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Discussion of the elements of sociology: community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation.
One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. This edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus features a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever.
The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book. The Quest for Community. In fact, Conservatism unites virtually all of Nisbet's work. In it, Nisbet deals with the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. The sovereign political state is more than a legal relationship of a superstructure of power, it is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of power. Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views...
The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He ...
A great moralist and social thinker illuminates the most vexing issues of our time--war, old age, racism, abortion, boredom, crime and punishment, sociobiology--in a book which is by turns hilarious and somber but always vigorous and stimulating.
A great new book from Regnery Publishing! This is the only book-length intellectual biography of sociologist Robert Nisbet (1913-1996).
""One of our most original social thinkers,"" according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology.Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel ...
Such intermediary institutions traditionally served as a protective social layer between the individual and the power of the state, providing a foundation for genuine freedom. This core insight of Nisbet's has grown ever more relevant in the past half-century.".