it requires a majority in Congress.

The case in brief

1. Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community (1953), argued that the modern central state grew by weakening the family, the church and the local group, leaving individuals alone before the government.
2. People cannot live without belonging, so when the groups weaken, the need for community seeks another home, and totalitarian movements and the expanding state are ready to offer one.
3. The idea builds on Tocqueville's praise of American associations and Burke's "little platoon," and it adds a modern, evidence-based account of how the groups decline.
4. The objection that old groups could be oppressive is partly right; the answer is that the state may protect persons from wrong but should not replace the groups themselves.
5. The cure for loneliness, politically and personally, is a society with many places to belong, built by citizens before it is built by government.

What you can do: this week, join one local group that meets in person, or take on a regular role in one you already attend, and introduce yourself to the neighbour you have not met.