I recently reviewed Robert Nisbet’s The Social Philosophers. In it, Nisbet traces the history of social philosophy through what he regards as its six major forms: military, political, religious, revolutionary, ecological, and pluralistic. The book was first published in 1973, but unfortunately, it was out of print for decades until the efforts of editor Luke Sheahan resulted in a new edition coming out this year. Here I would like to join the insights I gained from Nisbet’s book with a second, contrapuntal theme drawn from Michael Oakeshott. I will begin by summarizing Nisbet’s contribution.
The backdrop of Nisbet’s contemplation of the social philosophers is the kinship community. All of the earliest human communities were based upon kin relations and ruled by tradition, as interpreted by the elders. But this form of community did not produce social philosophers. It did not need to, because kinship communities are as natural to humans as herd communities are to gazelles.
However, after many millennia, there arose a rival to the kinship community: the military community, organized around the command of a single leader rather than a network of familial ties. And the existence of such a community was deadly for any kinship community that it confronted. As Nisbet puts it: “The kinship community is invariably defeated by the military community when the two come in confrontation.”
In fifth century B.C. Athens, the conflict between the values of the kinship community and those of the military community became acute. The tragic playwrights grappled with this theme repeatedly, Antigone being a notable example. But the greatest thinker dealing with this conflict was Plato. He attempted to resolve that conflict by depicting the perfect political community in The Republic. As Nisbet tells us, “Such was the power of [Plato’s] portrait of the political community that it has remained for some twenty-five hundred years the major inspiration of all other portraits of this form of community.”
As the Roman Empire declined, a new form of Western community arose in its wake, specifically oriented around the spiritual life: the religious community, represented first by the Christian enclaves within pagan society.
The next form Nisbet examines is the revolutionary community. He argues that this form of community was born with the French Revolution, which, as opposed to earlier slave and peasant revolts and palace coups, was not a mere rebellion, but an attempt to completely transform society. The revolutionary community shares much in common with the military community, such as a strict command structure and a focus on violence.
The “ecological community” begins in the west with Saint Benedict. The distinctive characteristics of this type were all there in the original Benedictine rule: respect for the “web of life,” cooperation, uncoerced social relations, and simplicity. This form is alive today, not only in monasteries, but in communes attempting to get “back to nature” and other intentional communities.
In response to the attempts of various bases for community to become the dominant or even exclusive basis, there has arisen what Nisbet calls the “plural community,” which attempts to give each type of community its proper role in social life. Nisbet identifies the beginnings of pluralist thinking in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s single-minded focus on the political community, and argues that tradition continued in the works of Burke, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and Weber, amongst others.
While one senses that Nisbet himself was “rooting for” the plural community, his book is chiefly descriptive rather than advocatory. It also does not go into any depth as to how the various forms of community should relate to one another in a pluralistic society. And here, I suggest, it is valuable to sound Nisbet’s ideas in the context of an essay by Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. There, he examines the relationship between what he calls different “modes” of human utterance. In doing so, he is continuing, after several decades, an inquiry he had begun in his first book, Experience and Its Modes. There, he had posited that we can experience the world through different lenses, or as he calls them, modes. There is, for instance, the lens of practical activity, the lens of science, and the lens of history. In this revisitation of the topic, he corrects an oversight in the earlier work by acknowledging that poetry (by which he means art in general) is another distinct mode.
As an example of how the different modes converse, he offers the comments of a pragmatic man viewing Owens Falls as a tremendous source of power for practical ends, as opposed to a poet who creates an image of the “moving waters” solely for the delight the image offers. And of course, a scientific engagement with the falls will search for, e.g., laws of turbulence, regardless of whether we can practically use them or if we find them delightful.
Furthermore, Oakeshott, after several decades of reflection, has decided that the best image for understanding the relationship of the modes is that of a conversation. And what is this conversation like?
The participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing.
In this conversation, the voices of the different modes “take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions.” Rather than being like a contest in which one mode must ultimately be selected the winner, or a voyage which must reach a predetermined destination or else be declared a failure, the conversation is instead “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.”
And it is worth noting that nothing in Oakeshott’s picture implies some egalitarian nonsense like, “Everyone’s voice is equally important.” No, some voices entered the conversation ignorant of the context and so should be educated, some tried to dominate it and so should be restrained, and some try to manipulate the conversation for their own self-interest and thus should be exposed.
What might be gained by viewing Nisbet’s different forms of community as being in a conversation, rather than in a competition? For one thing, the importance of each communal voice changes as the circumstances of the society encompassing them change, making it valuable for each of them to be heard even when they are not the lead voice.
For instance, no society without a military community can survive entering into conflict with a society that has one. So even pacifist ecological communities should recognize that, without some form of military community sheltering them, their survival is precarious indeed.
