The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and
Freedom, by Robert A. Nisbet (Oxford: Oxford University
Press: 1953; San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary
Studies, 1990).
Modernity, as a frame of mind or a set of ideas, accommodates
various and sometimes incongruous definitions. As a
historical era, its advent, and some contend its demise, can be
difficult to place. Some point to Galileo’s refutation of the earthcentric
universe; others identify Descartes’ invocation of the
primacy of individual human reason. Eric Voegelin traces its
origins to the gnostic musings of Joachim of Fiore, while Martin
Heidegger attributes to Plato the first “modern”” thoughts. The
subject’s pliability explains, to some extent, Western civilization’s
continuing difficulty in addressing modernity’s challenges and
inadequacies. We cannot legitimately expect to diagnose the
era’s problems and identify its potentialities while its roots
remain occluded.
One event, however, elicits a rare scholarly consensus as
quintessentially modern: the French Revolution. The cashiering
of the ancien régime in favor of the Declaration of the Rights of
Man stands as a watershed that continues to provoke great minds.
Edmund Burke’s contemporaneous Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790) remains the most trenchant and insightful
critique of the episode. Among many lines of criticism, Burke
takes exception to the ahistorical rationalistic mindset which the
Revolution’s leaders used to justify their introduction of a new
order based on universal principles wholly unrelated to what
preceded it. Burke juxtaposes the prejudice of his native British
polity with the rationalisms of the Jacobins and warns
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private
stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man
is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail
themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.1
In expressing his preference for a type of reason informed by
precedent, history and tradition over one which attempts to
ignore and overcome such influences, Burke acknowledges both
the staggering complexity of society and nature and the demonstrable
incapacity of unaided reason to comprehend it all. He
assigns primacy to the given human condition and advises a
humble resignation to its immutable constraints, historical, social,
and fallible.
In The Quest for Community: A Study of the Ethics of Order
and Freedom, Robert A. Nisbet undertakes his own examination
of the social pathologies afflicting the modern age, and concludes
that at the heart of modernity lies a congenital flaw similar to the
one Burke detects in the Jacobin mind: an abstract corruption of
history that has alienated Western man from the only ground where
he might reasonably expect a reconciliation of order and freedom:
community. As the nature of the problem is a misapprehension of
history, the purpose of this essay is to analyze the manner in which
Nisbet employs his own historical sense both to expose the flawed
historical methodology of modernity and articulate properly
grounded community. It is in this social context, contends Nisbet,
rather than in the throes of the individual and/or the political state,
as modernity would have it, where the salutary reconciliation of
order and freedom is most probable to occur. The boundary that
delineates the two forms of history marks not the dichotomy
between old and new, but between concrete and abstract, humane
and inhumane, liberty and compulsion.
When considering a work of scholarship more than a half-century
after its original publication, the question always and rightly
arises as to its contemporary relevance. Do the subjects, methods,
analyses, and conclusions provide insight into current and
foreseeable challenges? The social pathologies Nisbet addresses
in The Quest for Community were suitably grave to merit broad
attention at the time. In the wake of the material and moral
exhaustion of World War II and the ominous descent of the Iron
Curtain, world peace, if such a term might ever be accurately
applied, was underwritten by the hollow promise of mutually
assured destruction. One readily expects that such foreboding
darkness should produce the pervasive rootlessness and purposelessness,
the “”anomie,”” which Nisbet observed.
Were those post-war and Cold War circumstances, though,
transitory? No comparable cataclysm has occurred since. The
Iron Curtain has melted away. Nuclear holocaust, though always
a danger, seems a remote improbability. Aside from contained
spasms of horrific violence, like on September 11, 2001, order, in
general, reigns. Even the war in Iraq and the pogroms in Sudan,
for all their terrible savagery and destruction, remain, at least for
the moment, discrete affairs limited to their relatively modest
geographies. Perhaps Nisbet speaks only of and to his time.
We should not, however, mistake the relative calm of our own
day for a garden of earthly comfort. No more than a casual regard,
for example, of the demographic crisis now besetting the so-called
industrialized world reveals a strain of anomie every bit as virulent
and more as the one Nisbet first observed. For the first time in
history, entire populations freely and consciously neglect to
reproduce, with the effect that in less than fifty years deaths in
these countries will be twice as numerous as births.2 These are not
nations riven by war, drought, and pestilence, but the very
quintessence of the wealthy, industrialized, and democratic:
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Russia, to name only
the most populous.3 Could it be that the anomie Nisbet diagnoses
in 1953 has so completely infected the social body of the world’s
wealthy and free nations that the existential question of “”under
what conditions ought we proceed?”” recedes meekly before the
altogether more ontological question of “”why proceed at all?””4
Whereas a fervid quest for community gripped the West when
Nisbet wrote, the contemporary wealthy of the world seem to
have largely abandoned the search. What began as an effort to free
oneself from the past by destroying it has degraded into a form of
self-destruction. At least Nisbet’s modern man groped for meaning;
many a post-modern man of the twenty-first century West
deems even that minimal and desperate effort fruitless. The
current generation of the world’s wealthy seems to commit what
French novelist Georges Bernanos describes as the gravest of
sins—the sin against hope.5 The changes in circumstances between
now and then, however, are a matter of degree, not nature.
Anomie remains the principal symptom, a hardened and resigned
anomie.
The gravity of contemporary anomie lends renewed urgency
to the study of The Quest for Community. Nisbet knows from his
study of history that nothing, other than death, is inevitable, and
maintains that the ingredients necessary to put the Western house
in order remain intact because the constraints within which all
human beings must live, the given human condition, remains
intact. The slide can be resisted; the trend can be redirected. How
did it come to this? What mistakes have been made? Is there a
solution? These are the questions Nisbet tackles in The Quest for
Community. The anomie he observes indicates a severe disturbance
in the context from which human beings derive meaning in
their lives. That context, he asserts, is social in character and
comprised of the associations, groups, and institutions that
individuals form and perpetuate for the myriad exigencies of
human existence, material and spiritual, personal and collective.
