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). (QC)
Cited Works of Robert Nisbet
“Foreward”” to The American Family and the State, edited by
Joseph R. Peden and Fred Glahe (San Francisco: Pacific
Research Institute, 1986). (AS)
“”Conservatism and Sociology,”” The American Journal of Sociology
48 (September 1952), 167–175. (CS)
The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America,
1945–1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971). (DA)
“”The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France,”” The
American Journal of Sociology 49 (November 1943), 156–64.
(FS)
History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
(HP)
The Making of Modern Society (New York: NYU Press, 1986).
(MM)
The Present Age: Progress and Authority in Modern America (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988). (PA)
Sociology as an Art Form (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976). (SA)
The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society (New
York: Knopf, 1970). (SB)
Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1969). (SC)
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western
Thought (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982). (SP)
The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). (ST)
Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
(TA)
Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New
York: Random House, 1968). (TR)
In the preface to The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet
explained the theme of his work: “”I have chosen to deal with the
political cause of the manifold alienation that lies behind the
contemporary quest for community.”” (QC, vii) Although economic,
religious, and cultural factors played a role in modern
man’s alienation, the role of the state was preeminent in severing
the ties between the individual and his kin, church, and local
associations. Supplanting traditional communities, the state was
able to reorganize society with its ideology of individualism,
secularism, and progress that was aimed at imperial expansion.
The growing concentration of power in the state allowed it to
penetrate successfully into “”man’s economic, religious, kinship,
and local allegiances”” and dislocate “”established centers of function
and authority”” with its own mandate and bureaucratic
organization. (QC, viii) The decline of traditional communities,
and the corresponding rise of individual alienation, was a direct
result of the concentration of power and the complete sovereignty
of the modern state.
For Nisbet, communities rather than individuals were the
units of society, as best exemplified during the Middle Ages, when
the “”group was primary.”” Honors, privileges, and immunities
were attached to communities because they were prior to the
individual in origin and authority: “”whether we are dealing with
the family, the village, or the guild, we are in the presence of the
systems of authority and allegiance which were widely held to
precede the individual in both origin and right.”” (QC, 81) Decisions
of occupation, welfare, and family were decided not by the
individual but by the community. The medieval town “”was itself a
close association, and its members—citizens in the medieval
sense—were bound to live up to its articles and customs almost
as rigorously as the peasants on the manor.”” (QC, 81–83) Contrary
to Locke’s state of nature or Rawls’s original position,
Nisbet contended that all individuals were born in a community
instead of some a priori condition from which they could consent
to a societal contract. Like Aristotle, Nisbet believed that the
community was prior to the individual in both origin and authority
because it was only in the community where the individual could
find fulfillment and achieve self-sufficiency.
Not only did Nisbet reject the modern liberal premise of
abstract individualism, but he dismissed the idea of equality as the
basis for it. For Nisbet, a community was a hierarchal and
authoritative organization where humans sought fulfillment and
self-sufficiency. One was a member of a community as a “”father,
mother, priest, soldier, student, or professor”” where hierarchy
instead of equality defined the stratification of function and role
in the community. (DA, 44) As Nisbet said, “”Wherever two or
more people associate, there is bound to be some form of
hierarchy, no matter how variable, changing from one actor to the
other, or how minor. Hierarchy is unavoidable to some degree.””
(TA, 238) The hierarchal nature of functions and roles provided
“”the visible bonds, roles, statuses, and norms”” for a community’s
boundaries of what was acceptable and unacceptable in thought
and behavior. (DA, 41) In short, social and political stability was
impossible for Nisbet without some form of hierarchy and
authority.
However, the stability of the community did not have to rest
on exploitation and power; rather, Nisbet pointed out that consensus was the foundation for social and political order. Legitimacy
of the regime was rooted in “”some manifestation of consensus,””
whether it resided in the “”family, monastery, or university,””
and was the essence of community. (DA, 43–44) The stratification
of function and role in the community was based on habit, custom,
and use where the individual was engaged in and part of “”a pattern
of authority.”” (SB, 142) Similar to proponents of civil society,
Nisbet believed that the legitimacy of a community should not
found in the exploitation and power of the state—something
which occurred when authority had broken down.1 A community’s
legitimacy in some sense was voluntarily given by its members
where individuals submit to a stratification of function and roles
within that organization. Yet the community’s legitimacy was not
entirely determined by the member’s choice because habit, custom,
and tradition provided a context in which the individual
found himself. As Burke had argued, the community, as prior to
the individual, already has been legitimatized by members before
that individual even existed. When born into a community, the
member’s context was already established and therefore the
member had no choice other than to engage in and be a part of that
community’s “”pattern of authority.””
Crucial to a community’s “”pattern of authority””—its cohesive
and consensual nature—was its function. As Nisbet wrote, “”Nothing
is so likely in the long run to lead to the decay of community
than the disappearance of the function that established it in the
first place, or the failure of some commanding function to take the
place of the first.”” Nisbet did not specify what function a community
should adopt except to suggest that “”a community is strong in
the sense of some transcending purpose, some ideal or ideals.””
(DA, 43) He also rejected utilitarian and commercial concerns as
the proper function of a community: “”In the community of blood,
kinship cannot be assessed in terms of either material or pecuniary
interests. . . . And in the traditional community of scholars, in
the university, one prided himself on an aloofness to the kinds of
material or dollar interests that actuated businessmen.”” (DA, 45)
This was not to say that utilitarian and commercial matters should
be neglected; rather, these concerns should not be the highest
ones for the community to seek. Again, Nisbet differed with
modern liberal thinkers who placed property as the foundation
for their new communal order.
When the members of the community began to say “”I”” instead
of “”we,”” “”one may trace the phases of dissolution of a community.””
