Review of The Quest for Community

One of the greatest books ever written on the subject of local control, why it is needed, and how the central government marginalizes families, churches and local communities by taking over their traditional functions was written by Robert Nisbet in 1953. His seminal work, The Quest for Community was a clarion call about the dangers of centralization of power and the threat it posed to American society. Nisbet's predictions about the growth of crime, illegitimacy, drug abuse, poverty and illiteracy which would result from the continued marginalization of traditional local associations have been amazingly accurate. We include here the Forward to the latest edition which is a good summary of Nisbet's work. Copies of the book can be ordered from the publisher Institute for Contemporary Studies in San Francisco.

FOREWORD to 1990 edition of The Quest for Community

Forward by William A. Schambra

In 1953, the year Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community was published, scholars were beginning to suggest that strong ideological currents would no longer roil the waters of American politics--that the great, passionate movements of old had been softened and dissolved by a new politics of petty, haggling economic interests. Communism, one of the most ominous of the twentieth century's ideological movements, remained a threat to American freedom, but primarily as an armed, distinctly alien, and conspicuously pernicious system of thought--clearly totalitarian and "un-American," embodied in the blockades around Berlin and the horrors of Korean battlefields.

The Quest for Community, however, warned that totalitarianism had a different, far more "humane," and therefore more insidious face. For totalitarianism did not always present itself as a brutal, irrational, mysterious "focus of evil," according to Nisbet. It was in fact deeply rooted in--and drew its strength from its ability to satisfy--one of the most potent, rational, and decent of human impulses: the yearning for community.

"The Quest for Community will not be denied," Nisbet maintained, "for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature--needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity." The essence of totalitarianism--indeed, "the single most impressive fact in the twentieth century in Western society," noted Nisbet--was "the fateful combination of widespread quest for community... and the apparatus of political power" wielded by the centralized, territorial state.

Throughout most of its history, Nisbet observed, mankind had satisfied the yearning for membership, status, and belonging through the small communities of the human experience--communities like the family, church, neighborhood, and local fraternal, ethnic, and voluntary associations. The previous two centuries, however, had witnessed their decline, as the state, propelled by the unitarian, centralizing, rationalistic political theories of the eighteenth century, had set about to consolidate its power by displacing and absorbing the functions and authority of intermediate associations.

Once those associations no longer performed functions vital to the individual--no longer figured symbolically or materially in the central human dramas of birth, marriage, and death, in the provision of jobs and obligations that have meaning for our lives--they began to wither away, and the individual potentially stood alone. Such a condition represented the ideal to eighteenth-century thinkers, who eagerly anticipated the emergence of the rugged, self-sufficient individual in the wake of the destruction of the repressive intermediate associations. By the twentieth century, however, it had become clear that the sense of community was very much an enduring and urgent human need. Individualism, Nisbet suggested, had come to mean only isolation, loneliness, disconnectedness, alienation, and despair.

This provided fertile ground for the growth of the state. Not only could it absorb--and perform more efficiently and "humanely"--the social functions of the traditional, smaller communities, it also promised to alleviate the isolation and loneliness of the individual. This it would do through the vision of the "absolute, the total political community," a tightly knit, all-encompassing organization within which individuals once again would be given clearly defined status and purpose, a sense of comradeship and belonging, a sense of oneness with fellow citizens. "In its promise of unity and belonging," Nisbet noted, "lies much of the magic of totalitarian mystery, appeal and authority."

Every symbolic, cultural, and rhetorical device would be employed by the state to coax the individual into this vast new national family or neighborhood, as it penetrated every recess of society and assumed every practical and ritualistic communitarian function formerly performed by intermediate associations. Some devices were particularly compelling as forgers of national, political community. One of them was war.

War--even rhetorical substitutes for war, so long as they generated the same invigorating moral and social atmosphere--could pull the masses together in common endeavor, and infuse them with a sense of purpose and unity. As Nisbet noted in Quest, war could generate an "intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade"; society attains its "maximum sense of organization and community and its most exalted sense of moral purpose during the period of war."

Another useful community-forging device was the focus of political power and ritual on a single, articulate national leader who could embody, speak for, and bind more closely together the new national family. "Only the man who represented not sections, not localities, not partial interests, but the whole of the people, the people in their mystic political oneness, would be able to save the people from corruptions and oppressions," Nisbet wrote.

