Seattle, WA Robert Nisbet’s 1953 book The Quest for Community has rightfully achieved that rare and estimable status of “classic.”     What Nisbet saw more clearly than most of his contemporaries  – or ours – is that one of the deepest flaws of the modern era was its hostility to the reality of groups.  Modern liberalism (developed, among others by Thomas Hobbes, and later John Locke – and, at its root, Nisbet argued, in developments of Protestant theology) was broadly conceived in the backdrop of a hostility to organizations, institutions, communities and groups by which people defined their fundamental identities.   In the opening section of his book he describes the result of developments in the history of political thought to explain the condition in which we now reside:  shaped now by a worldview that regards all “intermediary” or “mediating” associations and communities as mere artifice and even as impositions upon our natural individual freedom (such as that condition described by Hobbes and Locke), modern humanity is nevertheless left with a deep longing and even void.

As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being.  Shorn of the deepest ties to (extended) family, place, community, region, religion, and culture – and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy – we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man – the State.  Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities – shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man sought belonging through distant and abstract State entities.  In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious belonging, now in the Church of the State itself.  Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation.  It would provide for our wants and ; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and incomplete allegiance to any other intermediary entity.  To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted.  Thus Nisbet concludes – following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville:  ”It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening  of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”

Nisbet understood that a radical disjuncture had been introduced by modern theories of “social belonging” that seemed to resemble some aspects of older Aristotelianism, but which in fact were fundamentally distinct.   Aristotle, and Aristotelians like Aquinas, insisted that such any conception of a good and flourishing human community required a basis in familiarity with a particular people and one that had continuity over time.  Theirs was an argument about human scale:   our ability to comprehend a common good, and our willingness to act on its behalf – to feel a sense of obligation and indebtedness to our inheritance from the past and a sense of duty born of gratitude toward the future – requires a fairly intimate scale, in which we can have some sensory connection of our actions upon others and theirs upon us, and a setting in which memory plays a large role.  Such a community has an enlarged sense of humanity’s temporal dimension, one that expands beyond merely one lifetime instead to include a strong sense of generational gratitude and obligation.  Only in such a setting can we intuitively understand that without our forbears, we would not have achieved our own humanity, and thus that we are obligated to give as good as possible to future generations.

By contrast, Nisbet noted, achievement of any such national – or, increasingly, supra-national or even global “community” – is “unnatural” to us.  Exceeding the capacities of our senses or the reality of actual experience or memory, it was expected by some of the key philosophers discussed by Nisbet – such as Rousseau or Marx – that what was needful – and thus to be expected – was a change in human nature, specificially, an enlargement of our consciousness.  To put it in Marxist terms, what was needed was our intuitive knowledge of our “species being,” our immediate sense of our mutual obligation to every and all human beings, regardless of limits of space and time.  However, thinkers like Rousseau and Marx recognized that humans are not so apt to have such equal regard for all humans, but in fact prefer some humans over all humans.  Thus, Marx argued, the elimination of family, church, and even nation was a prerequisite for the achievement of this “cosmic consciousness.”  Before our automatic and instinctual love of all humans could be realized, the power of a centralized authority was needed to eliminate all partial loyalties that otherwise stood in the way of the achievement of such universal identification.  The love of all required first the enlargement of the State and its active elimination of partial loyalties.  First we would be forcefully separated – rendered into monistic individuals – then we would be universally united.  It’s fairly easy to see the radical difference between ancient Aristotelian understandings of common good from the abstract and incorporeal expressions of modern liberalism.

We should also be clear about the development that Nisbet describes:  the conceptual and political individualism that originated in the early-modern liberal thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke precedes and lends itself to the Statist and collectivist liberalism of Rousseau and Marx.  It’s due to the very alienation and longing for more intimate and constitutive forms of community that makes the denizens of individualist liberal societies susceptible to the temptation of belonging that is proffered by a collectivizing State.  Here Nisbet quite radically confronts one of the deepest assumptions not only of most modern people, but in particular an article of faith among conservatives:  he argues that the very form of individualistic liberalism – derived from the likes of John Locke and to a degree enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitutional order – is a necessary and even inevitable precursor to radical forms of modern Statism.  Far from being its opposite – as is commonly held to be the case –  the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke – by attacking and weakening the intermediary ties of community, church, and even family – establishes the conditions for centralization and State-sponsored collectivism.