(DA, 44) For Nisbet, the sixteenth century was the beginning in
which individuals became steadily more detached from their
“”close confinements of kinship, church, and association.”” (QC,
86) The modern individual who emerged from the sixteenth
century understood communities as particularistic, exclusive,
and egalitarian in an ideology of individualism, secularism, and
progress. This progressive emancipation of the individual was a
direct result of the decline of the traditional communities from
which he has been emancipated. Although this transition contained
a variety of economic, religious, and cultural factors, the
role of the political state was preeminent in this transformation of
the modern individual. (QC, 97)
#page#
For Nisbet, the state was an artificial construct that was opposed
to traditional communities and arose out of force in the conditions
of war. (QC, 100) The state’s expansion of power during
times of war was especially evident to Nisbet, “”Everywhere the
state, as we first encounter it in history, is simply the institutionalization,
and projection to wider areas of function and authority,
of the command-tie that in the beginning binds only the warriorleader
and his men.”” (AF, xxi) The rise of the state was often at the
expense of kinship, as illustrated by Homer, whose epics painted
“”Greek society just beginning to face the pangs of conflict between
its age-old kinship structure and the pressing needs of war.
Eventually the political state won out.”” (AF, xxi–xxii) In Athens
itself, the state’s victory was assured with the Cleisthenean
Reforms that abolished kinship and replaced it with the polis,
individualism, and contract. Roman history was no different than
Greek when it came to the “”conflict between patria potestas, the
sacred and imprescriptible sovereignty of the family in its own
affairs, and the imperium militiae, the power vested in the military
leaders over their troops.”” (AF, xxxiii) When the empire replaced
the republic, the state triumphed over traditional kinship. Civil
and religious life became one when Augustus was anointed
Pontifex Maximus, and the Institutes of Justinian codified the
sovereign as the sole source of law and above it. As Nisbet
described the Roman family during this period, “”By the fifth
century, the once-proud Roman family had been grounded down
by the twin forces of [the state’s policies of] centralization and
atomization . . . .”” (AF, xxxiii)
The rediscovery of the Institutes of Justinian during the early
modern period greatly influenced the re-militarization of society;
and with this re-militarization came war, which in turn assisted in
the state accumulating more power at the expense of traditional
communities. (TA, 167) Under the conditions of war, these
communities became subordinated to the state, and “”Only through
the State’s penetration of traditional social authorities to the
individuals who live under them can its authority be said to be
manifest.”” (SB, 385) Individuals were to express their loyalty and
identity first and foremost to the state rather than to their kin,
church, or local association. As Nisbet had observed, war provides
the most intense sense of community among its members,
“”the kind of community that is brought into existence by emergency
and then reinforced by shared values and emotions which
reach the depth of human nature.”” (P, 309) But this new sense of
community was at the price of the traditional ones, with innovation
and invention replacing custom and tradition. (P, 309–11)
Over time, “”we see the passage of the State from an exclusively
military association to one incorporating almost every aspect of
human life.”” (QC, 101)
Besides the state’s penetration into traditional communities,
the condition of war also promoted the democratization of
society: “”Democracy, in all its variants, is the child of war.”” (P,
312) As Nisbet recounted, the Cleisthenan Reforms created the
first democracy, imperial Rome furnished entitlements to its
citizens, and the first mass infantry was formed during the late
Middle Ages and had a direct affect on modern democracy’s
notion of egalitarianism. Once a society had become democratized,
it had an affect on the nature of war, with twentieth conflicts
identified with popular and moral aspirations. As Nisbet observed,
“”When the goals and values of a war are popular both in
the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic,
institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further
into the void.”” (QC, 39) War now had become a type of crusade
in the name of the nation, with its martial character more intense
and reach greater in range because it had become more popular.
The affinity between the conditions of war and the democratization
of society led to the state’s centralization of power. The
state’s removal of intermediate political and civil institutions
created a condition in which men were equal in role, status, and
function. In Nisbet’s words, “”the very centralization of monarchical
and State power could not help but create the conditions for
a growing interest in personal equality.”” (QC, 107) By restricting
the authority and power of intermediate institutions, the state can
stress “”upon the impersonality and equality of the law, to create
a scene in which many traditional medieval inequalities had to be
diminished.”” (QC, 108) The state’s centralization of power promoted
a passion of equality among its citizens where “”[a]ll that has
magnified equality of condition has necessarily tended to abolish
or diminish the buffers to central power which are constituted by
social classes, kindreds, guilds, and other groups whose virtual
essence is hierarchy.”” (TA, 209) The flattening of hierarchies in
traditional communities resulted in a national community of
equality where the state becomes the sole source of power and
authority.
The disappearance of traditional communities coincided with
the rise of alienation among citizens: the individual was “”uprooted,
alone, without secure status, cut off from the community
or any system of clear moral purpose.”” (ST, 265) People felt
powerless to influence their own lives or the lives of others and
therefore withdrew from social and political organizations. (SB,
264–65) Lacking institutional resources, the individual had to rely
upon his own subjectivity to direct his life, which often collapsed
either into a philosophical relativism or hedonistic calculations.
Instead of cultivating genuine individuality and creativity, the
individual took “”mechanical roles he is forced to play, none of
them touching his innermost self but all of them separating man
from this self, leaving him, so to speak, existentially missing in
action.”” (ST, 266) Without any intermediate institutions, the
individual viewed the state’s impersonal bureaucratic institutions
as remote, incomprehensible, and fraudulent.
In addition to acting as barrier to the state’s power, intermediate
institutions served as the venue to cultivate values such as
love, honor, and loyalty that cannot be taught effectively by the
vast, distant, impersonal state. In fact, when the state attempted
to indoctrinate such values into its citizenry, the result was a
degradation of traditional dogmas, traditions, and values. (TR,
130) Humans learn and acquire meaningful skills and values in
concrete contexts which only intermediate institutions, like the
family or churches, can furnish. Without such groups that point
to higher purposes, humans reduce their relationships to contractual
ones, with property or currency being the common denominator.