An all-encompassing, national political community, possessed of all the practical and symbolic attributes of intimate human associations, bound together by the intoxicating spirit of war and by the equally intoxicating rhetoric of a charismatic leader--this was the genuine face of the total political state in the twentieth century, according to Nisbet. The true horror of it, he insisted, was precisely that it did not generally manifest itself in the brutal repression or naked terror of Soviet or Nazi totalitarian-ism. The national community was, rather, more commonly a benevolent and humanitarian provider of the material needs of its citizens, and a potent furnisher of relief from their unbearable sense of isolation. As Alexis de Tocqueville described it in one of Nisbet's favorite passages, its power was "absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild." In spite of its good intentions--or rather, precisely because of its good intentions--the national political community remained, in its all-encompassing reach, the most profound threat to freedom in human history, Nisbet insisted.

The Progressive Vision

Equipped with the new perspective provided by Quest, virtually all significant American political thought and behavior throughout the twentieth century could be understood as an effort to create and vindicate the great, national community. It had been no secret, of course, that the national state had grown significantly over the century, as Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal had absorbed more and more of the social and political responsibilities of the states and local communities. Nisbet enabled us to understand, however, that this growth was not the "inevitable" fruit of historical progress or of modernization and industrialization, as liberal-ism commonly explained it, nor a mysterious, evil manifestation of alien socialism, as some conservatives believed, but instead a result of the state's capacity to satisfy the powerful, deep-rooted passion for community-

Suddenly, the rhetoric of twentieth-century progressive liberalism took on a new, more significant--and more ominous--meaning. The early progressives--Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt--argued for a stronger state apparatus as a way to build a sense of unity, loyalty, common sacrifice, and mutual belonging among the American people. They argued for it, in short, in the name of national community- Croly, for example, hoped that a powerful and compelling "national idea" would then be bound together by a "religion of human brotherhood," which could be "realized only through the loving-kindness which individuals feel. · · particularly toward their fellow countrymen."

According to progressive thought, one of the chief devices for forging national community was a powerful, articulate president who could nurture the unity of the people. As Wilson described the president, "the voices of the nation. · · unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak. · · the common meaning of the common voice." No one appreciated better than Theodore Roosevelt the power of the presidential "bully pulpit," from which the people could be summoned to duty, brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, in the name of national oneness. Americans, he insisted, should strive to "make this nation · · · a democracy of true brotherhood, which knows neither North nor South, East nor West, which recognizes services and not pleasure as the ideal.. · which stands for each individual's performance of his own duty towards others even more than his insistence on his rights."

The progressives discovered in World War I the valuable community-forging properties of war. As Lippmann contentedly remarked, "the war has given Americans a new instinct for order, purpose, and discipline" and has served to "draw Americans out of their local, group, and ethnic loyalties into a greater American citizenship." Once having experienced what Dewey called the "social possibilities of war," liberalism would never stop searching for war's "moral equivalent," which would serve to produce its sense of national unity and common moral purpose without the actual spilling of blood.

The progressive vision of national community, marked by a strong sense of national oneness, mutual belonging, and common sacrifice, pulled together by a powerful president as well as by the unifying spirit of real or imagined war, went on to form the theoretical underpinning of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As Roosevelt put it once, the goal of the New Deal was to "[extend] to our national life the old principle of the local community." He was a master of the bully pulpit and of the moral equivalent of war. In his first inaugural address he suggested that the Great Depression demanded the same degree of national unity and sacrifice required in times of war. America, he insisted, must "move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline" and understand that "larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife." The presidency he likened to the "leadership of [a] great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems."

Behind the steady expansion of the central state throughout the first half of the twentieth century, then, lay precisely the Vision of national community that Nisbet had described in Quest. That same vision would go on to inspire John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, which urged Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you," but what "you can do for your country." Above all, it fueled Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and its tremendous expansion of the reach of the national state throughout the mid-1960s. "I see America as a family," Johnson proclaimed, "bound together by common ties of confidence and affection, and common aspirations toward duty and purpose." To him, the presidency's "first role and first responsibility is to help perfect that unity of the people." The moral equivalent of war he found in the "war on poverty," deliberately so named because, he believed, war evokes "cooperation... [and a] sense of brother-hood and unity."