In political terms, the social context provides the ground for the
necessary reconciliation of order and freedom.
What then is the cause of that disturbance? Nisbet responds,
“”[T]he greatest single influence upon social organization in the
modern West has been the developing concentration of function
and power of the sovereign political State.””6 State and community
have historically competed for authority and function in individual
lives. Within these relationships of authority and function
lie relevance and meaning. With the rise of the modern political
state, a symbiosis has developed between the aggrandizement of
the state and the release of individuals from social structures and
communities. As allegiances between individual and community
attenuate, the state can enhance and expand its power by providing
alternative authorities and functions. Nisbet contends that the
aggrandizement of the individual and the state at the expense of
community has failed to satisfactorily respond to the fundamental
human need for meaning. “”[T]echnological progress and the
relative satisfaction of material needs in a population,”” he writes,
“”offer no guarantee of the resolution of all deprivations and
frustrations. . . . Material improvement that is unaccompanied by
a sense of personal belonging may actually intensify social dislocation
and personal frustration.””7 The modern era has seen a
relocation of the ground for the reconciliation of order and
freedom from the social context to either the individual as freeagent
or the political state or both. The pervasive anomie indicates
the inadequacy of this relocation.
#page#
A case could be made that the threat from the intrusive state
that Nisbet perceives in 1953 derives mostly from the thenlooming
specter of totalitarian states. Now that such exemplars of
the “”total community”” have subsequently either dissolved, as in
the case of the Soviet Union, or embraced certain, even radical
reforms, as with communist China, the reasoning goes, the threat
has largely dissipated. In the contemporary context, Nisbet
appears, according to this critique, rather quixotic, tilting his
lance at long-past predators.
While the expansive menace of certain total states has in fact
receded, one need not search for gulags or secret police to
recognize that even the organs of the liberal democratic state have
infiltrated whole realms of society (social and economic) which
were, until the recent past, sanctuaries of private concern. The
spectacle of the American Republicans, nominally the party of
limited and decentralized government, increasing both the size
and scope of federal government beyond any precedent should lay
to rest any pretense of deference to the private social realm. The
modern political state, even in its purportedly benign liberal
democratic form, remains the most intrusive competitor with
community for providing meaning in human lives, and the competition
has favored the former since at least the French Revolution.
The modern political state, contends Nisbet, did not rise
alone to challenge social institutions. The proliferation of individualism,
itself a challenge to the authority structures in social
institutions, has accompanied the political expansion. Nisbet
identifies a corruption of history as the source of the struggle
between the modern state and the community over providing the
ground for meaning in human lives. The corruption amounts to a
conscious substitution of a rationalistic, metaphorical, “”natural””
history for the chronological record of people, places, and events
as they occur in concrete history. This modern abjuration of the
historical record, Nisbet claims, facilitates a conception of man
outside the constraints of his given condition, no longer subject
to his intrinsic limitations, and ultimately perfectible.
The narrative of metaphorical history identifies social organs
like the family, church, class, etc. as impediments to the deterministic
achievement of a fully “”natural”” human nature, thereby
justifying their degradation or elimination. “”The early distrust of
the political sovereign in Western Europe and the traditional
reliance upon religious and social systems for protection and
security,”” writes Nisbet, “”have been dissolved only by a growing
conviction that a type of “”freedom”” comes from political power.””8
The modern nation-state emerges as both the agent of change and
the guarantor of individual liberation from these impediments. It
is ultimately the primary provider of a new kind of “”community,””
for the atomized, free-agent individual. “”The modern state and the
whole ideology of the political community have become significant,
influential,”” asserts Nisbet, “”not through worship of naked
power but because of the promise which seemed to lie in political
power for the salvation of man—for the attainment of moral goals
that had eluded mankind for thousands of years.””9 The interests
of individual and state converge at the dissolution of social
authority and function.
Nisbet constructs in The Quest for Community a trenchant
analysis of how modern man imperils his very existence by
attempting to transcend the immutable constraints of his given
condition, constraints which “”pre-modern”” man, if he may be
called that, dared not challenge whether restrained by humility,
fear or ignorance. In the subtitle of the book, “”a study of the ethics
of order and freedom,”” Nisbet conveys that community, as he
defines it, is the only ground suitable for the great tension of
political philosophy, the reconciliation of order and freedom.
Until the advent of the modern era, that reconciliation occurred
solely within the social nexus. Both state and individual lacked the
means and even the impetus to rest control of this process. The
corruption of history provides the impetus for the individual and
warfare for the state.
In the modern era, both state and individual have sought to
control the reconciliation and effect it according to their own
terms. The social pathologies of modernity indicate that neither
has succeeded in effecting a tolerable reconciliation. Nisbet
diagnoses modernity’s failure in the symptoms manifest in the
prevailing moral imagination of the era:
The modern release of the individual from traditional ties of
class, religion, and kinship has made him free; but, on the
testimony of innumerable works in our age, this freedom is
accompanied not by the sense of creative release but by the sense
of disenchantment and alienation. The alienation of man from
historic moral certitudes has been followed by the sense of man’s
alienation from fellow man.10
Nisbet admits that the forces which have shaped the modern
era have succeeded in transforming Western society, but the new
order has not only disappointed, but has self-destructed. Modern
man, rather than basking in the afterglow of his long-awaited
freedom, struggles with the uncertainty of his unforeseen isolation.
