Robert Nisbet’s 1953 classic, The Quest for Community was published at a most opportune time. The postwar American landscape was changing dramatically. While pre-1940 America held a decent balance between a rural, small town culture and vibrant but livable big cities, a new world was coming of age in the 1950s. Artificial suburban housing tracts were being rapidly built all across the country. The G.I. Bill led to an explosion of both college students and eventually, college graduates, themselves soon to be members of a contented middle class. The American economy dominated the world scene in an unprecedented manner. Even blue-collar workers could now flee the cities and live in the suburbs. But could real communities exist in these new conditions? After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, a tragedy that took place in an affluent Denver suburb, many somber observers began to ask similar questions. Running alongside American mobility is Robert Nisbet’s insistence that a viable community life is more important than mere material things or individual fulfillment.

Prior to the publicity The Quest for Community received, Nisbet did not consider himself to be a conservative. He did not object, however, when critics pinned that label on him. Also in the 1950s, Nisbet read Russell Kirk’s opus, The Conservative Mind, an experience that convinced him that being on the Right was not such a bad place to do battle from.

Brad Lowell Stone’s critical study is the first full-length book on a man long recognized as one of the postwar Right’s premier thinkers. The subtitle, in particular, gets to the heart of Nisbet’s worldview. Some of the prose gets bogged down in academic jargon; otherwise, the book is a fine introduction to a sociologist who wrote as he pleased and cared little what the consequences of his opinions might be.

Although Nisbet never shied away from offending the gods of received wisdom, his own career, interestingly enough, never suffered for his reactionary views. He taught for many years at the University of California before ending his teaching days at Columbia University. In New York, he became friends with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, while also writing for National Review and eventually receiving the Rockford Institute’s Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. By the 1980s, Nisbet was probably the only conservative who was welcomed into the world of not only Kristol and Podhoretz, but also that of writers as different as William F. Buckley Jr. and Thomas Fleming. Perhaps his friendship with the neoconservatives and the Buckleyites spared him the fate suffered by numerous Old Rightists. Nisbet, to say the least, was no fan of an American empire. Yet, the man was a survivor.

Russell Kirk, like other traditionalists, tended to celebrate the organic nature of community life. Nisbet, on the other hand, was committed to exploring the political causes of social dislocation. Throughout his career, Nisbet criticized, often in strong language, modern-day libertarians. Unlike Frank S. Meyer, he saw little hope for a coalition between libertarians and traditionalists. Still, Nisbet had plenty in common with more responsible libertarians. Namely, he was a thorough critic of the modern state, its current day workings, and the men who helped to create the leviathan against which conservatives struggle.

Do conservatives really want “limited government”? If so, then according to Nisbet, they first ought to join the antiwar party. Agreeing with Randolph Bourne, war, Nisbet correctly noted, is “the health of the state.” War feeds the state, creating bureaucracies that are not repealed once the shooting stops. War also creates its own sense of community. The public, understandably enough, rallies around the flag in time of war, not realizing that they are also cheering on a huge expansion of the size and power of the centralized state. In recent American history, the main villain in Nisbet’s eyes was Woodrow Wilson. Standing for re-election in 1916, Wilson promised to keep America out of World War I. Once re-elected, Wilson could not resist the war drums. More than that, Wilson’s Washington created huge bureaucracies, most of which would serve as the model for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an experiment in social engineering that was once the sworn enemy of the American Right. In addition, Wilson’s wartime government came close to being a police state. Civil liberties faced their greatest threat in decades.

Consequences of state power included the rise of a judicial tyranny, most notably in the form of school busing orders, themselves, along with urban renewal projects, largely responsible for a new round of massive working-class and middle-class flight from fairly stable urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. Nisbet’s critique of the state extended into the realm of economics. Falling wages for male workers, the most significant economic phenomenon of the past 30 years, has also wreaked havoc on family life in America. Always willing to be politically incorrect, Nisbet blasted feminism as the most revolutionary—and destructive—force in our lifetime. Not only was the “ancient role of the sexes” torn asunder, male workers now faced stiff competition in the workforce, not to mention in undergraduate and graduate school admission contests. Stone lists the baby boom population and massive immigration as other factors for male wage decline. Nisbet, as far as I know, never addressed the immigration crisis. Robert Bellah, another important sociologist who was a contemporary of Nisbet, blamed, in part, the loss of manufacturing jobs for plunging wages. Nisbet disagreed, and the author sides with his subject. True, the American economy continued to create millions of jobs even during a time of deindustrialization, but the loss of good-paying jobs has played its own significant role in this age of wage decline. One does not have to be a statist to see that.

In all, Nisbet opted to take the long view of things, preferring the communitarian vision articulated by Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville over the state worship hinted at by Plato and embraced more fully by Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the fanatics who fueled the French Revolution. In fact, opposition to that bloody uprising is where, in Nisbet’s view, modern conservatism began. Like many traditionalists, Nisbet saw many splendid lessons to be learned from the Middle Ages, especially that era’s desire to place the health of the community above the whims of the individual. More specifically, such social inventions as the “manor, fief, guild, university [and] parish” appealed to Nisbet. He was not attempting to turn back the clock. As with any great scholar, he only sought what was useful from the past and how those lessons could be applied to the present.

Nisbet did not offer much in the way of policy prescriptions for the nation’s social ills. He did, however, see cause for optimism in the American people’s increasing disbelief that mere politics could save their country. For Nisbet, this was complimented by the hope that a religious revival might yet sweep the Western world, with America as the most Christian of the Western nations, leading the way. The twentieth century was a time when the state, in all its bloody excesses, triumphed. Will the new century see the return of an older, more modest faith? Time will tell if Nisbet’s cautious optimism was warranted. In the meantime, thanks to this book, Nisbet’s popularity among younger conservatives should continue to grow.  
__________________________________________