Through most of the twentieth century, American conservatism put up but feeble intellectual resistance to liberalism's vision of national community, in large pan because it did not comprehend--or chose to ignore or disparage--the inescapable human yearning for community that explained its appeal. Conservative thought remained in the thrall of eighteenth-century individual-ism and so posited against the national community only the splendid, isolated, rugged individual, solitarily pursuing wealth through the impersonal, anonymous mechanisms of the free market. Conservatives failed to comprehend the lessons of Quest: that the yearning for community "cannot be denied," and that by the twentieth century, individualism for most meant not noble self-sufficiency, but loneliness and alienation. Indeed, Nisbet suggested, conservatism's emphasis on individualism was not only politically unpalatable, but would also serve to augment, rather than circumscribe, the state, by fueling the loneliness and disconnectedness that drove isolated individuals into the arms of the national community. Small wonder, then, that the conservatism of the Eisenhower years left no lasting imprint on American politics, proving rather to be merely a brief period of sobriety between two intoxicating episodes of the politics of national community.

In short, when Quest was published in 1953, liberalism had no use for its message because it was wedded precisely to the idea of national community, the dangers of which the volume had been written to describe and avert. Conservatism was equally unprepared to listen because it championed an individualism that, Nisbet insisted, was of no use as a counterweight to the total state. In 1953, Nisbet's was a relatively lonely voice speaking against the increasing dominance of national community. The Quest for Community was not all jeremiad, however. It pointed toward a way to satisfy The Quest for Community without resort to national community--a way that would thereby preserve freedom. If the total political state flourished as a consequence of the erosion of traditional intermediate associations, then, Nisbet suggested, friends of liberty should fight for the preservation and propagation of these institutions. If function and authority could be restored to family, neighborhood, church, and local association, individuals might once again find the sense of status and belonging they sought, without appeal to the central state. The multiplicity of reinvigorated, autonomous associations, in turn, would serve as breakwaters or barriers to 'the reach of the state. As Nisbet put it, "in the division of authority and the multiplication of its sources lie the most enduring conditions of freedom."

The New Vision

The Quest for Community, therefore, provided not only a crucial intellectual framework for understanding the most significant political development of the twentieth century, the rise of the national community, but also the groundwork for a future politics that might reflect once again the under-standing that intermediate associations could satisfy both The Quest for Community and the yearning for freedom. The dim outlines of that future politics began to emerge in the turmoil and confusion of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. If there was a central theme to the diverse and seemingly mutually contradictory currents of unrest during that period, it was the loss of faith in the idea of national community. As Theodore White noted in The Making of the President, 1968, "alienation" became such a fashionable word in the politics of that time precisely because it captured this new skepticism: It was the "negative of the old words, the old faith that America was a community, and that government served the community." At the same time, America began groping its way toward a new (or rather, very old) way of satisfying the yearning for community, within intimate, participatory groups like the family, neighborhood, and ethnic and voluntary association. In other words, it began to open itself to the truths written in the pages of The Quest for Community.

The New Left, for instance, came together as a major political movement when college students around the country discovered that others were "quite as lonely as they are... quite as hungry for some kind of community as they are," in the words of Mario Savio. That community, however, was not to be found in the central state, which now seemed a distant, alienating, impersonal, bureaucratic monstrosity. Instead it was to be found in the devolution of authority to small, tightly knit "participatory democracies," which would, in the words of the Port Huron Statement, "bring people out of isolation and into community."

Likewise, the Black Power movement rejected the idea of a national, integrated community, in the name of reinvigorated ethnic association, within which, as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton suggested, blacks would be able "to reassert their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture; to create their own sense of community and togetherness."

More generally, however, a mood of dissatisfaction with the national community idea gripped millions of average American citizens, who by and large had retained allegiance to and continued to value family, church, neighborhood, and local community. In their eyes, the state had gone too far in its absorption of authority and function from treasured local associations. The state's bureaucracies and courts disparaged and assailed the moral and cultural standards of local communities as they manifested themselves in local laws and customs, suggesting that they were parochial, narrow-minded, reactionary, and even unconstitutional. Thus local communities were told they could neither send their children to nor have them pray in the local school, nor erect religious displays in public places, nor ban forms of expression considered offensive and pornographic, nor enforce standards of sexual conduct, nor define the circumstances in which abortion might be proper, nor enforce the law in such a way that genuine justice was accorded criminals and victims.