The movement from zoon politikon to individual as freeagent
has engendered, according to Nisbet, “”frustration, anxiety,
and insecurity”” instead of the anticipated self-determination and
self-sufficiency. The agents of modernity “”abstracted certain
moral and psychological attributes from a social organization and
considered these timeless, natural qualities of the individual, who
was regarded as independent of any historically developed social
organization.””11
Nisbet identifies this flawed perception of history, both in its
substance and processes, as the fundamental error which mislead
the catalysts of modernity into believing, first, that a rationalistic
“”natural”” history contained a vision of mankind in its pristine,
unadulterated, and “”natural”” condition, and, second, that a generalized
universal history could be read to indicate an inevitable,
deterministic, even linear ascent by the human race from primitive
ignorance toward enlightened worldly perfection. Nisbet
accuses modernity of, in effect, transgressing history through the
misapplication of abstract, metaphorical reasoning to the record
of human events. According to Nisbet, this corruption of history
has for its object:
The eradication of old restraints, together with the prospect of
new and more natural relationships in society, relationships
arising directly from the innate resources of individuals, prompted
a glowing vision of society in which there would be forever
abolished the parochialisms and animosities of a world founded
on kinship, village, and church. Reason, founded upon natural
interest, would replace the wisdom . . . claimed to find in
historical process of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.12
The modern order marks not just the emergence of the
autonomous individual in his rational independence, but the
disintegration of the social bond grounded in historical predilection, tradition and custom. Freedom and self-determination, he
notes, have long replaced “”use and wont”” as Western man’s motive
forces. The expansive modern order supplants the constrictive
predecessor.
Nisbet finds this “”glowing vision of society”” problematic
because it seems to contradict, or at least fail to appreciate, the
irreducibly historical and social ground of human existence. He
adheres more closely to the Aristotelian characterization of man
as zoon politikon, and rejects as inadequate both the scientific and
rationalistic justifications for the associative impulse. The basic
human social structures like family and kinship are historical in
nature, he contends, and not merely biological or utilitarian.
Society is a product of history, lived and shared in infinite variety,
for purposes which widely exceed the survival instinct. As such, it
yields plural authorities with diverse functions, each directed
toward a particular end shared by the respective constituents.
Nisbet claims that “”[m]an 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.””13 His historical methodology foreordains his defense of
the “”encrustations”” of conventional history, those plural and
particular institutions wherein, he believes, lays the primary
source of social cohesion. By taking up that mantle, he sets
himself on a collision course with a conception of history rooted
in the metaphor of “”nature”” and the deterministic unities of
immanent causality and inevitable progress. These opposing
views of history comprise the great drama of modernity: the
struggle for authority between community, individual, and state.
While Nisbet has often been characterized as a “”communitarian,””
and a “”prophet of community,”” he receives less attention for his
historical sense which both grounds his study of man and delimits
his perspective on human nature. “”If we would diagnose our own
age, we had better do so historically,”” he insists, “”for history is the
essence of human culture and thought.””14 For Nisbet, the study
of man is a fundamentally historical inquiry which obliges an
examination of the record of historical events, people, and places
taken in their respective contexts.
Both his critique of modernity and his positive assertion of
community, rightly understood, emanate from his appreciation of
the substance and processes of history. He derives this sensibility
both from deep readings of various authors including Edmund
Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Emile Durkheim, and from the
close tutelage of Frederick J. Teggart during his years at the
University of California–Berkeley.15 What glimpses of the historical
sense he treats the reader to in The Quest for Community
(1953) receive more explicit elaboration in later works, including
Social Change and History (1969), Twilight of Authority (1975),
History of the Idea of Progress (1980), and The Present Age (1988),
among others.
As a scholar engaged in the study of man, Nisbet, following
Teggart, delimits his analysis to “”how things actually work,”” and
seeks “”an orderly approach to the study of ‘how things have come
to be as they are.'””16 This process obliges turning “”to history and
only to history if what we are seeking are the actual causes,
sources, and conditions of overt change of patterns and structures
in society.””17 What exactly does he mean by “”history?”” He
cautions, in a way reminiscent of Herbert Butterfield,18 that
“”[w]hat is determinative in the historian’s judgment is simply that
aspect of the present he chooses to illuminate.””19 The temptation
to selectively pluck from the past discrete events, customs or
attitudes which tend to support a given contemporary perspective
or conclusion leads the social scientist down precisely the path
Nisbet abhors.
#page#
By “”history,”” Nisbet “”means events such as the Conquest,
dates such as 1066, individuals such as William, and areas such as
England.””20 He uses the concrete historical record as it was lived
by particular individuals and groups. He employs a “”genuinely
historical method, one which proceeds from social behavior,
from events, from concrete circumstances.21 “”History,”” he writes,
“”is what the contemporary social sciences are all about, “” and
“”[t]he methodology of history lies in its concern with the concrete
and particular, and its strict observance of the limits of time.””22
As a source of insight into present concerns, this historical
methodology resembles what Burke refers to as “”the spirit of
philosophical analogy.””23 Burke’s term recognizes the inextricable
link between past and present. The essential inheritance of each
culture, when properly respected and applied, engenders a “”natural””
continuity so that “”in what we improve we are never wholly
new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.””24 A
historical sense of this kind rejects blind veneration of the old as
much as the ahistorical rationalistic embrace of the new.
Two corollaries readily emerge from experiential or concrete
history: first, it is plural and particular; and second, it reveals
continuity rather than change. It is plural and particular in the
sense that it is bound by events, people, places, and time, and as
such, eludes simple generalizations and universal theories. Nisbet
follows his mentor in reminding that “”[h]istory, the late F. J.
Teggart insisted, is plural. It is plural in sequence of event and
plural in result. There is no one general statement that can remain
meaningful before the diversity of historical materials.””25 While
he does not mean to imply that the present is in no way related to
the past, Nisbet’s positive statement of the plurality of history
underscores his fundamental demarcation between concrete
history and a distinct discipline of historical observation which
seeks broad unities and universal principles. The rationalistic
brand of historical observation can at times be informative, but,
when the field of study is limited to the experience of actual people
during a defined period of time these unities never appear. The
human beings living in the concrete, historical and social remain
oblivious to the great cycles and generalizations of abstract
history. “”Generalization is beyond question what we seek from the
empirical and concrete,”” Nisbet asserts, “”[b]ut it is generalization
from the empirical, the concrete, and the historical; not generalization
achieved through their dismissal; not generalization drawn
from metaphor and analogy.””26 Generalizations can be reasonably
and responsibly drawn from human behavior and social change
only insofar as they recur in concrete history. Like Burke, Nisbet
mines the vein of historical inheritance to derive philosophical
analogies that inform present and future.
