[analphilosopher] Keith Burgess-Jackson: Robert G. Perrin on Robert Nisbet (1913-1996)

[analphilosopher at lists.powerblogs.com]

Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson:
Robert G. Perrin on Robert Nisbet (1913-1996)
http://www.analphilosopher.com/posts/1128387956.shtml


   Throughout his career, Nisbet analyzed the excesses and evils of the
   modern state in ways that caught the attention of thinkers across the
   political spectrum. Indeed, one authority said that Nisbet was =E2so
   resolutely unfashionable that he regularly came back into fashion.=E2
   Nisbet argues that the troubles of modernity stem from a head-to-head
   conflict between the values of tradition (for example, authority,
   hierarchy, community, and the sacred) and those of revolt (for
   example, rationalist conceptions of power, mandated equality,
   individualism, and secularism). In his 1953 classic, The Quest for
   Community (from a manuscript rejected by three publishers), Nisbet
   warns that the greatest social and political problem of our time is
   the deterioration of =E2intermediate association=E2 and, pari passu, the
   growth and consolidation of a goliath state, the fingers of which
   touch and direct every man. Put differently, modern history has swept
   away the hoary communities of kin, region, and faith, and into the
   vacuum has come the total state.

   (Robert G. Perrin, =E2Robert Alexander Nisbet,=E2 Proceedings of the
   American Philosophical Society 143 [December 1999]: 695-710, at 699
   [italics in original; citations omitted])