The New left and Black Power reactions against national community proved ephemeral, of course, but the same cannot be said of the widespread, deep-seated resentment evoked in the average citizen by the state's heavy-handed interference with the prerogatives of local community. In fact, it became the salient political fact of the later 1970s and 1980s and remains so today. No candidate of either party, for instance, has captured the presidency in the past twenty years without denouncing intrusive, insensitive, overcentralized, bureaucratic government and promising to return authority and function to states, local communities, neighborhoods, and private associations. The language of national community has become electoral poison, while that of local community and intermediate association has become the key to electoral success.

The Democratic party, loath to give up the idea of national community, has paid a heavy price. Walter Mondale was swamped in the 1984 election after basing his campaign on the futile effort to revive allegiance to national community. "My America is a community, a family, where we care for each other," he told the unappreciative voters, while it is the president's pre-eminent task to "make up a community and keep us a community." Similarly, Michael Dukakis in 1988 sought unsuccessfully to persuade the voters to return to "a simple but a very profound idea--an idea as powerful as any in history. It is the idea of community . . . the idea that we are in this together... regardless of who we are or where we come from."

The only Democrat to win the presidency in the past two decades did so precisely because he seemed to speak for and reflect the traditional, neighborly values of Plains, Georgia, rather than a commitment to national community. Jimmy Carter professed to believe during his 1976 campaign that "our neighborhoods and families can succeed in solving problems where governments will always fail" and noted that "the only way we will ever put the government back in its place is to restore the families and neighborhoods to their proper places." Later, Carter would fall away from these views, deciding instead that Americans suffered from a "malaise" that could be cured only by a new dose of national community. The immediate remedy was, of course, yet another moral equivalent of war--in this case, a rather far-fetched war on the energy crisis, which, he maintained, could "help us conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country. It can rekindle our sense of unity... and give our Nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose." In the election of 1980, the voters once again demonstrated just how unpersuasive and stale that language had become.

According to the Democrats, meanwhile, the Republican party remains committed to self-interested, laissez-faire individualism and to the unbridled workings of a heartless, exploitative, anticommunitarian marketplace. "Let us end this selfishness, this greed, this new championship of caring only for yourself," Mondale pleaded in 1984, urging voters to turn the Republicans out. In fact, however, the Republican party and a broad segment of American conservatives have adopted a very different message over the past decade. They seem to have heeded Nisbet's suggestion that rugged individualism is a bankrupt notion, failing, as it does, to address The Quest for Community. Republican party doctrine through the Reagan and Bush years has come to reflect Nisbet's view that the yearning for community is most satisfactorily and safely accomplished through return of authority and function to intermediate associations.

President Reagan's political career, for instance, was based on sentiments captured nicely in a speech from his 1976 campaign, in which he called for "an end to giantism, for a return to the human scale--the scale that human beings can understand and cope with; the scale of the local fraternal lodge, the church organization, the block club, the farm bureau.

It is activity on a small, human scale that creates the fabric of community." After becoming president, he continued to insist that "the renaissance of the American community, a rebirth of neighborhood--that is the heart and soul of rebuilding America." Similarly, George Bush repudiated the idea of national community in his vision of "a nation of communities, of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary and unique... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky."

Propelled by these new beliefs--having discovered the political futility of preaching an individualism that signified only loneliness and alienation-the Republican party has drawn into its column millions of those voters repelled by the national community's attempt to absorb and displace local communities. It has reaped the electoral benefits of a new politics based on the return of authority and function to intermediate associations-based, that is, on The Quest for Community's prescriptions.

If that volume's message seemed somewhat out of tune with the intellectual climate of 1953, in other words, it has become essential for understanding the climate of this decade. American politics 'is no longer merely the party of the state versus the party of the individual. There is a new politics, characterized by the reaction against the national community idea and the intrusive, centralized state--and equally against raw, self-interested individualism--on behalf of local communities and associations. As Nisbet had urged, intermediate associations are increasingly viewed once again as the prime source of membership, status, and belonging--as the chief agents of community. And as he had reminded us, it is precisely the diversity, autonomy, and strength of local associations--their resistance to total absorption into the national community--that has forestalled the emergence of the total state in America. They have, indeed, proved to be the indispensable breakwaters of freedom.