The corollary of continuity is closely related to the plurality
of history. If, as Nisbet insists, our object is to understand how
things became as they are, then we must orient our review of
concrete history toward the changes which have taken place
within what Durkheim refers to as a particular social milieu: “”in
the assembled circumstances and conditions and events which
form the time and place within which the specified change has
taken place.””27 All concrete history, and therefore, all social
change, inescapably takes place within the social milieu, and when
we analyze the historical records of a particular people, in a
particular place, at a particular time we find a perpetual struggle
for continuity, not change. “”On the empirical record,”” writes
Nisbet, “”fixity, not change, is the required point of departure for
the study of not merely social order but social change.””28 History
indicates that social man strives for permanence, stability, persistence,
and “”[c]ommon sense tells us that, given the immense sway
of habit in individual behavior and of custom, tradition, and
sacred in collective behavior, change could hardly be a constant,
could hardly be ubiquitous.””29
This is not to say, quite obviously, that changes never occur,
but “”changes can only be understood against the background of
persistence that must, if we are to understand change, be our
point of departure.””30 Nisbet’s concrete historical inquiry reveals,
then, that social structures are built and maintained on the
premise of fixity, on the deep desire to express and live shared
values, beliefs, and ideas and to convey them through institutions,
customs, traditions, and rites. Social structures are by their
nature solicitous of continuity and resistant to change.
The continuity corollary itself engenders certain important
implications which bear directly on both Nisbet’s historical sense
and his critique of modernity. The manifest presence of continuity
as the ordering principle of social structures indicates that the
social changes that do occur emerge most often from sources
external to the social milieu in question. Nisbet makes an important
distinction between “”changes within a given pattern of
behavior . . . more nearly in the character of readjustments—and
changes of the pattern.””31 The former resemble more closely daily
“”activity, interaction and motion,”” while the latter amount to
fundamental changes of a “”larger, structural significance.””32
These latter “”intrusions,”” as Nisbet labels them, most frequently
arise from external sources, through interaction between cultures
and social structures. The exogenous source of social change
rejoins the plurality of history in confirming the random character
of social change, the manifest lack of pattern and system. If
concrete history is indeed “”plural in sequence of event,”” and social
change is exogenous to the social structure concerned, then social
structures left in isolation tend toward continuity and permanence
until such time as a random external intrusion intervenes.
The social bond that draws the elements of any social structure
together is, therefore, conservative in nature. Nisbet describes
any given social subject of a specified time and place as exhibiting
“”long periods of relative persistence of form; processes of very
minor modification; and, rarely, bursts of extraordinary change
directly relatable to the impacts of external events.””33
Positively stated, Nisbet’s historical sense places the source
of meaning in human lives inextricably within the social milieu,
and establishes therein the only ground where the reconciliation
of order and freedom might tolerably occur. He reaches these
conclusions by scrupulously adhering to the constraints of the
given human condition as manifest throughout concrete history,
constraints of time, membership, and imperfection. The characteristics
of concrete history, its plurality and continuity, further
define the social milieu as fundamentally conservative of its
particular values and ideas. The implications of this historical
sense place Nisbet in contradiction with the approach to history
that informed the catalysts of modernity.
Nisbet identifies the apotheosis of the historical methodology
which has severely corrupted modern historical judgment in a
passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Let us begin then by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the
question. The investigations we may enter into treating this
subject, must not be considered as historical truths, but only as
mere conditional or hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to
explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin;
just like the hypotheses which our physicists daily form respecting
the formation of the world.34
Rousseau’s approach, though also imbued with a certain
romantic longing, epitomizes the rationalistic tendency to prefer
the hypothetical “”nature”” of things to concrete historical truths.
According to Nisbet, the goal of this “”natural”” reasoning is “”to cut
through the morass of customs, superstitions, traditions, and
prescriptive laws . . . to the underlying forces of the natural
order.””35 Natural history separates “”what was fundamental and
natural to man,”” from what was “”ordinary or conventional history,””
the former a product of abstract reasoning, the latter of
observed and lived experience.36 In this rationalistic (and often
equally romantic) conception of the pristine nature of human
existence, the implied ideal of the human condition is everpresent,
but obtruded by the conventions of mankind. It becomes
intelligible only “”whenever enlightened political action . . . [removes]
the underbrush of convention and historic tradition that
[hides] nature and her laws.””37
These ahistorical rationalistic concepts are but one derivative
Nisbet identifies within the broader Western metaphor of “”organismic
growth”” or “”development,”” metaphors which are predicated
upon the ancient Greek ideas of physis, or “”way of growth,”” and
telos, or “”movement toward the end of an object.”” The ideas of
physis and telos convey a sense of purposive progress or maturation,
and contain certain characteristics of change as: “”intrinsic to
the entity””; “”longitudinal [in] shape . . . from one point in time to
another””; “”cumulative”” and “”irreversible””; occurring “”in stages””
that “”have genetic as well as merely sequential relation to one
another.””38 These metaphorical characteristics of change are
frequently expressed by analogy with the biological development
of a plant or other organism. Nisbet links physis and telos with
their modern incarnations in the “”natural history”” of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the deterministic and rationalistic
theories of utilitarianism, Marxism, and Darwinism in the
nineteenth century, and the progressivism, relativism, and nihilism
in the twentieth century.
One of the consequences of this rationalistic use of metaphorical
history is a shift in emphasis away from the actual events
in history and toward the perception of certain intrinsic processes
of history, the sweeping millennial movements and universal
syntheses of past, present, and future. These processes have taken
the various forms through the ages of the classical cycles, Christian
Providence, Darwinian social evolution, and modern Progress.