Values of honor and loyalty become replaced with what
Nisbet referred to as the “”cash nexus””: “”Every act of service,
responsibility, protection an aid to others is an act presupposing
or calling for monetary exchange, for cash payment.”” (PA, 86) It
should come to no surprise that the state’s centralization of power
preceded and made possible the existence of capitalism. Capitalism
required the context of “”a single system of law, sanctioned by
military power, to replace the innumberable competing laws of
guild, Church, and feudal principality.”” (QC, 105) The vast power
of the state, and therefore its attractiveness, was its ability to
standardized objects and men, whether it was currency, property,
or rights. The imposition of uniformity upon both objects and
men “”provided a powerful political stimulus to the rise of capitalism.””
(QC, 105) It was in this homogenous environment where
capitalism could emerge and thrive. Of course, the great irony for
Nisbet was that the continual expansion of state power had
undermined and even threaten capitalism: capitalism needed
intermediate institutions—its moral capital and cultured order—
in order to survive. As Nisbet observed, “”Most of the relative
stability of nineteenth-century capitalism arose from the fact of
the very incompleteness of the capitalist revolution.”” Capitalism
required the “”the continued existence of institutional and cultural
allegiances which were, in every sense, precapitalist”” in order to
exist. (QC, 237)
With the decline of intermediate institutions and the rise of
alienation, the modern individual searched for community in the
state, for it is the state that held the greatest promise and “”evocative
power”” for an “”image of community.”” (QC, 33) The individual’s
identification with the state as part of his national community
contributed to the legitimatization of further state expansion into
society. When intermediate institutions like the family or churches
have disappeared, we are at the point that Tocqueville had predicted
of the administrative despotic state where a majority tyranny
dictated and instructed people in all incidents of their lives.
Citizens soon lose the capacity to think for themselves and
become reduced to “”timid and industrious animals, of which the
government is the shepherd.””2 (II: 310, 313, 337, 345)
For both Nisbet and Tocqueville, the rise of individualism and
the state’s concentration of power were not contradictory impulses
in democratic societies but rather complementary ones.
Individualism—the mature and calm feeling that leads citizens to
withdraw from society in order to pursue their private affairs—
was the greatest opponent to liberty, especially in democracies
where social and class structure was eliminated (at least psychologically
among the citizenry). With the equalization of inheritance,
democrats were forced to a life of economic independence,
after which they had achieved, led them to believe that they were
masters of their own destinies. The ties to intermediate institutions,
the sentiments of obligation and loyalty, were transformed
into independence and self-interest. (II: 104–06) Yet this newlywon
independence became subsumed under the politics of majority
tyranny, because democratic citizens believed all are endowed
with an equal capacity for judging and evaluating truth. Thus, “”the
greater truth should go with the greater number,”” with “”the
majority its ministering prophet”” in politics. (II: 11–12)
This new form of politics was aptly described by Foucault as
“”bio-politics,”” where the state guided and managed citizens according
to a rational criterion of its own determination.3 With the
decline of intermediate institutions, the state slowly assumed the
role of supervising, structuring, and directing the lives of people.
Under the “”responsible management”” of the state, the citizen was
reduced to a passive entity: individuals were categorized by social
sciences and then fitted into an assortment of institutions to
better serve the state. At the center of this process was an
architecture of control with multiple networks of power centers
that treated citizens as objects and with nothing escaping its
surveillance. With its access to technology, a vast bureaucracy,
and an ideology of individualism and progress, the state now had
acquired the capacities to equal its ambition to implement a
politics to affect an entire population. From birth to death, the
citizen’s life was under the administration of the state.
The emergence of the administrative despotic state usually
occurred in times of war; as Nisbet observed, “”Most of the great
wars in the modern West have been attended by the gains in the
political and social rights of citizenship as well as by increased
nationalism and centralization of power.”” (MM, 133) Creating a
vast bureaucracy to oversee its war objectives, the state not only
penetrated into every aspect of society but the “”stifling regimentation
and bureaucratic centralization of military organization is
becoming more and more the model of associative and leadership
relationships in time of peace and in nonmilitary organizations.””
(QC, 43) When citizens become reduced to equal, homogeneous
entities, the state can manipulate and incorporate them into its
most effective and efficient goals. Genuine individuality becomes
replaced with timidity and industry for the sake of the “”national
community.””
The emergence of the welfare state was an example of a
bureaucracy modeled after the efficiency of the military to
further the state’s objectives. Social reforms such as “”the equalization
of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of industries,
the raising of wages and improvements in working conditions,
worker-management councils, housing ventures, death
taxes, unemployment insurance plans, pension plans, and the
enfranchisement of formerly voteless elements of the population””
were administered by the state. Furthermore, these social reforms
were usually implemented during times of war or in the
name of war. (QC, 40) According to Nisbet, 75 percent of all
national programs in the last two centuries in western countries
have been designed to equalize income, property, and opportunity
that first arose out of the “”war state and of the war economy.””
(TA, 220)
In the United States, the origins of the state’s centralization of
power resided in President Woodrow Wilson’s entry of the United
States into World War I. For Nisbet, Wilson’s presidency was the
crucial event for America during the twentieth century:
[Wilson’s] political, economic, social and intellectual reorganization
of America in the short period 1917–1919 is one of the most
extraordinary feats in the long history of war and polity. . . .
Within a few short months he had transformed traditional,
decentralized, regional and localist America into a war state that
at its height permeated every aspect of life. (PA, 42–43)
Congress acceded to Wilson’s request for war powers, with
wages, prices, and profits controlled by the national government;
industries like the railroads and telegraphs nationalized; and civil
liberties suspended. Nisbet was so disturbed by Wilson’s concentration
of power that he compared his presidency to “”the West’s
first real experience with totalitarianism—political absolutism
extended into every possible area of culture and society, education,
religion, industry, the arts, local community, and family
included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings—came
with the America war state under Woodrow Wilson.”” (TA, 183)
#page#
The Wilson administrative state became the offspring for the
social programs of the New Deal which were created and advocated
by such progressive intellectuals like Herbert Croly, Walter
Lippmann, and John Dewey. To Nisbet, the “”so-called New Deal
was no more than an assemblage of governmental structures
modeled on those which had existed in 1917.”” (TA, 184–85) The
variety of programs and their acronyms—NRA, AAA, WPA—
were not only national entities that centralized power but also
were modeled after military organizations. In fact, the New Deal
was often referred to as the “”moral equivalent of war”” and
continued to advance the idea of a national community. When the
United States entered into World War II, the notion of the
national community became the only possible one for Americans
to conceive of in their fight for self-preservation.
