A remembrance of sociologist Robert A. Nisbet by his daughter.

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 Nisbet’s writings, from his early studies of French counterrevolutionary thinkers through his final assaults on America in the present age.

This article discusses the ideas of progress and social change in the sociology of Robert Nisbet. It contends that Nisbet is a unique figure in US sociology given his conservative political views, his historicist understanding of social and political thought and his interest in the moral texture of sociological ideas. In terms of structure, the article proceeds in three steps. Firstly, it reconstructs the central tenets of Nisbet’s conception of social change, history and progress by looking at the role of metaphors and analogies in the construction of scientific statements. Secondly, the piece revisits his analysis of the rise of modern social institutions in America as an empirical application of sociology’s key distinction between community and society. Here, I pay special attention to Nisbet’s assessment of America’s transformation after WWI, as in his view the Great War paved the way for the definitive modernisation of American society. Finally, the article compares Nisbet’s arguments, as developed in the previous two sections, with Karl Löwith and Strauss’s critique of modern thought. I contend that mutual lessons can be learnt through an engagement between these philosophical critique of modern social science and Nisbet’s own critique of sociology.

Nisbet’s conception of sociology practiced as an art form: multivocality, tolerance for uncertainty, wealth of invention, reservation of judgement. Tocqueville as exemplar. Nisbet’s own writings evaluated in the light of his best insights. A southern white perspective on the central state, shaped in later years by quest for recognition in a rising conservative movement. Lesson to be gleaned: discernment in the deployment of wit, and cultivation of ‘caritas’, essential features of sociological writing capable of enduring the test of time.