According to Nisbet, modern rationalistic thought seeks, consistent
with physis and telos, a unity in historical processes that
underscores rational confidence that history amounts to a steady
ascent of the human condition toward some perfect state of
temporal being. The motion of this ascent can be assisted by the
expansion and application of human reason to the challenges and
problems which perennially befall mankind. Indeed, in the modern
mind, all science has precisely the goal of improving the
worldly human condition and speeding mankind on its linear
trajectory toward temporal perfection.
Nisbet attributes to Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, the French
physiocrats, and the philosophes, among other modern thinkers,
the tendency to “”get away from the ‘accidental’ character of
historical happenings, in order to discover the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’
course of change . . . [and] set up [a] concept of ‘hypothetical,’
‘theoretical,’ or ‘ideal’ history.””39 Indicative of the distortive
influence of this “”natural”” history with its immanent traits of
progressive, salutary, and inevitable change, is “”the profound
conviction that through human reason evils could be corrected or
banished from society—that such evils were not necessarily a
timeless aspect of human nature.””40 The modern mind, as Nisbet
describes it, perceives a perfectible human reason through the
shroud of concrete history and the conventional institutions
which obscure it. In the clarity of ideal or natural history, the
modern mind has “”sought to discover . . . the bases of harmony and
self-perpetuating progress””41 that have proved so elusive to
historical, social, fallible man.
Nisbet’s mentor Teggart concludes that modernity’s catalysts
“”introduced into the very heart of humanistic study a cleavage
between history and the ‘scientific’ aspects of social inquiry which
has not yet been repaired, and which remains to exert an obscure
but all-pervading influence upon the humanistic scholarship of
the present-day.””42 Whether by way of empiricism, positivism,
determinism, etc. the modern mind, continues Nisbet, attempts
to “”root out those institutions that have lost their viability and
destroy those structures that, through corruption of original
purpose, have become tyrannous and oppressive . . . the only good
order is a rational order . . . one that would be in conformity to the
true nature of the individual and society.””43 All that is not part of
the given or natural order is subject to censure and eradication.
Only what is common to all men, in all circumstances, for all time,
the universal or natural, unsullied by particularities, serves the
perfection of the human condition.
Nisbet identifies a close connection between metaphorical
natural history and the idea of inevitable progress. The former
includes a teleology of temporal perfection: progress. According
to this teleology, mankind has progressed through the ages from
barbaric to civilized to scientific through the perpetual expansion
of reason and extension of control over environment. “”Between
philosophers as far removed as Spenser and Marx,”” he writes,
“”there was a common faith in the organizational powers of history
and in the self-sufficiency of the individual. All that was needed
was calm recognition of the historically inevitable. In man and his
natural affinities lay the bases of order and freedom.””44 The
teleology foretells how mankind eventually will be denuded of its
inadequacies and imperfections through the continuous and
irreversible unfolding of Progress. The particular and plural in
history, according to this narrative of Progress, is ignored and
abhorred in equal measure in favor of bold pronouncements on
the trajectory of human achievement. The disciples of modern
Progress operate under “”the assumption that history is a more or
less continuous emancipation of men from despotism and evil””45
as embodied by conventional, man-made social structures like
kinship, church, class, and guilds.
Nisbet refutes the utility and applicability of metaphorical
history by flatly stating that “”the more concrete, empirical, and
behavioral our subject matter, the less the applicability to it of””46
modern processes of history like Progress and development.
Generalizations of this nature may be appropriate “”when the
subject is civilization in its entirety and one is seeking general laws
of its asserted advancement. But it is very difficult—I should say
impossible—to exclude the concrete particularity of history when
one is dealing with, say, modern England.””47 Nisbet rebuts this
rationalist, ahistorical set of concepts. All “”genetic derivation“”—
that is, all assignations of intrinsic, continuous, immanent, irreversible,
inevitable change—””is impossible,”” claims Nisbet. “”It is
not impossible to find conditions and also causes of change. What
is impossible is to fix causality into the linear succession of events
and changes with which the historian or social scientist deals.””48
He then cites with effect Durkheim, who claims that “”[t]he stages
that humanity successively traverses do not engender one another.””
49 The point of this line of reasoning is that metaphorical
history, through its digression from history and the actual experience
of human beings living and acting in social groups, purports
to identify a natural and universal framework for the human
condition that has no support in actual human experience. Adherence
to such a construct permits the a dangerous conception of
human interaction and fuels the deeply flawed presumption that
the human condition can be neatly ordered, even perfected,
according to these simple, rational precepts.
As Teggart writes in Theory and Processes of History (1925)
and Nisbet reiterates in History of the Idea of Progress (1980),
Progress, in its various forms (classical, Christian, and modern),
has had and will continue to have an important role to play in the
perpetuation of Western civilization so long as “”we recognize the
difference between a belief in progress and a belief in the
possibility of progress.”” Any careful student of concrete history
apprehends that “”[t]o restrict belief to the possibility of progress
implies recognition of the fact that change may result in destruction
as readily as in advancement.””50 The plurality of concrete
history confirms the coexistence of progress and decline. Nisbet
and Teggart indict modernity for its failure to appreciate “”the
precariousness of human achievement, as witnessed in the fate of
‘Nineveh and Tyre.'””51
The substance of Nisbet’s critique of the modern corruption
of history lies here in this statement. Metaphorical history
grounds its conception of the human condition on the imperative
of human progress. By selectively surveying a succession of points
on the chronological continuum, the modern mind identifies a
seemingly clear trajectory of human improvement from barbaric
to civilized to scientific. On the basis of this “”historical”” survey,
the human species appears en route to an ever brighter future.