Nisbet explains why America has better (though certainly imperfectly) withstood the tendency to Statism and collectivism:  namely, the residual strength of a pre-liberal inheritance.  He notes that under the liberal social and economic order, that pre-modern inheritance provided a counterweight, but was ultimately subject to demolition.  “First, the nucleated village, and the landed estate underwent destruction.  For a long time, however, the family, local community, tangible property, and class remained as powerful, though external, supports of the economic system which the rationalists saw merely as the outcome of man’s fixed instincts and reason.  But, in more recent decades …, even these associations have become steadily weaker as centers of security and allegiance.  Modern rationalization and impersonalization of the [social and] economic world are but the other side of the process which [one author] called the ‘decline of custom’ and which we may see as the dislocation of certain types of social membership.”

Nisbet recognized that then-contemporary trends ran against the preservation or renewal of those partial inheritances from a pre-modern era:  modern trajectories suggested that it would be increasingly difficult to defend pre- or non-liberal institutions such as families, churches, communities, and the like, from the universal solvent of philosophical liberalism.  Where possible, he argued, there was a need to fortify those inheritances where they persisted, or, if necessary, to refurbish them anew where they were too fully attenuated.  While he called for strenuous defenses of such inheritances in a number of areas of life, there are three areas of concern in particular that, it seems to me, were deeply prescient and remain profoundly pressing.

(For the second half, click on “Page 2″, below)

First, Nisbet called for “the revival of localism.”  Perhaps especially in a nation as large as America, the spirit of localism was a defining feature for much of the nation’s history, a feature that had been noted and praised in the early 19^th-century by Alexis de Tocqueville as an essential feature of democracy’s success and vibrancy.  Yet, given the logic of modern liberalism, a deep hostility toward local identification that interfered with complete identification with what John Dewey called “The Great Community” of the nation informed much of progressive opinion during the 20^th century.  Nisbet noted that progressives of various sorts had worked for decades in portraying a more local-based form of community as stifling, narrowing and unfulfilling.  – “The nation, the centralized nation freed of local regional encrustations, seemed to an ever larger extent  the true repository of the spirit of progress.  Suddenly, the local community became the symbol of reaction, dullness, mediocrity, and oppression of the mind…. [e.g., Babbitt, Main St., Winesburg, Ohio).”   Nisbet observed that fashionable portrayals of the recidivism of local life combined with enlightened arguments of the nation’s leading experts who urged the desirability, efficiency, and opportunities of greater national identification.  It’s instructive to recall that it was a socialist, after all, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance (sans the phrase “Under God”), in keeping with the ambition on the Left that our first and only allegiance should be to ever more comprehensive “communities” at the expense of partial or local attachments.  Of course, the logic behind this call to identify with ever-larger and more abstract “communities” necessarily means that eventually the nation itself will be understood to be too partial, and why on the Left today there are calls to move beyond narrowing allegiance to the nation and instead identify with a post-national global community.  What’s also instructive about Nisbet’s examination of this logic is it throws into relief how far the Right has ceded ground on this issue, combating the calls to “globalism” instead with urgent defenses of “national” identification and being more apt to defend the Pledge of Allegiance than to find its origins worrisome.  Conservatism is doubtless destined to playing defense against a moving target, but Nisbet helps to remind us how much ground has been ceded in the contemporary stances of conservatives who are more apt to be ardent nationalists than ardent localists.