Nisbet recognized the connection between American intellectuals
and the national government’s centralization of power. Not
only were intellectuals active in the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations,
but they became even more involved in the governmental
activities during the Cold War. As Nisbet described this
period, “”Political omnicompetence, with the state the spearhead
of all social and cultural life; industrialization, however farcical in
context; nationalization of education; rampant secularism; and
growing consumer-hedonism—all this bespeaks modernity to the
Western clerisy and the welcome sign of the developed, the
progressive.”” (PA, 73) In Nisbet’s lifetime, the idea of the national
community as governed by intellectuals reached its apex under
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, with its New Frontier,
War on Poverty, Great Society, and the Vietnam War.
The relationship between American intellectuals and political
leaders was not confined to the Democratic Party. The most
recent example of this alliance between an intellectual and political
elite can be found in President George W. Bush’s administration,
with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the expansion of the
welfare state in education and Medicare. These policies were
created, supported, and justified by neo-conservatives, who,
during the Cold War, were anti-communist, pro-free-market, and
supporters of traditional cultural values.4 For neo-conservatives,
democracy was a superior form of government because it protected
human liberty; and other regimes that curtailed human
freedom, like the Soviet Union, were deemed evil. Regimes
therefore were evaluated and ordered, with democracy as the
best, totalitarian as the worst, and authoritarian governments as
somewhere in between.5 For the neo-conservatives, the United
States should have prevented the Soviet Union from spreading
totalitarian regimes around the world as well as have promoted
democratic ones (or in conditions when it was not possible,
supported authoritarian ones).
This sense of American exceptionalism—the United States
had a unique role to play in the protection and spread of freedom
throughout the world—was shared and encouraged by American
intellectuals, including neo-conservative thinkers.6 According to
them, the United States’ commitment to liberal democracy, a
free-market economy, and the spreading of these ideals throughout
the world made it exceptional. As the exemplar nation that
promoted democracy and capitalism, the United States was seen
as part of an ideology of exceptionalism and progress that became
attractive to intellectuals and political elites, whether they were
from the left or right. As I will show later, for Nisbet the notions
that democracy was inherently the best form of regime or that
progress could occur in the realm of history were flatly rejected.
The form of government mattered less than its relationship to
intermediate institutions to Nisbet; and the idea that the state
could promote freedom in the name of progress was considered
by him silly, for the concept of progress itself had become
distorted into an ideology that justified the state’s centralization
of power.
After the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda on September
11, 2001, the Bush administration was in a position to
centralize more power in the national government because the
state was at war. In the name of national security, civil liberties
were curtailed, the national bureaucracy expanded, and another
war was justified. Rather than being immune to the state’s drive
for war, the United States under the Bush Administration was
merely another example of a state that expanded its power in an
ideology of exceptionalism and progress. As Nisbet noted, ideologies
were the justifications of a centralized, bureaucratic, national
state. This transformation began in war time conditions and has
been sustained by subsequent wars in order support the state’s
ideology. The problem for society was that wars can be justified
on ideology as fed by intellectuals rather than evidence.
The Bush doctrine that emerged after September 11, 2001,
“”called for offensive operations, including preemptive war against
terrorists and their abetters, more specifically against the regimes
that had sponsored, encouraged, or merely tolerated any ‘terrorist
group of global reach.'””7 Like Wilson, Bush’s foreign policy
contained a moral component in the promotion of democracy, as
in the case of Iraq. The most articulate justification of the Iraq
War can be found in the national security presidential directive
entitled “”Iraq: Goals, Objectives, and Strategy”” that the President
signed on August 29, 2002.8 The United States’ objectives were to
eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to prevent Iraq from
being a threat to regional stability, to liberate the Iraqi people
from tyranny, and to create a society based on pluralism and
democracy. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz believed
that “”it was necessary and it would be relatively easy”” to topple
Saddam Hussein because, in Vice President Dick Cheney’s words,
the United States would be “”greeted as liberators.””9
This ideology of exceptionalism and progress—that the rest of
the world eventually would become part of the liberal democratic
and capitalist order—was the centerpiece to the neo-conservative’s
ideology. Fukuyama’s variation of the modernization thesis in The
End of History and the Last Man predicted that all societies were
converging into a single order of democracy and capitalism.
Although there has been some disagreement among these think325
ers about how much the United States should promote democracy
around the world, the underlying belief remained the same. Of
course, this ideology has been questioned by the Iraqi War’s
aftermath: weapons of mass destruction were not discovered,
regional instability has become greater in the Middle East after
the American invasion, and the Iraqi people are engaged in a civil
war, in which the United States military is entangled. Worst of all,
the number of international terrorists and threats to the United
States are on the rise, as the “”Iraq conflict has become the ’cause
celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement
in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the
global jihadist movement.””10
Underlying this ideology was a belief that humans, specifically
bureaucrats, can direct events in a progressive and directional
fashion. With respect to war, the “”revolution in military affairs””
(RMA), or more commonly known as the Rumsfeld doctrine, was
the latest manifestation of the belief that bureaucracies can guide,
direct, and control human events. Proponents of RMA believed
that technology was the primary driver of change in war. By
providing superior information to leaders, the RMA would enable
political and military leaders to make better decisions on the
battlefield.11 The cultivation of character and training of soldiers
was secondary to investment in technology, weaponry, and information
systems.