Problems arise, however, when the modern mind neglects to
distinguish between the selective generalization produced by the
survey and life as it is lived in concrete history. To paraphrase
Kierkegaard, man certainly benefits from generalizing backward
about the past, but he can only live going forward in the particular.
The teleology of Progress has for its object the temporal
perfection of the human condition, and although its proponents
were convinced of its inevitable fruition regardless of their
efforts, they nevertheless undertook to facilitate it. The human
mind properly informed by the absolute verities of science could
accelerate the fruition by rendering the individual free of prejudice,
ignorance, and superstition. The self-sufficient individual,
applying his unaided reason, could thereafter define happiness
for himself. The epitome of the teleology of Progress arises in the
concept of laissez-faire, and through Nisbet’s treatment of it we
derive a better understanding of his historical sense.
In The Quest for Community, Nisbet refers the eighteenthcentury
school of thought laissez-faire as an example of how the
application of metaphorical history in the pursuit of freedom
served to corrupt the modern understanding of concrete history
and distort the apprehension both of human potentialities and
limitations. Proponents of the “”old”” laissez-faire, as Nisbet calls it,
informed by natural or ideal history of man, conceive a more
perfect human condition grounded in the self-sufficiency of the
individual guided by unaided reason. The impediments to the
realization of such a “”natural”” condition, in their estimation, are
the detritus of concrete history, the man-made clutter that
betrayed the tyranny of uneducated ignorance. The society they
envision
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would be one in which individuals were morally and socially as
well as politically free, free from groups and classes. It would be
composed. . .of socially and morally separated individuals. Order
in society would be the product of a natural equilibrium of
economic and political forces. Freedom would arise from the
individual’s release from all the inherited personal
interdependences of traditional community, and from his existence
in an impersonal, natural, economic order.52
The old laissez-faire interest in and preference for the abstract
“”natural order”” poses difficulties for the non-conforming historically
evolved order; those social and political institutions which
represent the obstacles to a comprehensive manifestation of the
natural order would seem prime targets for elimination.
As with all projects that attempt to circumvent or erase the
given historical human condition, the rationalistic “”natural order””
of the “”old”” laissez-faire, as Nisbet relates, failed:
because it was based on erroneous premises regarding human
behavior. As a theory it failed because it mistook for ineradicable
characteristics of individuals qualities that were in fact inseparable
from social groups. As a policy it failed because its atomistic
propositions were inevitably unavailing against the reality of
enlarging masses of insecure individuals. Far from providing a
check upon the growth of the omnicompetent state, the old
laissez-faire actually accelerated its growth. Its indifference to
every form of community and association left the state as the sole
area of reform and security.53
This indictment underscores the distinction between the
autonomy of individuals championed by the old laissez-faire and
the autonomy of social groups which Nisbet considers paramount
to a free and functional civil order. The old laissez-faire
may vehemently oppose intrusions by the state into private
matters, economic or otherwise, just as it strenuously opposes
intrusions by social groups, but it contains in its quiver of defense
against such intrusions only the weapons of its own demise. The
atomized, solitary individual cannot muster a defense against the
centralized interventionist state; indeed the undifferentiated
mass, the insecure “”sand-heap”” as Nisbet calls it, is more likely to
seek refuge under the aegis of national authority, attracted like
bugs to the glow of equality and order. Nisbet asserts that “”the
objective of the older laissez-faire“” was “”to create the conditions
within which autonomous individuals could prosper, could be
emancipated from the binding ties of kinship, class, and community.””
54 The common ground shared by the individual and social
groups in their mutual resistance to state coercion recedes in
response to the old laissez-faire‘s embrace of individual autonomy
at the expense of rather than in coordination with those social
groups in which concrete persons actually live and act.
These sentiments contrast sharply with Nisbet’s insistence
that if a “”natural order”” exists it is an essentially social one
evolving through history, adapting to the particular circumstances
of each community in every era. He maintains that the
proponents of the old laissez-faire find the historically evolved
order at best a nuisance and at worst a corrupting agent. The more
extreme end of this spectrum closely resembles the inversion of
the traditional moral order advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
in his First Discourse: that man’s intrinsically good nature, when
subjected to the institutions of civil society, suffers moral debasement.
55 Such an inversion nullifies one of the paramount functions
of the associative impulse which is to mollify the human
inclination toward sin, selfishness, or anti-social behavior.
Throughout its history Western civilization has sought to constrain,
with the hope that the higher potentialities might emerge,
precisely the mercurial human nature that proponents of natural
history seem so eager to liberate. The old laissez-faire confidence
in enlightened self-interest producing benefits for all without
provision for tempering that self-interest contradicts the willful
self-restraint and individual moral striving prescribed by several
millennia of Western tradition.
Nisbet ascribes some merit to the old laissez-faire with regard
to antipathy for the interventionist state. The fact remains,
however, that he finds the advance of the state inversely proportional
to the retreat of the historical social bond. He finds the
retreat facilitated and accelerated by the old laissez-faire preference
for individual freedom over historically-grounded social
cohesion, and exacerbated by the willingness of some of its
proponents to employ the coercive powers of the state to effect
change.
Nisbet holds the old laissez-faire responsible for the flow-tide
of the all-encompassing welfare state. He further laments the old
laissez-faire lack of appreciation for the social context within
which every individual completes, expresses, and lives his humanity.
By favoring the individual as free-agent exclusive of the group
rather than the individual as he concretely lives, as a member of
the social construct, the old laissez-faire undermines the concrete
historical natural order’s last defense against the rationalistic,
mechanistic, and utilitarian conceit of modern technocracy.
Proponents of the old laissez-faire, suggest Nisbet, benefit
from the presumption of a relatively robust social order and a
comparatively weak impulse for government intervention. “”[I]t is
because the social order has been cemented securely by all the
values and institutions which spring from altruism and cooperation,””
he reminds us, “”that an economic system driven by enlightened
self-interest is possible within that order.””56 The immensity
of the modern welfare and warfare edifice would have been
inconceivable to eighteenth-century thinkers. In training their
sights on what they perceived to be the greater threat, i.e., the
historically evolved social and cultural structure, however, they
justify the decline of what is the final redoubt against the
government juggernaut.
