Robert Nisbet: life, ideas and books

Life

Robert Alexander Nisbet was born in Los Angeles in 1913 and earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939 under Frederick Teggart. He joined the Berkeley faculty that year, helped found its sociology department and briefly chaired it. In 1953 he moved to the University of California, Riverside, as a dean and later vice-chancellor.

From the early 1970s he was Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University, and from 1978 to 1986 he was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and the American Philosophical Society in 1973, and he delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture in 1988. He died in 1996.

Ideas

Nisbet's main theme, set out in The Quest for Community (1953), was that modern people suffer from the weakening of the families, churches, local associations and guilds that once stood between the individual and the state, and that this loneliness drives them toward the centralised state and mass movements. He argued that the state's growth and the loss of intermediate bodies went together, and that a free society needs a strong network of independent, self-governing associations.

He took the theme from Burke, Tocqueville and Montesquieu, and called his position conservative pluralism. The Sociological Tradition (1966) traced the concepts of modern sociology, community, authority and status, to the conservative reaction against the French Revolution, and History of the Idea of Progress (1980) examined the belief in progress and its limits.

Major works

• The Quest for Community (1953).
• The Sociological Tradition (1966).
• The Social Bond (1970).
• The Twilight of Authority (1975).
• History of the Idea of Progress (1980).
• Conservatism: Dream and Reality (1986).
• The Present Age (1988).

Why conservatives read him

The columnist Ross Douthat has called The Quest for Community arguably the most important work of conservative sociology of the twentieth century. Nisbet gave Russell Kirk's concern for community a social-scientific form and prepared the ground for later talk about mediating institutions and civil society, a theme that runs from Alexis de Tocqueville to present-day arguments about families, congregations and local government.

He was not a party loyalist. He identified as a conservative while publicly supporting abortion rights and criticising Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, and critics of his work, such as the sociologist Daniel Chernilo, have argued that his account of the First World War and of the decline of community is one-sided. Even so, his scholarship is a standing reminder that the debate between individual and state leaves out the associations that make a free people.