Robert A. Nisbet

"The Quest for Community stands among the most important social critiques ever written. Robert Nisbet's study explores how individualism and statism have flourished while the primary sources of human community--the family, neighborhoods, the church, and voluntary organizations--have grown weaker. First published in 1953, this timeless work is a seminal contribution to the understanding of the spiritual and intellectual crisis of Western society."--Back cover.

A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

The Quest for Community

The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern Society. --

A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

Sosyolojik Düşünce Geleneği

Robert King Merton

Contemporary Social Problems

International scholars probe the development of sociological analyses in examinations of major thinkers since the eighteenth century and critical studies of theories including conservatism, positivism, and structuralism

History Sociologicl Analysis

We had thought, or our forefathers had, that modern liberal democracy would be spared the kind of erosion and decay that both Plato and Aristotle declared endemic in all forms of state. Now we are not so sure.” So wrote Robert Nisbet in the first edition of Twilight of Authority, published by Oxford University Press in 1975, shortly after the resignation of President Richard Nixon revealed what Nisbet called “only the most extreme and corrupt manifestation of a democratic royalism that has roots in several preceding administrations.” Nisbet argues that the political community in the West has broken down after two centuries of ascendancy. He believes that the West has entered “a twilight age” that will be characterized by political and cultural crises similar to those that preceded the fall of Rome. He foresees the displacement of traditional, liberal society by centralized, collectivized power—what he terms “the war society,” driven by the rising power and expense of a hugely scaled military. “The centralization, and, increasingly, individualization of power is matched in the social and cultural spheres by a combined hedonism and egalitarianism, each in its own way a reflection of the destructive impact of power on the hierarchy that is native to the social bond,” he writes. Nisbet offers no prophecy of inevitable decli≠ rather, he means to call attention to “the problem of finding the means of generating a social order within which the individual can live and derive a spirit of initiative.” Robert Nisbet (1913–1996) was renowned worldwide for his scholarship in the history and philosophy of social and political thought. He taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, Smith College, and the University of Bologna, and was the author of several major works, including Social Change and History and The Quest for Community. Robert G. Perrin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Twilight of Authority

This is one of the most important books ever published about the American university. Robert Nisbet accuses universities of having betrayed themselves. Over the centuries they earned the respect of society by attempting to remain faithful to what he terms "the academic dogma," the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The measure of a university's greatness and of the stature of an individual scholar was determined not by the immediate usefulness of the work done, but by how much it contributed to scholarship, learning, and teaching. American universities abandoned this ideal, Nisbet charges, after World War II, welcoming onto their campuses academic entrepreneurs engaged in the "higher capitalism," the highly profitable sale of knowledge. This "reformation," says Nisbet, has resulted in the greatest change in the structure and values of the university that has occurred since their founding as guilds in the Middle Ages. And it may be responsible, for reasons he spells out in convincing detail, for their eventual demise as centers of learning. In her introduction, Gertrude Himmelfarb pays tribute to Robert Nisbet for his prescience in analyzing the reformation of the university in the postwar period. A second reformation, she says, has further undermined the academic dogma, first by applying the principles of affirmative action and multiculturalism to the curriculum as well as to student admissions and faculty hiring, and then by "deconstructing" the disciplines, thus subverting the ideas of truth, reason, and objectivity. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma is even more pertinent today than when it was first published a quarter of a century ago. For those concerned with the integrity of the university and of intellectual life, Robert Nisbet has once again proved himself a prophet and a mentor.

Robert A. Nisbet

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