Moreover, the emphasis on economic liberty as the precondition
to other forms of personal autonomy tends to elevate the
material over the moral, an inversion that leads to the inevitable
decline of both. Moral striving does not depend on the material
circumstances of the subject; any individual regardless of station
can entertain his higher potentialities even in relative penury.
Material wealth, on the other hand, presupposes an ethical
disposition sufficiently well-attuned to the higher potentialities;
without it, material success degrades into avarice and envy
thereby undermining the social impulse and impeding the higher
potentialities. “”Capitalism is either a system of social and moral
allegiances, resting securely in institutions and voluntary associations,””
contends Nisbet, “”or it is a sand heap of disconnected
particles of humanity.””57 He points out that “”[m]ere economic
affluence . . . can indeed be a virtual recipe for the widespread
turning of responsibilities over to the ever-flowing revenue
powers of government and for the consequent divorce between
human beings and their ordinary, natural impulses toward social
initiative.””58
On the Reconciliation of Order and Freedom
The reconciliation of order and freedom ranks as one of the
foremost challenges of political philosophy. This symbiotic tension lies at the heart of defining a polity and the broader culture
of which it is a part. Before the advent of modernity and the
concurrent rise of individualism and the nation-state, that reconciliation
took place, however tenuously, within the social nexus. In
The Quest for Community, Nisbet undertakes “”a study of the
ethics of order and freedom”” not only for the purpose of analyzing
the dislocation of that process of reconciliation, but to reorient
the audience toward the social ground wherein human ethics are
devised, lived, and transmitted. That ground, he contends, lay
solely within the social nexus of human existence; not only are
human beings irreducibly social, but they derive meaning in their
lives from shared experiences in the various social groups, associations,
and institutions in which they conduct their daily affairs.
The meaning arises from identifying, defining, and living out
concretely certain cherished values. The social element of human
existence is indispensable to and inextricable from the moral
element. In this way, order, as manifested in the social nexus,
provides a haven for freedom, and is its necessary precondition.
Despite the surfeit evidence of man’s given historical social
condition, the modern age prefers to advance the sanctity of the
individual as free-agent in opposition to the Aristotelian vision of
the individual achieving the fullness of his humanity only as a
citizen of the polis. “”Nowhere,”” Nisbet asserts, “”not in economy,
state, or culture in any of its forms, do we in fact find aggregates
of ‘individuals.’ What we find are human beings bound, in one or
other degree, by ties of work, friendship, recreation, learning,
faith, love, and mutual aid.””59 The accuracy of Aristotle’s observation
of zoon politikon is, for Nisbet, an incontestable historical
fact.
That having been said, Nisbet in no way disclaims or diminishes
the human person as a social being. He contrasts the
individual-as-free-agent who populates the modern imagination
with the human person who exists within the constraints of the
human condition, a being bound by time, by fellowship with other
persons, and by the fallibility of human will and reason. Nisbet
accepts the premise of the philosophy of individualism, which
emphasizes “”the fact that the ultimate criteria of freedom lie in the
greater or lesser degrees of autonomy possessed by persons. A
conception of freedom that does not center upon the ethical
primacy of the person is either naïve or malevolent.””60 His choice
of the term “”person”” instead of “”individual”” reflects his insistence
on the primacy of the human person as he is found in history and
society rather than the abstraction of the self-sufficient, selfdefining
individual. Every individual is inescapably influenced by
his historical and social surroundings. This does not mean,
however, that every individual is but a product of his environment.
Nisbet believes “”it is in association—intimate, relevant, and free
association—that individual energies become stimulated, strengthened,
and, finally, focused.””61 Only through an understanding of
the historical and social circumstances underlying his environment
and cultivation of the various associations available to him,
can an individual bring to fruition his fullest humanity.
Voluntary associations, on the contrary, by their very nature
embody a normative element in the purpose they serve for their
constituents. “”All the testimony of contemporary sociological and
psychology joins in the conclusion that individuality cannot be
understood save as the product of normatively oriented interaction
with other persons.””62 To be fair, the communal impulse is
often enough too virulent resulting in rigidity and dogmatism,
stifling the creativity and variety that are produced by the individual
imagination. Nisbet contends, however, that “”the perspectives
and incentives of the free creative mind arise out of communities
of purpose.””63 Right-ordered autonomous groups, unlike
autonomous individuals, engender a normative element around
which the group coalesces that harmonizes the diverse perspectives
and competencies of individuals.
In the closing pages of The Quest for Community, Nisbet calls
for a “”new laissez-faire“” whose primary objective is “”[t]o create
conditions within which autonomous groups may prosper””64 in
response to the inadequacy of the old laissez-faire and the suffocating
encroachment of government power. Nisbet employs the
term “”new laissez-faire“” because this order, like its failed predecessor, requires a certain latitude, a liberty from the impositions of
the modern state to function properly, to respond sufficiently to
the ethical needs of society. Although the constitutive elements of
the new laissez-faire are implied throughout The Quest for Community
(1953), they receive more explicit treatment in Twilight of
Authority (1980). The fundamental elements of the new laissezfaire
are the rediscovery of the social and a renewed distinction
between public and private; the recovery of pluralism; the renascence
of kinship; and a revival of localism.
The new laissez-faire embraces the ethical primacy of the
person while rejecting the ahistorical distortion of individualism
which holds that personal self-fulfillment and happiness presuppose
a solitary freedom of action that precedes the social conditions
in which all human beings live. Nisbet argues that “”[w]hat is
required obviously is a form of laissez-faire that has for its object,
not the abstract individual, whether economic man or political
man, but rather the social group or association.””65 The economic
and the political are categories of the broader, comprehensive
social circumstances of each individual.