Nisbet helps us see clearly that, as a response to contemporary calls for identification with globalism, a defense of the legitimacy of the nation-state is necessary.  However, such a defense is not sufficient, and indeed, absent a stronger defense of local attachments, in fact ultimately and ironically undermines the deepest preconditions of life at the heart of the conservative understanding of the flourishing human life.  Nisbet presciently argues that it is not sufficient to defend “family values” in the absence of a deep concern about the immediately surrounding conditions in which families exist, is ultimately to defend an organism without its necessary attendant ecology.  Thus Nisbet wrote (with amazing prescience), “our present crisis lies in the fact that whereas the small traditional associations, founded upon kinship, faith, or locality, are still expected to communicate to individuals the principal moral ends and psychological  gratifications of society, they have manifestly become detached from positions of functional relevance to the larger economic and political decisions of our society.  Family, local community, church and the whole network of informal interpersonal institutions have ceased to play a determining role  in our institutional systems of mutual aid, welfare, education, recreation, and economic production and distribution.”  Absent a rich and interconnected set of mutually reinforcing local institutions and practices that supports the “work” of family, and are in turn supported by families, then family becomes untethered and increasingly irrelevant.  With the decline of strong ties of locality, Nisbet’s analysis fully predicts the decline of family, or its replacement by easy-going relationships that reflect a dominant ethic of mobility, individual self-expression and detachment.  While conservatives have been vocal in a defense of “family values,” they have been far less successful – one is even tempted to say even negligent – in defending the moral ecology in which good families thrive.

One of the main reasons for this implicates the second area of Nisbet’s concerns, namely, the Economy.  At base, Nisbet holds, a good economy exists for the sake of supporting and maintaining a diversity of local communities.  It exists to serve society – not vice versa.  A market comes into being inside the city walls or town limits, not vice-versa.  The basic presuppositions of modern economic theory – premised on the idea that economic decision-making is undertaken to increase individual profit and liberty, and undergirds a society of mobility and efficiency  – contradicts the central understanding of community as a place of continuity, stability, order, and interpersonal identification.  Modern economic demands of comparative advantage, mobility, efficiency and profit maximization result in a set of practices that undermine the existence of communities that, arguably, economic life was originally created to serve.  Instead of serving the sustenance of those institutions, the demands of modern economic life undermine or eviscerate their existence.   Human goods come to defined in almost exclusively economic and materialist terms, leading to an abandonment of informal and legal efforts to promote those social conditions in which families and communities flourish.    Among other things, local businesses and institutions are displaced by industries that can offer discounts based on economies of scale, but which have no fundamental investment in the places from which they siphon money and to which they return little to nothing of enduring social value.

Nisbet perceptively argued that the very success of free-market capitalism rested upon a widespread and diverse set of local institutions and practices that the economic system not only did not create, but, over time, which it actively undermined.  We can see that fact in a microcosm by observing the way in which the current financial crisis was in part precipitated by divorcing financial transactions from the places where they took place.  By “upstreaming” mortgages out of the communities in which loans were made, lenders were divorced from accountability and absolved from the consequences of those loans, just as those taking loans felt no compunction or hesitation in thinking about their responsibilities and ability to repay, and later had no moral compunction in “walking away.”  Throughout the system it was increasingly believed that what was being purchased was a financial asset, not a home in a community.  By generating high degrees of abstraction and separation, the modern economic system actively obfuscates our economic actions from consequences, and origins from destinations.  It generates massive ignorance about our daily economic life, undermining any sense that what we purchase and sell in any way contributes to the good life and continuity of our communities.

Nisbet observed not only was the logic of free-market capitalism undermining local communities and their constitutive associational life, but that in the end its logic would end up undermining free-market capitalism itself.  Presciently he wrote, “Ultimately, human institutions depend for their preservation on the strength of the allegiances which such institutions create in human beings.  To divorce economic ends from the contexts of social association within which allegiance to these ends can be nourished is fatal….  Economic freedom cannot rest upon moral atomism or upon large-scale impersonalities.  It never has.  Economic freedom has prospered, and continues to prosper, only in areas and spheres where it has been joined to a flourishing associational life.”

Most stunningly, Nisbet recognized that the temptations proffered by imperialistic tendencies toward atomism and the destruction of associational life within free-market capitalism would culminate not in perfect liberation of humans, but profound bondage.  Again, I quote:  “But to weaken, whether from political or individualistic motives, the social structures of family, local community, labor union, cooperative, or industrial community, is to convert a culture into an atomized mass.  Such a mass will have neither the will, nor the incentive, nor the ability to combat tendencies toward political collectivism.  The transition from free capitalism to forced collectivism is easy and will hardly be noticed when a population has lost the sense of social and moral participation in the former.  Everything that separates the individual from this sense of participation pushes him inevitably in the direction of an iron collectivism, which will make a new kind of participation both possible and mandatory.”

