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Web End = Soc (2015) 52:335343DOI 10.1007/s12115-015-9909-z
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Web End = SYMPOSIUM: THE LEGACY OF ROBERT NISBET
Robert Nisbet and the Present Age
Paul Gottfried1
Published online: 1 July 2015# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Among well-known sociologists, Robert Nisbet was almost unique in considering himself a conservative. He defined this orientation not in terms of conventional American partisan affiliation but as a sociological and anthropological perspective. Nisbet viewed human relations as requiring organic relations, which he assumed to be hierarchical and communally determined. Such relations seemed to Nisbet natural and even beneficial; and his lifelong interest in nineteenth-century social theory and his efforts to locate organicist positions among social thinkers of the Left, especially Emile Durkheim, can be attributed to an attempt to substantiate his understanding of basic human relations. Nisbet also significantly viewed contemporary America as departing rapidly and perhaps irreversibly from what he considered to be a good society. This concern pervades his studies of social theory; and it is possible to interpret his emphasis on the conservative origins of sociology and his attack on leveling public administration from the 1950s onward as related reference points. Against the social disintegration and social engineering that he already criticizes in his early work The Quest for Community, Nisbet (1990) poses his vision of personal authority and communal hierarchy. This vision is present in Nisbets writings, from his early studies of French counterrevolutionary thinkers through his final assaults on America in the present age.
Keywords The sociological tradition . Twilight of authority . Canons of conservatism . Structural functionalism . Organic solidarity . The present age
A German encyclopedia of conservatism (Von Schrenk-Notzing 1996: 397398) begins its entry for Robert Alexander Nisbet by noting that he was a conservative sociologist. For American academics such a characterization may seem strange and even oxymoronic, since in the US and most everywhere else in the Western world today, sociology as a discipline is dominated by the Left. This ideological association applies not only to the vast majority of academic sociologists but also to famous sociologists who were Nisbets contemporaries. Talcott Parsons,...