Nisbet was born in Los Angeles in 1913. He was raised with his three brothers and one sister[1] in the small California community of Maricopa,[2] where his father managed a lumber yard. His studies at University of California, Berkeley culminated in a Ph.D. in sociology in 1939. His thesis was supervised by Frederick J. Teggart. At Berkeley, "Nisbet found a powerful defense of intermediate institutions in the conservative thought of 19th-century Europe. Nisbet saw in thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville—then all but unknown in American scholarship—an argument on behalf of what he called 'conservative pluralism.'"[2] He joined the faculty there in 1939.[1]
Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, [1953] 1969), claimed that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows to combat the centralizing power of the nation-state. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called it "arguably the 20th century's most important work of conservative sociology."[5]
Nisbet began his career as a leftist but later confessed a conversion to a philosophical conservatism.[6] While he consistently described himself as a conservative, he also "famously defended abortion rights
and publicly attacked the foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan."[7]
He was a contributor to Chronicles. He was especially concerned with tracing the history and impact of the Idea of Progress.[8] He challenged conventional sociological theories about progress and modernity, insisting on the negative consequences of the loss of traditional forms of community, a process that he believed was greatly accelerated by World War I. According to British sociologist Daniel Chernilo, for Nisbet, "The sociological interest in the formation of modern society lies in whether and how it can re-invigorate forms of communal life and, if not, in understanding what will be the consequences of such failure." Nisbet, thus, "inverts what had been until then the mainstream proposition that society was more important, both historically and normatively, than community."[9] Chernilo also critically observed that Nisbet's "argument on the Great War [World War I] that marks the transition from community to society offers a one-sided view of the historical process as moving unequivocally towards a decaying condition."[10]
Bibliographyedit
Booksedit
1953. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom
1966. The Sociological Tradition
1968. Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays
1969. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development
1970. The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society
1971. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–1970
1976. Sociology as an Art Form
1973. The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought
^"Robert Alexander Nisbet". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Archived from the original on 2022-08-15. Retrieved 2022-08-15.
^"APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Archived from the original on 2022-08-15. Retrieved 2022-08-15.
^Douthat, Ross (March 15, 2014). "The Age of Individualism". New York Times. Archived from the original on April 21, 2016. Retrieved February 12, 2017.
Church, Mike, 2012, "Robert Nisbet and the Rise of the Machines," Archived 2013-06-27 at the Wayback MachineThe Imaginative Conservative.
Elliott, Winston, III, 2010, "War, Crisis and Centralization of Power" Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine, The Imaginative Conservative (blog).
Gordon, Daniel. "The Voice of History within Sociology: Robert Nisbet on Structure, Change, and Autonomy," Historical Reflections (2012) 38#1 pp. 43–63
Hill, Fred Donovan, 1978, "Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community," The University Bookman, Volume 18, Number 3.
Mancini, Matthew J. "Too Many Tocquevilles: The Fable of Tocqueville’s American Reception", Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2, April 2008, pp. 245–268.
McWilliams, Susan, Hometown Hero: Robert Nisbet’s conservatism of community against the state Archived 2011-08-28 at the Wayback Machine, The American Conservative (Feb. 1, 2010)
Nagel, Robert F., 2004, "States and Localities: A Comment on Robert Nisbet's Communitarianism," Publius, Vol. 34, No. 4.
Schrum, Ethan. The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Stone, Brad Lowell, 1998 (Spring), "A True Sociologist: Robert Nisbet", The Intercollegiate Review: 38–42.