Here again, we see how far contemporary conservatism has departed from a necessary defense of local and associational life in response to positions taken by the Left.  Against the specter of Soviet communism and creeping socialism, American conservatives became ardent proponents of free-market capitalism – understandably in that context – but in the process, lost sight of the more fundamental and necessary context in which any such free market system must exist in order to serve the goods of human community, rather than to destroy them.  In urging free-market values shorn of these more fundamental concerns and ends, modern conservatism ironically contributed to its own undermining and contemporary defeat.  Losing sight of the fundamental nature of society that is required in the conservative vision of human life in its passionate response to liberalism, modern conservatism ended up serving as a great if unintentional contributor to the advance of modern liberalism.

Lastly…both of these conditions (the destruction of localism and the destructive expansion of the logic of free-market capitalism) have been served by the modern educational system – particularly the universities.  And this has been the case not so much in spite of opposition by conservatives, but with their active support.  The modern university system has arisen with the consent of those on the Right and Left alike, particularly in its guise as the modern research university aimed toward the end of “creating knowledge” and providing educations that allow our students to “succeed” and to “solve problems.”  Both have actively assented to a national, and increasingly international educational system that becomes annually more homogenous and standardized (This is just as true of supposedly “conservative” administrations, one of which gave us “No Child Left Behind” and Margaret Spellings).  Nisbet saw these developments in their earliest stages, and lamented the loss of variety and diversity of the nation’s many institutions that derived from their origins and characters as primarily local (and one could add, religious) institutions and thus as defenders and conservators of particular ways of life and particular values.  ”The situation is hardly different in the university.  It would be difficult to list accurately all the once-small, once-local colleges and schools which, after WWII, were swept into large, unified, centralized systems of university administration in the various states, all in the name of educational progress and efficiency.”

Students and parents alike now largely view a college education as a necessary credentialing process, acting increasingly like consumers of a product and demanding, for high dollars spent, high grades dispensed.  Faculty increasingly see their primary duty as research and publishing their findings which will be read by less than a handful of people.  Trained at the small number of increasingly identical Ph.D. granting institutions, future faculty are actively oriented to view their career as driven by their success in research; that teaching is a secondary activity; and that the aim is to put oneself into a position always to be moving to a better, more prestigious institution.  The idea of inculcating or encouraging a sense of institutional or local loyalty, and measuring one’s success by how deeply one’s roots are settled at an institution in a particular place, and how well one’s teaching helps advance the cultural and even religious commitments of a college, does not come into the picture.  As a result – even as the word “diversity” is on every academic’s lips these days – there is a rush among our rich patchwork of liberal arts colleges to be completely identical, beginning earlier last century in their rush to disaffiliate from the religious traditions in which they had been founded, and more recently in the widespread change their name from “College” to “University” (in order to signal their seriousness as a research institution – and, that they are no longer a “collegium,” (a word that means “community” or “association of colleagues.”).

Let me conclude:  what Robert Nisbet teaches conservatives today is a valuable lesson about the inherent dangers of conservatism.  Conservatism was born in early-modern times as a reaction to the radicalism of political ideology.  It was reactive, and in that sense defined itself in reference to liberalism.  In modern American history – in reaction to the radicalism of the Left on the world stage, particularly given the threat of Communism – American conservatism reacted by occupying space that had recently been vacated by the Left.  In responding to calls for global citizenship, conservatism defended the nation-state – while losing sight of a deeper allegiance to localities.  In responding to the threat of economic socialism, conservatism defended the free market – while losing sight of a deeper allegiance to the associational life that an economy was brought into being to sustain and preserve.  In responding to the dogmatic “multiculturalism” on college campuses, conservatism defended a form of rationalist universalism that contributed to the deracination and homogenization of our colleges – while losing sight of a defensible form of true diversity, a diversity of places, localities, and actual cultures.  Nisbet, finally, is an invaluable teacher for today’s conservatives because he teaches us that, more than a simple reaction against, conservatism must always be for something, and that something must be finally more than merely “the quest for community,” but the reality and flourishing of community itself.

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