The United States’ quick and relatively low-cost defeat of Iraq
seemed to justify the RMA, but the subsequent insurgency and
civil war exposed the flaws of this doctrine. The problem of the
doctrine was that the enemy became indistinguishable from
civilians, thereby negating the American technological or informational
advantage. Furthermore, the use of asymmetrical weaponry
such as suicide bombers undermined the United States
advantage in conventional weapons. The insurgency had to be
fought in neighbors, from door-to-door instead of from the sky or
sea where missiles could be launched. The virtues of prudence,
discretion, and courage were more necessary in combating this
type of conflict than weapon systems or transformation doctrine.
The blending of civilians and combatants, the use of lowtechnology
weaponry, and the propaganda of ideas in a decentralized
network was known as “”fourth generation warfare.””12 Most of
the post–World War II conflicts the United States has been
engaged have been fourth-generational: Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia,
Afghanistan, and Iraq. What determined the outcome of
this type of conflict was will instead of technology, with subnational
actors, manipulation of the media, and the cooperation
of civilians as the main theaters of battle. Organizations like Al-
Qaeda and the insurgent groups in Iraq have used this type of
warfare with great success. What the United States military needed
to do was become more flexible in its organization and responses to
the enemy. In other words, the United States must abandon the
RMA and focus more on training of the infantry, media propaganda,
and nation-building. Philosophically speaking, the underlying
belief that the centralized state, with its vast and impersonal
bureaucracy can control and direct events, must be replaced
with intermediate institutions and individual decisions.
The suggestions of fourth-generation war advocates coincided
with Nisbet’s ideas on bureaucracy, intermediate institutions,
and progress. Instead of relying upon the command-andcontrol
of the Pentagon, the United States military should trust
the intermediate institutions of battalions, media groups, and
non-governmental organizations to make decisions in a battle that
was defined not by certainty of information but by contingency of
events. In order that these institutions to make the correct and
prudent decisions, the United States will have to invest into
training and cultivation of character in its soldiers, which again is
most effective among small groups with their local sentiments and
attachments. But for this to be accomplished, the idea that
humans solely can direct history in the name of progress must first
be dismissed.
Progress and History
The concept of progress was a crucial feature in the ideology of
the war state to justify its centralization of power at the expense
of intermediate institutions. Citizens voluntarily have sacrificed
their privileges and liberties to the state if they believed that the
future promises more than the past. The justification of “”making
the world safe for democracy””—whether it was against the
Germans, Japanese, Soviets, or Islamic fundamentalists—only
became persuasive if the concept of progress existed; otherwise,
there was no compelling reason why citizens should submit
themselves to the state. Given this fact, it should come to no
surprise that intellectuals were not only the best equipped but also
played an active role in presenting the case of progress on behalf
of the national government to its democratic citizenry. As Nisbet
had noted, the concept of progress in our times “”had reached its
zenith in the Western mind in popular as well as scholarly circles.
From being one of the most important ideas in the West it became
the dominant idea.”” (HP, 171)
For Nisbet, the concept of progress was neither uniquely
modern nor entirely secular in origin and history. Rather than
emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the concept
of progress was founded in the Greek and Roman attempt
to understand their histories. The key to understanding progress
to the classical mind was the idea of nature (physis or natura):
the nature of any object—animal, plant, a person, or even a
civilization—””was simply a pattern of growth and change that
was held to be inherent in it, natural to its very structure or
being.”” (MM, 39–40) The task of classical science was to identify
the nature or essence of an object and trace its development and
progress sequentially over a period of time. Thinkers like Plato,
Aristotle, Seneca, and other classical thinkers each wrote on
human development that occurred over several generations.13
(SC, 15–61; HP, 13–26)
Christian theologians and philosophers fused the classical
notion of nature with the Israelite conception of sacred history in
order to describe human events as something “”that could not have
been other than it actually was.”” (P, 239) In other words, God
directed human progress as it unfolded in history; or as Nisbet
wrote, “”All of the essential ideas involved in the philosophy of
progress—slow, gradual, and continuous advance through time
of all mankind, in a pattern of successively higher stages of
development, the whole process revealing, necessity, direction,
and purpose—are to be found in the Christian philosophy of
history.”” (P, 239) However, the nature of human history was not
in reference to the external events—a series of unintelligible and
therefore meaningless events—but to the spiritual development
of mankind. The Christian philosophy of history for Nisbet was
essentially Augustinian in its belief of temporal historical necessity
and ecumenical spiritual unity. (HP, 59–76) The concept of
progress was to be discovered not in the city of man but in the city
of God. In this sense, the concept of progress as a spiritual
experience of the divine available to all humans reached its
greatest refinement in the Christian philosophy of history.
The mistake of modern thinkers was to misplace the concept
of progress to the realm of historical necessity. Although the “”the
move from the Christian to the ‘modern’ concept of progress was
short and uncomplicated,”” this replacement took place sequentially
in the works of Turgot, Lessing, and Kant, where human
progress was not determined solely by God’s grace but also by
natural causes. (P, 240) The Enlightenment philosophers for
Nisbet argued that both God and nature—the former accessible
by faith, the latter by reason—provided humans the path towards
progress. In spite of permitting God’s existence, the Enlightenment
thinkers not only had redefined the divine as a distant watchmaker
deity, but they have allowed reason an equal, if not
superior, epistemological claim to knowledge in nature. This
source of knowledge, nature, did not refer to the essence of a
human being but to the external causes and relations of man’s
environment. Consequently, nature and reason were held to be
co-equal to God and faith as epistemological and metaphysical
realities. Progress no longer translated into man’s spiritual development
to the divine but also to his relation to the external world
of nature and its causes.
By the nineteenth century, the concept of progress had
degenerated into an article of popular faith with the divine
entirely disappeared. Social evolutionary theorists dominated the
age with their redefinition of progress as something completely
natural, directional, immanent, continuous, and necessary. (SC,
168–88) Progress solely resided in the realm of historical necessity
that was accessible only by reason, and more specifically,
scientific reason. With the introduction of the comparative
method, Western civilization became measured against its own
past as well as against other civilizations were evaluated to
determine the progress of human development. Unstated and
assumed was that contemporary Western civilization—alienated
individuals, a centralized state, an ideology of secularism—were
the criteria against which other past and present civilizations were
to be measured against. This assumption would be exposed and
somewhat dismantled in the twentieth century after two world
wars and the rise of postmodernism.