On the other hand, when society has been fractured by violent conflict among its members, the voice of the political community might need to become dominant, as it did with Hobbes, writing in the wake of a destructive civil war.
Or when society has become widely corrupt and decadent, as happened in the Roman Empire, it may be the religious community, such as the early Christians, that needs to take the lead in resisting such immorality.
The U.S. Constitution contains the sensible notion that the government of a society containing a diversity of religious voices should be neutral between them: the government shall not establish a religion. But a grave misstep occurred when the understanding of what this meant was distorted to erect “a wall of separation between church and state.” This idea was used to justify shutting religious voices out of the conversation altogether.
The ecological community strives to be in the world but not of it, so that it points towards a transcendent city that any real, human city can approach but never reach. Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option is a recent reminder of the value of such communities: there are circumstances in which it is appropriate for a “remnant” to withdraw from the society around them as much as possible.
The political community is often suspicious of ecological communities, since the political community wants everyone within its borders to participate in political life (even if only as the victim of a totalitarian regime). But in most cases, this suspicion is unfounded. The existence of such communities can expand the boundaries of what forms of life the people in a society conceive as possible. They’re like scouts, sent out to report back on how hospitable far-off life forms may prove to be.
Clearly, the most difficult community to bring into conversation with the others is the revolutionary one. But I suggest this is not impossible. If, as thinkers like Bosanquet and Gentile realized regarding the state, we understand that each of these types of communities not only has an external form, but also an internal representation in our own consciousness, then it is clear that the revolutionary community exists in all of us. After all, which of us has not had days when it seemed better to overthrow everything rather than to continue enduring some present injustice? But to be a participant in a conversation, this voice will have to become conversational, and in normal circumstances, abjure violence.
Of course, Karl Marx or Frantz Fanon would completely reject this taming of the revolutionary community, this bringing it into the conversation as a welcome member, so long as it behaves itself. They would tell us, if I may speak for them: “This rejection of violence as a means, and perhaps the only means, of revolutionary change serves to defend the current order against those who feel it ill serves them.”
The above is true. But in times when the social order is functioning moderately well, the pluralist will tell the revolutionaries: “We appreciate your keen interest in making our society better and find it probable that some of the things that upset you really should be addressed. But we also know that, this side of heaven, perfection is not obtainable, so we will never see a perfectly just earthly kingdom. Your revolution will not, therefore, set right every wrong and cure every ill. So while you have valid complaints, you have not convinced us that violently overturning the current order, however flawed it may be, is worth the loss of life and destruction entailed by revolution, only to find that, quite probably, we are saddled with a regime even worse than the one we overthrew.”
On the other hand, despite anyone’s best efforts, societies wander into trouble, sometimes so dire that a violent revolution may be necessary. And in those cases, it will be useful to have a revolutionary cadre ready to be called into action. And how could such a cadre know when it is appropriate to change tactics from protesting to taking up arms? It is when the other communal voices in that society stop urging it to restrain itself.
Besides the utility of including all of these voices in the conversation, there is also the danger, if some voices are not allowed free participation, of producing a one-sided social life, deformed like the body of a weightlifter who only strengthens his biceps and neglects his other muscles. As Oakeshott notes, “But for a conversation to be appropriated by one or two voices is an insidious vice because in the passage of time it takes on the appearance of a virtue.”
Finally, all of these communities must respect and recognize that they are founded upon the kinship community. Attempting to do away with kinship communities for humans is akin to attempting to do away with hives for bees. The great prophets of the Axial Age discovered that beyond the family and kin group, there are greater realities that we must respect, but it is still the family from which that higher orientation grows.
And of course, none of this is a panacea: Each of these communal voices has its own tendency towards excess. The military community is always tempted by its capacity for effective violence to achieve domination over as many other communities, whether they are inside or outside its current control, as possible. The political community has an ineradicable tendency to extend its rules into every aspect of citizens’ lives, in other words, towards totalitarianism. The religious community’s vice is its tendency towards dogmatism and fanaticism, in other words, claiming that it is the only voice worth attending to. The revolutionary community regularly goes overboard by failing to ask the question of whether overthrowing the existing order is actually likely to make things better. And the ecological community is always subject to the temptation to become absorbed in their communal practices and forget the fact that they are sheltered by forces outside the community.
Widespread endorsement of this conversational relationship of communities would not bring human conflict to a halt. Finding the appropriate level for a voice, and recognizing at which times it ought to take the lead in the conversation, are pragmatic judgments relying upon intimate knowledge of the actual circumstances of time and place. There is no formula that will eliminate the need for practical wisdom in deciding such matters, and thus we will often get those judgments wrong.
The times when all of these voices have been able to contribute to a composition with relative balance and harmony have been rare achievements. Nevertheless, that does not negate the value of keeping this image in mind as we navigate the sea of our current political circumstances.
Image Credit: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881)
