Robert Nisbet is best known for his books The Quest for Community and The Twilight of Authority. Luke Sheahan joins the podcast to discuss a new edition of Nisbet’s lesser-known but perhaps most important book The Social Philosophers, a sweeping account of the history of community and its treatment by Western political philosophers.

Related Links

The Social Philosophers, by Robert Nisbet, foreword by Luke Sheahan
Quest for Revolutionary Community by Luke Sheahan, Law & Liberty
Revolutionary Degradation by Luke Sheahan, Law & Liberty
Why Associations Matter by Luke Sheahan

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06 ):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove (00:39 ):

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty, filling in this time for our regular host James Patterson. I’m pleased today to be joined by Luke Sheahan. Luke is associate professor of political science at Duquesne University. He is a senior affiliate in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the editor of The University Bookman, and he’s the author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism. And most recently, he’s brought back a new edition of Robert Nisbet’s book, The Social Philosophers, and he’s written a new foreword for that book, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So Luke, thanks for joining me.

Luke Sheahan (01:23 ):

Thank you for having me.

John Grove (01:24 ):

So let’s talk a little bit first about Nisbet himself and his place in the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. Most of our listeners will probably be familiar with his book, The Quest for Community. I personally feel like that book is often cited but not necessarily appreciated in its fullness, to say nothing of the rest of Nisbet’s corpus. So I think there are a lot of intellectual conservatives out there who probably haven’t read a lot beyond Quest for Community and maybe not The Social Philosophers. So tell us a little bit about Nisbet and his importance before we get into this particular book.

Luke Sheahan (01:59 ):

So Robert Nisbet was a significant figure in the twentieth century. So he’s one of the few leading lights of the conservative movement who spent his entire career in academia. So he started off at the University of California–Berkeley, and he ended his career at Columbia University, holding the Albert Schweitzer chair, and retired from teaching in 1978, and commenced with teaching in 1939. So long career, very storied. He gave the Jefferson Lecture, which is the highest honor given by the federal government in the humanities. So a very significant figure. He’s most famous for his book, The Quest for Community. So that book was published in 1953. He was 40 years old, came out with Oxford University Press. It still was, as you indicated, it’s read or at least cited all the time. And there he makes the arguments that communities, real concrete communities, have been in decline for some centuries, largely due to the ideas of the state, the state being the most cohesive and important community and the state being composed of individuals.

(03:21 ):

So this kind of individual-state dyad has grown at the expense of communities by which he means families, local communities, professional associations, religion, and religious organizations. All of these things have been squished in the middle between the individual and the state. Now that argument he carried on throughout the rest of his career. It was the main aspect of his scholarship and popular writing. Now what people don’t quite realize is that when you read Quest for Community, sometimes you’re left with questions. Sometimes I wish it was twice as long, so there are certain things, I just want to hear more about this, what do you mean? And if you ever think that reading Quest almost certainly, he did go more in depth elsewhere. He wrote another 20 books or thereabout where he really digs into some of these issues. So the book we’re going to talk about today, The Social Philosophers was published in 1973.

(04:27 ):

So 20 years after Quest. He goes much deeper into his concept of community. What exactly is he talking about when he says these communities? What is a community? What he means is not a statistical aggregate. So it means people who identify psychologically as the same thing. They’re are community and it endures through time. We are the same thing. We rely on each other, we’re going to help each other, and we are devoted some higher cause or purpose, the community itself. That could be—and he says we can form communities around all sorts of things—politics, we’ve done that for a long time; war, we’ve done that for a long time. The family can be a community of course, and has been for many millennia. And religion is another one. And these are really four types of communities that have been the ones that have been with us the longest—kinship, obviously for tens of thousands of years, but most recently and as the subject of social philosophy, war, politics, and religion. He says these three have really dominated over the last couple of millennia and always at the expense of kinship. They always came into being in conflict with the clans and tribes and patriarchal family.

John Grove (05:48 ):

I want to get into most of what we’re going to talk about. We’ll be talking about some of these particular forms of community and how he approaches them, but I think you’ve already started to introduce us to The Social Philosophers and what that book is. But just tell us a little bit before we get into the details about where this book fits in Nisbet’s Corpus and what value somebody who’s studying Nisbet, what value they get, particularly from The Social Philosophers, because a sweeping book, very, very wide scope, broad take on Western history and social thought. Is this the pinnacle of his scholarship? Is this sort of the central book to read?

Luke Sheahan (06:28 ):

Yeah, so his kind of three most popular books are The Quest for Community (1953), Twilight of Authority (1975), and The Present Age, which is his Jefferson lectures from the 1980s. So those three [are] his most popular. They’re most accessible to the public, so they’re not too long by any means. They’re written as lectures or adapted from popular writings, scholarly based upon his scholarship, but accessible. So he publishes his first book, 1953. He actually doesn’t publish a whole lot in the coming decade because he’s dean of the University of California at Riverside. And then at the age of 50 or thereabouts, he goes back to teaching and he starts to really publish. Interestingly enough, he starts to really publish in earnest really in the 1960s. So in his fifties and sixties is really when he gets, kind of hits his stride interestingly enough. So The Social Philosophers comes in 1973. He’s 60 years old. And it is you might say, his magnum opus, what he really has to say about community all comes together in that book. So if you’re willing to invest in the 400 pages, that’s really what it is. And so it’s basically a textbook in so