Nisbet himself doubted the assumptions of nineteenth-century
evolutionary theories: “”Change is not natural, not normal,
much less ubiquitous and constant. Fixity is. . . . If we look at
actual social behavior, in place and in time, we find over and over
that persistence in time is the far more common condition of
things.”” (SC, 270) Furthermore, change is not directional: “”Patterns,
rhythms, trends are inescapably subjective. There is no
inherent relation to the data. However persuasive a given ‘direction’
may be to our acquired interests or values, it has no
independent or objective validity.”” (SC, 285) Consequently,
theories that claim progress or directional change in the realm of
historical necessity were fundamentally flawed. According to
Nisbet, there was no inherent progress or direction in history
because events were in the state of continual flux. By contrast,
human nature was a constant. (SC, 298) If we resorted to the
classical understanding of nature as discovering the essential
aspect of human beings, we discover that progress occurred only
in sacred and not temporal history. The claims of social evolutionary
theorists therefore were misplaced not only metaphysically in
the realm of historical necessity but also epistemologically in the
denial of the divine.
In spite of its falsity, the concept of progress remained “”a
powerful intellectual force behind Western civilization’s spectacular
achievements”” that cemented people to the past, present,
and future. (P, 241) But the transformation of the concept has
created a condition of crisis in contemporary society: “”[societies]
are destroyed by all the forces which constitute their essence.””
The result was a society that “”steadily [is] losing the minimal
requirements for a society—such requirements being the very
opposite of the egoistic and hedonistic elements that dominate
Western culture today?”” (HP, 356) With the disappearance of the
spiritual dimensions of man’s existence, society can conceive of
progress only in temporal and material terms. This modern
conception of progress has become emptied of any transcending
significance for citizens and as a result can bind people together
only in a false ideology of individualism, secularism, and state.
From the social scientist’s perspective, the modern conception
of progress has no utility. The concept of progress was
originally born in the “”classical world, sustained by religion from
the third century on, and now threatens to die from the loss of
religious sustenance.”” (P, 242) Nonetheless, Nisbet believed that
recovery of the religious sustenance behind the concept of
progress was possible, for there was a “”faint, possibly illusory,
signs of the beginning of a religious renewal in Western Civilization,
notably in America.”” (HP, 356) If this renewal was possible,
then we were likely to regain “”a true culture in which the core is
a deep and wide sense of the sacred”” and “”the vital conditions of
progress itself and of faith in progress—past, present, and
future.”” (HP, 357) Progress in this sense was not a matter of
historical necessity but one that transcended human hedonistic
egoism for community and removed a utopian belief in politics as
a means of salvation.
#page#
The confidence in progress that bureaucrats proclaim in directing
historical change was undermined by the absence of a directional
law in the realm of historical necessity. History was a series
of discrete events rather than intelligible laws inherent in any
temporal and material process from which someone can uncover
and discern. As Nisbet wrote, change was contingent, episodic,
and variable. There were constants in human nature but they were
“”of little help in accounting for variables”” to explain historical
change. (SC, 298) The multiplicity of factors that caused historical
change were too numerous for the bureaucrat to capture and
manipulate for the state’s ends. Like progress, the notion of a
directional change in history as discovered and guided by an elite
was a faulty one at best and a destructive one at worst.
For Nisbet, the constancy in human nature—the nature or
essence of the person—was his ideas as forces in the realm of
historical necessity: “”everything vital in history reduces itself
ultimately to ideas, which are the motive forces . . . Above all, man
is what he thinks the transcending moral values are in his life and
in the lives of those around him.”” (TA, 233) Nisbet allowed for the
influence of social, economic, and political factors to influence
historical events, but he believed intellectual, moral, and ethical
ideas were paramount in the shaping of social community and
political sovereignty. In this sense, Nisbet was similar to the neoconservative
thinkers in their emphasis upon ideas as the moving
forces in history. However, Nisbet differed from the neoconservatives
in two important respects: 1) he recognized other
variables, such as economics, culture, and religion, played a vital
role in the shaping of events; and 2) he rejected any directional
sense of history or conception of progress that was strictly
temporal in nature. There was no cause, direction, or movement
in history for thinkers to discover, and any attempt to do so would
be futile. The only fundamental thing we can know with some
certainty was the constancy of human nature and the ideas that
they produce.
According to Nisbet, the two great traditions in Western
social and political thought were political monism and social
pluralism, with the former started by Plato and the latter by
Aristotle. Social pluralism made a clear distinction between the
state and society and was characterized by a “”relationship that
exists between the political state, whatever its form of government,
and the several institutions of the social sphere.”” (TA, 245–
46) The form of the government mattered less than its relationship
to intermediate institutions, for “”a government monarchial
or oligarchical in structure can be a free government if—as has
been the case many times in history—it respects the other
institutions of society and permits autonomies accordingly in the
social and economic spheres.”” (TA, 246) By contrast, political
monism was the preeminence of the state, so that “”[s]uch groups
as family, locality, neighborhood, church, and other autonomous
associations are almost uniformly reduced to their individual
atoms, made into unities dependent upon concession of existence
by the state, or in some other way significantly degraded.”” (TA,
245)
Although Plato was the first political monist in the West, it
was Hobbes and Rousseau who were the first modern representatives
of this tradition where “”the affirmation in each instance is
the state conceived as being, not force, not repression, but
justice, freedom, and tranquility for the individual.”” (SP, 10) The
social contract rather than natural or social associations was the
basis of political sovereignty: individuals would fulfill their rights
not in local groups or traditional associations but in the state. For
Hobbes, “”the greatest claim of the absolute State lay in its power
to create an environment for the individual’s pursuit of his natural
ends.”” (QC, 137–38) Rousseau went even further than Hobbes in
proclaiming that “”there is no morality, no freedom, no community
outside the structure of the State.”” (QC, 140) Whereas
Hobbes was content to tolerate individuals to pursue their own
ends within the state, Rousseau was the “”first of the modern
philosophers to see in the State a means of resolving the conflicts,
not merely among institutions, but within the individual himself.””
