Robert Nisbet

Conservative sociologists are as rare as hen’s teeth. I ought to know—being one of them. Robert Nisbet is probably the best known example of one. Like conservatives generally, he was appalled by the gradual growth of State power over the last century and pointed out how the State had supplanted and destroyed local community-based organizations and ways of doing things. And I agree that a lot of that did happen. As Steven Chapman, put it:-

“Could it be said that it is precisely the rise of the State - i.e. Statism - that has led to the erosion of community/society? Think of it this way: a community or society is, traditionally, an informal thing, depending for its existence on goodwill and mutual dependence among a group of people, however large or small. In a traditional society, everyone needs to stay on pretty good terms with their neighbour because, after all, you never know when you’re going to need him/her. Then the State comes along, and tells you that, when the going gets tough, you can rely on it to get by. This new state of affairs relieves you of the ‘burden’ of maintaining the high degree of goodwill and mutual self-interest which maintains a community/society, and furthermore, because the state is a system rather than a person, no expenditure of goodwill on your part is necessary to get what the State is offering. All you need to do is fill out the relevant forms and provide the relevant supporting documentation to prove that you’re entitled to the State’s goodies.”

But I think it is sheer romanticism to say that it could all have been avoided. I think the whole trend of history is towards de-localization of almost everything. Globalization of world trade is the clearest case in point. Division and specialization of labour has become more and more pronounced as time goes by and is part of the essence of modernity. And division of labour means ever larger and more complex organizations (businesses and factories) to make that specialization work. And, after that, large and complex networks of people to distribute the fruits of that specialized labour are needed. Doing everything locally is as obsolete as the spinning wheel. So big, complex organizations have inevitably replaced small, local organizations. So the State was just one of the things that destroyed localism and community.

I cannot see that we will ever get the same sort of community back under any circumstances but we are also forming new communities all the time. We may no longer live in villages but, for many people, those they work with are an important community and most of us are part of various communities connected with our leisure activities. So I think we will always have about as much community as we want.

Large, complex organizations do not have to be part of the State, however. And the State is in fact very bad at running large, complex organizations. So modernity may have destroyed the old communities and replaced them with new ones but the role of the State in that process was certainly unnecessary and will hopefully yet be at least in part ridiculed out of existence.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at 10:06 PM in Social Sciences
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Comments:

Posted by john on May 17, 2005, 11:29 PM | #

There is something bizarre about the one-sidedness of Mr. Chapman and other libertarian-leaning people’s claim that the state is solely or mainly responsible for the “erosion of community/society”. Supposedly, the state, by providing something of a safety net, “relieves you of the ‘burden’ of maintaining the high degree of goodwill and mutual self-interest which maintains a community/society”. Why it is that, for example, social security or medicare have this destructive effect, while health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, private pension plans, stock portfolios, etc, etc do not is a mystery to me. The reality is that the market is far more effective at replacing the traditional community and its functions than is the state. Free market zealots are prevented from seeing this rather obvious fact by the heavy ideological blinders they refuse to remove.

Posted by Andrew L on May 18, 2005, 01:48 AM | #

There is a very important point, How did our parent, and their parents etc , cope, they survived thank you very much, and made us stronger, the State, in all aspects is making people dependant on it, untill the State collapses, then people have absolutly nothing, no Friends, Family , etc,Only some braindead burocrat Tripping on some Utopian Ideological tangent fit for the mental Institution, The state is your friend, Well unless you have tryed to communicate with a Beurocrat, then you might have a second thought. Yep Stuff the State, People power, more realistic social patterns. Just Imagine this, where will the population be if we had a Great depression, my parents survived, I will have a chance, but what about the state dependant, Druggoes and all. Good by, Instant polulation culling.They would have absolutly no Idea how to survive.

Posted by ben tillman on May 18, 2005, 11:55 AM | #

JR—

I recently completed Nisbet’s “The Quest for Community” and was very impressed. A thought-provoking and insightful book indeed.

Posted by ben tillman on May 18, 2005, 12:08 PM | #

The only problems with the claim are (1) it igores the fact that the cause is bidirectional; the growth of the state and the disintegration of the community each cause and are caused by the other in an unfortunate feedback loop, and (2) it fails to identify the underlying cause or causes that set this process in motion.

Nisbet’s observation that individualism and the state go hand in hand is well supported by his discussion of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

Of course, there are other ways of approaching the problem, but ultimately one must conclude that where there is a state there can be no community. When one understands the issue fully, one sees that this is a tautology. The thing that makes a community out of a population—an enforceable moral code—is *by definition* absent from a society subjected to a state. Nor is this libertarian proof by definition. The definition we refer to is not libertarian but Weberian.

Posted by John S Bolton on May 18, 2005, 05:08 PM | #

The real question, though ought to be whether aggression may legitimately be used to break up community of values, and natural communities, in order to have an inclusive statist society. Until the 1940’s, the US gov’t enforced racial and religious covenants on real estate transactions. Did private parties use aggression to establish such communities, or did the government, by aggression nullify those contracts? If this distinction is glossed over, the moral crux of the matter is obscured. Obfuscating the aggression involved, plays into the policy which would justify all manner of tyranny, by saying we can make minorities feel better about themselves. There is nothing about modern technology which drives this process on. On the contrary, it was the development of automotive and other transport technology on a mass scale, which allowed for the covenanted developments to grow at an awesome pace. Today we have also government schools’ propaganda working furiously against any such tendencies like the contractually exclusionary communities regrowth.

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