The Rediscovery of the Social:
The Distinction Between Public and Private
Nisbet argues for a restoration of the distinction between the
public and the private in both economic and moral terms. With a
seemingly insatiable appetite, government soaks up an everincreasing
range of formerly private responsibilities, which renders
it incapable of performing effectively even those functions
which incontestably fall within its purview, notably the maintenance
of order. At the same time, government usurps the authority
and function of private associations. As the associations lose
or cede responsibility for these functions they atrophy and
dissipate, making all the more difficult the formation of different
groups to address new challenges. The civic impulse undertaken
by private citizens, when idle, withers, precipitating an increased
need for state intervention.
Nisbet argues that pluralism is comprised of four essential
components: functional autonomy, decentralization, hierarchy,
and tradition. Every social unit exists to serve some function
deemed valuable by its constituents. In order for that function to
be properly executed the social unit requires a sufficient measure
of autonomy, a clearing of external influences so that internal
authority can be exerted. “”What characterizes the pluralist view
of autonomy,”” writes Nisbet, “”can best be thought of in terms of
the ability of each major function in the social order to work with
the maximum possible freedom to achieve its own distinctive
ends.””66 With autonomy established in the plural order, voluntary
groups form in response to various needs, desires, and values,
producing harmony and balance through interdependence and
complimentarity. Nisbet locates the origin of this principle in
Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s ideal regime, citing the former’s
preference for harmony over unison as the source of true unity,
“”as the bringing into consonance of elements in the social order
the diversity of which is recognized as vital to both freedom and
creativity.””67
The second element of Nisbet’s pluralism is the decentralization
of all political power and administration. By this he means
the broad distribution of power and administration to the various
functional elements of the social order: workers, business owners,
professionals, families, and neighborhoods. His reference to
administration is no afterthought; if a restoration of the level of
respect the Founding Fathers had for decentralized political
power might be difficult to achieve, decentralized administration
may prove a formidable force. Nisbet wonders “”[w]hat better way
of encouraging initiative in both family and in individual than
through use of family as in indirect means of administration.””68
Nisbet’s appeal for a renewal of hierarchy is at its source an
indictment of democracy in its egalitarian form. As Tocqueville
notes in Democracy in America, equality in its leveling form
implies both a dilution if not removal of hierarchy in favor of
equal voices and roles, which in turn reduces if not eliminates the
leadership, the natural aristocracy that every society requires to
function properly. Nisbet follows Burke in advocating hierarchy
not as a method of entrenching privilege to one group over others
(“”Everything ought to be open but not indifferently to every
man.””69), but of producing those exceptional characters, those
natural aristocrats whom all may emulate and who are best
capable and positioned to lead those social units of which they are
a part.
This amounts to a meritocracy, but it’s a meritocracy of a
certain kind; the kind for which the scorecard consists of more
than quantitative material criteria. Nisbet cites approvingly Burke
who explicitly rejects a “”sordid mercenary occupation”” as sufficient
grounds for social advancement, in contrast to the modern
tendency to celebrate material success above all else. Nisbet
refers to Burke’s specific emphasis on those “”talents and virtues””
that any country most desperately needs: “”civil, military, or
religious.”” Merchant, commercial, and self-interested fail to
make the list.
Nisbet draws on the historical sense by assigning to the term
tradition the same meaning as Burke did to the term prejudice.
The “”customs and traditions”” of any social body, he advances, “”are
the very stuff of morality.””70 Moreover, rich and vibrant customs
and tradition indicate a rich and vibrant underlying community.
Nisbet calls for a “”reliance upon, in largest possible measure, not
formal law, ordinance, or administrative regulation, but use and
wont, the uncalculated but effective mechanisms of the social
order, custom folkway, and all the uncountable means of adaptation
by which human beings have proven often to be masters of
their destinies in ways governments cannot even comprehend.””71
Pitting as it does the opposing interests of competitors, the
unrestricted market advocated by the old laissez-faire has a
tendency to rely on legalism to advance its interests, but is
certainly not above seeking privilege and advantage through legal
rather than strictly commercial means. This is another byproduct
of unfettered competition whereby men wishing to
advance their economic interests in the endless search for commercial
advantage resort to political pressure. “”Plural society is
free society,”” Nisbet maintains (with a nod to Burke), “”exactly in
proportion to its ability to protect as a large a domain as possible
that is governed by the informal, spontaneous, custom-derived,
and tradition-sanctioned habits of the mind rather than by the
dictates, however rationalized, of government and judiciary.””72
Kinship is a natural counterweight to the rationalistic forces of
benevolent self-interest contained in the old laissez-faire. Within
the family unit, rational self-interest is subordinated to the wellbeing
of the family as a whole. Parents routinely, some would say
irrationally, forego economic opportunity for the perceived welfare
of their family. As the irreducible unit of community, the
family has always represented the counterweight to the interventionist
state, however it also represents a substantial bulwark
against the cold rationalism of the marketplace. Membership in
such a unit presupposes a personal subordination of passions and
will to the common good. Nisbet attributes to the family unit that
which best reconciles “”communality and opportunity for individual
expression.””73 Family and community oblige and nurture
an other-orientation that the market mechanism lacks and even
undermines. The socially bound man is more oriented toward the
common good, an orientation which is severely subordinated if
sanctioned at all by market forces. The family is not the utilitarian
tool that market forces try to make it. “”It should be obvious,””
contends Nisbet, “”that family, not the individual, is the real
molecule of society, the key link of the social chain of being. It is
inconceivable to me that either intellectual growth or social order
or the roots of liberty can possibly be maintained among a people
unless the kinship tie is strong and had both functional significance
and symbolic authority.””74
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Nisbet arrays the deep-rooted impulse for localism against the
atomizing forces of concentration of capital, mobility of capital
and labor, and centralizing of resources for the purposes of
achieving economies of scale. Localism allows for a proliferation
of diverse communities affording individuals myriad choices for
ac