(QC, 140) The state for Rousseau was absolute, indivisible, and
omnipotent with its general will reconciling both social and
individual conflict through civil religion. (SP, 37–45) The individual
lived a free life as determined by the state.
In the tradition of modern social pluralism, with its emphasis
on local communal associations against the arbitrary and impersonal
power of the state, Nisbet cited the works of Burke, Acton,
Tocqueville, Lammenais, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France was given particular
attention by Nisbet as the father of modern social pluralism.
Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution was rooted in his
“”profound belief in the superiority of traditional society and its
component groups and associations, as well as what he regarded
as its inherent organic processes of change, over-centralized
political power.”” (SP, 53) It was the “”rationalist simplicity”” of the
French Revolution that Burke had feared because of its destructive
effect upon the intermediate institutions of traditional groups
and local associations. (SP, 56) Sentiments such as love and
loyalty were best cultivated in small groups rather than in a
“”national community.”” In fact, a genuine national community
could exist only when individuals were able to transcend their
local attachments for the greater good, or as Burke wrote, “”the
love of the whole depends upon the subordinate partiality.”” (PS,
58) But if there were no intermediate institutions in society, then
citizens would not have anything to sacrifice or transcend for the
national community. Paradoxically then, traditional groups and
local associations made possible a national community, because
they provided something from which citizens could transcend.
The other thinker that was given a preeminent place in the
modern social pluralist tradition by Nisbet was Tocqueville:
“”There is a clear and logical line of descent from Burke’s espousal
of traditional groups and associations, his belief in limits on all
forms of power, and his advocacy of traditional pluralism and of
decentralization to the fundamental principles in Tocqueville’s
classic Democracy in America . . . .”” (SP, 58) According to Nisbet,
Tocqueville’s central thesis was that alienation led modern society
from intermediate institutions to the state centralization so that
the power of modern democracy was rooted in public opinion.
(ST, 120) The solution to further concentration of state power
was the preservation of intermediate institutions and federalism:
“”Fundamental among the causes of continued freedom in Ameri
can democracy, Tocqueville shows us, is the American principle
of division of authority in society.”” (SP, 65) The division of
authority between the national and state governments—as well as
in intermediate institutions that served as a barrier against the
state—fragmented the state’s authority and power in society. (SP,
68) Tocqueville’s insights into the federal principle and intermediate
institutions as the key features to preserve liberty in American
democracy influenced Nisbet’s own work and methodology in
studying the United States.
Nisbet’s selection of the traditions of political monism and social
pluralism was part of his overall project of restoring sociology to
its classical foundations. Most historians of social thought have
regarded sociology “”as a logical and continuous outcome of the
ideas which had commanded the intellectual scene during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”” (FS, 157) To Nisbet, this
was an inaccurate characterization: sociology arose in direct
response to the French Revolution that sought to destroy society.
(FS, 159) The government destroyed the churches and guilds,
abolished familial and property rights, and declared education as
the sole function of the state. The destruction of society prompted
the discipline of sociology, with Burke, Comte, and others hoping
to rebuild society and its intermediate institutions. (FS, 161; CS,
172) Concepts such as “”social, tradition, custom, institution, folk,
community, organism, tissue, and collective”” were re-introduced
into intellectual life in the aftermath of the French Revolution and
became the foundation of the discipline of sociology. (C, 77)
Unfortunately for Nisbet, sociology usually adopted one of
two approaches to the study of intellectual history: it either have
analyzed individual thinkers or concentrated on schools of thought.
Both of these approaches contained serious flaws. The focus on
the individual thinkers’ ideas ignored the cultural, economic, and
political impact upon the thinker’s thought. Ideas consequently
“”are treated as extensions of shadows of single individuals rather
than as the distinguishable structures of meaning, perspective,
and allegiance that major ideas so plainly are in the history of
civilization.”” (ST, 3) Nevertheless, this approach was superior to
the second method, which concentrated on schools of thought.
The study of ideas in this approach made them irreducible givens
that resisted analysis. (ST, 4) That is, schools of thought were
abstractions of ideas that presented themselves as a systematic
account of reality, regardless of whether they actually corresponded
to that reality. These ideologies were a further removal
from reality that the sociologist was trying to penetrate.
Finding both approaches inadequate, Nisbet decided to study
“”unit-ideas”” where one began “”with neither the man nor the
system, but with the ideas which are elements of the system.”” (ST,
5) These unit-ideas had to be general but distinct, continuous yet
discrete, and provided a theoretical perspective to understand
social and political reality. By focusing on unit-ideas, the sociologist
can account for cultural, economical, political, and other
factors that influenced their formations while not making any of
these structural variables the primary explanatory cause. Unitideas
also were anchored in a civilizational reality, unlike schools
of thought that were abstracted from anything concrete and
therefore subject to speculative fantasies about the directional
nature of history. Rooted in unit-ideas, Nisbet’s sociology thus
provided a correction to the approaches that had focused either
on the individual thinker or schools of thought.
Some examples of unit-ideas were community, authority,
status, the sacred, and alienation. Following the Hegelian tradition,
Nisbet claimed these unit-ideas were created when an idea
and its “”conceptual opposite, to a kind of antithesis, from which
it derives much of its continuing meaning in the sociological
tradition”” came into conflict. (ST, 6) In the case of community,
the unit-idea not only referred to local communities but to
religious institutions, occupations, and the family. When compared
to its opposite—the state, with its impersonal institutions
and contractual obligations—the unit-idea of community became
crystallized in distinction and meaning.
Nisbet continued with his clarification of unit-ideas with
authority, status, and the scared. Authority was practiced in
intermediate institutions and legitimized by function, tradition,
and custom, while power was rational, centralized, and popular.
