Darrell Falconburg
In his analysis of alienation in the modern world, Robert Nisbet recognized an important truth about the human person, which makes “The Quest for Community” timely even today: The individual cannot be understood except in relationship to other individuals in time and space. The abstract, autonomous individual does not exist nor can he ever exist.
When American sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote The Quest for Community in 1953, it was a success. The book quickly made Nisbet an icon of the conservative movement, and even in the year 2020, thinking conservatives and even libertarians consider this work a classic.
The main thesis of The Quest for Community is that the rise of individualism in the modern world was paralleled by the rise of unprecedented statism. Specifically, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it was the goal of modern man to free himself from the shackles of “intermediate institutions”—such as parishes, monasteries, manors, villages, guilds, families, and other local bonds. But the consequences of this freedom from intermediate institutions was devastating. Alone and stripped from virtually all sources of human community, man was compelled to join the only community still available: the mythical “national community” offered by the central state.
It was shocking to many observers in the early twentieth century that the liberation of the individual had, in the end, coincided with the bloodiest and most brutal decades in the history of mankind. To be sure, the individual was freed from the shackles of traditional intermediate institutions, but all he got instead was the shackles of work camps, gulags, and atomic bombs. Take your pick, I guess.
I first encountered Robert Nisbet when I was an undergraduate and, upon learning about him, quickly picked up a copy of his conservative classic from my college library. I was fascinated by his central thesis about the two-fold rise of individualism and the central state in the modern world. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/09/revisiting-robert-nisbet-conservative-classic-darrell-falconburg.html