(ST, 107) Status was the individual’s position “”in the hierarchy of
prestige and influence that characterizes every community and
association,”” with its antithesis as class: a new hierarchy created
by the individualization and fragmentation of society. (ST, 6, 177)
Finally, the sacred referred “”to the totality of myth, ritual,
sacrament, dogma, and the mores in human behavior; to the
whole area of individual motivation and social organization that
transcends the utilitarian or rational and draws its vitality from
what Weber called charisma and Simmel piety.”” (ST, 221) Its
antithesis was the secular as characterized by utility or rationality.
Interesting, Nisbet did not create an opposite for alienation:
the sense of estrangement and rootless when one was cut off from
community. Rather, Nisbet called alienation the inversion of
progress, i.e., the forces that produce progress also create alienation.
(ST, 264–70) Emptied of any transcendental meaning, the
modern concept of progress can mean anything that humans want
to subscribe to it in the realm of historical necessity. As stated
before, usually the content furnished into the concept of modern
progress was the promise of national security or material prosperity,
which, in turn, required the state to centralize power at the
expense of intermediate institutions. Citizens must be alienated
from their local attachments and obligations in order to identify
with the “”national community”” and to serve its goals in the name
of progress. This particularly was true in times of war, when
citizens voluntarily alienated themselves from intermediate institutions
for national and progressive causes. The end result was an
atomized society led by a “”progressive”” state.
Unit-ideas most clearly emerged when there was a “”conflict
between two social orders,”” such as the “”feudal-traditional and
the democratic-capitalist,”” with thinkers like Tocqueville and
Weber writing about the “”tension between the values of political
liberalism and the values of a humanistic or cultured conserva337
tism, however reluctant this conservatism might be.”” (ST, 316;
317) The current problem confronting sociology was that the
theoretical paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
were still in place and consequently have become outdated and
overused. As Nisbet pointed out:
It thus becomes ever more difficult to squeeze creative juices out
of the classical antitheses, that, for a hundred years, have
provided theoretical structure for sociology. . . . It becomes ever
more difficult to extract new essence, new hypothesis, new
conclusion, from them. Distinctions become ever more tenuous,
examples ever more repetitive, vital subject matter ever more
elusive. (ST, 138)
What were required of sociology were new unit-ideas, which
only can emerge of out of imagination and intuition rather than
methodological innovations and research designs. (ST, 319)
The sociologist must be inspired by his creative and intellectual
impulses to direct his discipline away from scientism—the
belief that the scientific methodology provided the only source of
knowledge about reality. For Nisbet, sociology was dominated by
scientism, which explained its dependence upon outdated unitideas
to explain reality. According to Nisbet, not one unit-idea was
derived from scientific analysis: “”Without exception, each of
these ideals [unit-ideas] is the result of thought processes—
imagination, vision, intuition—that bear as much relation to the
artist as to the scientist.”” (ST, 18–19) The sociological unit-ideas
of the bourgeoisie and worker, the bureaucrat and intellectual
were a result of a creative act “”that is not different in nature from
what we have learned of the creative process in the arts.”” (SA, 9)
What sociologists needed to do today was to create new unit-ideas
that “”have a significant relation to the moral aspirations of an
age,”” such as the problems of individualism, urbanization, and
secularism. (CS, 168)
Nisbet was pessimistic about the prospects of sociology’s, and
the social sciences’ in general, future as a discipline. The inability
to generate new unit-ideas because of the predominance of
scientism in the social sciences made the their contributions to
society “”minimal when not actually counterproductive, and that
in so many of the projects of social reconstruction designed by
social scientists for government execution more harm than good
has been the result—as in the benignly intended but disastrous
‘wars’ against poverty, ethnic discrimination, poor housing, slums,
and crime.”” (HP, 347) Furthermore, the social sciences had
become politicized to such an extent that objectivity was difficult
to achieve. (P, 287) Given the influence of these two factors in the
social sciences, scientism and the politicization, Nisbet was not
hopeful about the social sciences being able to diagnose the
nature of society. The discipline of sociology had become corrupted
and outmoded in this age of ideology.
#page#
In its quest to create a national community, the state centralized
power at the expense of intermediate institutions with an ideology
of individualism, secularism, and progress. The introduction of
egalitarianism into society destroyed the established hierarchies
of traditional communities and fostered alienation among citizens
where they have no recourse to fulfill their communal longing
other than in the national state. The result was individualism
where people pursued private interests instead of public obligation,
leaving those tasks to intellectuals and bureaucrats. Not
conceiving of anything higher than the state, both the intellectual
and bureaucrat promoted secularism in order for the citizen to
find meaning and significance in the realm of historical necessity;
and this history had become redefined as progressive where the
state would provide its citizens security and prosperity in the
future.
The emergence of this ideology coincided with the state’s
centralization of power—a process that was accelerated in times
of war. The destruction of intermediate institutions and the
removal of transcendence from the public sphere allowed the
state to defined wars in moral and spiritual terms; and the
democratization of society enabled the state to mobilize all
resources of the population towards war, thereby making it a
mass, ideological movement. Rather than the exception, the
United States has been exemplar of these processes of democratization,
centralization, and ideological justification. With its
belief in exceptionalism and progress, the United States since
President Wilson has conceived of history as one of necessity that
inevitably will lead to liberal democracies and free-market economies.
The ideology of “”making the world safe for democracy””
contained a state-sanctioned moralism that enabled the United
States to justify its wars to its citizenry. Wars are presented to the
American public in ethical, moral, and sometimes even in spiritual
terms to rationalize the curtailment of civil liberties, the nationalization
of industries, or the monitoring of intermediate institutions.
In the name of national security, the state was permitted to
centralize its power; and with the promise of progress, the state
was able to ask its citizens for sacrifice and commitment to its
national cause. In the end, we are left with Tocqueville’s administrative
despotic state and Foucault’s “”bio-politics””: citizens are
guided, supervised, and directed by the state from their birth to
their death.
This ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress has
even penetrated into the American military establishment, with
its belief that bureaucracies some day will be able to guide and
direct human events with perfect informational certainty. The
p