It must not be thought, however, that politics is the only realm within which intermediate associations have enjoyed a renaissance. We understand today that many of our most pressing social problems can be solved only by the resurrection of such institutions as the family, neighborhood, church, and local community- We are now prepared to admit, for instance, that the problem of poverty--the threat of a permanent underclass forever dependent on welfare--cannot be solved simply by providing yet more welfare. The cycle of poverty can be broken only by a renewal of self-confidence, self-discipline, and belief in hard work within the individual--and those values are taught chiefly by strong, vibrant families, churches, and neighborhoods. Those same values, and so those same institutions, are indispensable weapons in the battle against drug abuse because they alone provide young people the inner resources to "just say no." Furthermore, they alone forestall the sense of alienation that makes drug abuse such an appealing escape.

We know now that stronger neighborhoods, perhaps beginning with nothing more elaborate than a "crime watch" network, are the best means for driving out drug traffickers and suppressing street crime in general. Within criminal justice today, there is a new school of thought called "community-oriented policing," the essence of which is that the police are more likely to succeed in enforcing the law where they stimulate and anchor their efforts in strong, closely knit neighborhood organizations. Where urban areas can generate a strong sense of local community, not only is crime suppressed, but physical deterioration is arrested and even reversed, business is lured back, and once-hopeless slums become thriving urban neighborhoods once again. It has also been found that public housing units turned over to the management of vital community organizations begin to improve in appearance, collect more rent, and experience less welfare dependency and fewer births out of wedlock.

Finally, it is understood today that the business of educating the young cannot proceed in the value-free, loosely structured environment so popular with educational reformers in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the most successful schools--schools that still manage to teach, even in the toughest neighborhoods--are those that develop a community of learning, with firm, shared standards of conduct, high and rigorously enforced expectations, instruction in moral values, and the cooperation and involvement of families and neighborhood.

Social policy as well, then, has grasped the importance of the community to be found in intermediate associations, assuring us that the new language of local community is in truth something considerably more than political rhetoric. Indeed, the social practice of intermediate associations is far greater than the political practice. For no matter how devoted to intermediate associations political candidates profess to be during campaigns, as soon as they are in charge of the state apparatus they come under intense pressure from intellectual, political, and media elites to "do some-thing" about the problems before the nation. And to do--or at least to be seen to do--something almost invariably means mobilizing the bureaucratic mechanisms of the state, in what turns out to be yet another futile attempt by Washington to solve problems that are best left to local communities. Indeed, the effort usually turns out to be worse than futile. As often as not, the problems become worse because the state once again commences to absorb functions and authority from the intermediate associations, thereby only weakening further the most natural mechanisms for dealing with social distress.

If The Quest for Community poses any challenge for American politics and social policy, it would be to develop some way to translate the political rhetoric of small community into policy. The still sizable and potent state apparatus must be brought to reinforce, rather than to displace, intermediate associations. In many areas, of course, reinforcement would require simply relaxing the smothering embrace of the state. Thus Nisbet suggests a "new philosophy of laissez faire," but this time, not to create "conditions within which autonomous individuals could flourish," but "conditions within which autonomous groups could flourish." Perhaps, however, it is possible to do more. Ways might be found for the state apparatus actively to shore up local communities or to rebuild them where they have failed. But given the inclination of the national community to absorb all it sets out merely to assist, the work of reinvigorating mediating institutions is a formidable challenge indeed.

Conversely, and equally important, we need to find a way to translate the social practice of intermediate associations--which are tackling some of the most intractable of our nation's problems--into suitable political rhetoric. Our political leaders must occasionally find words, and the courage, to say that many useful things are in fact "being done" about problems, even though no high-visibility, high-cost federal initiative is planned. Given the pressures on national leaders to be seen to be doing something in their own right, though, reforming our public rhetoric is a formidable challenge too.

If Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community is a powerful tool for understanding the political and social developments of the past three decades, it has a timeless and deeply personal dimension as well. For it is an elegant, deeply insightful treatment of the enduring human condition. As Nisbet points out, although The Quest for Community is the grand, definitive political fact of the past several centuries, it is also something with which we all struggle, in our individual, daily existence, wherever and whenever we live. For all its political and social truths, then, perhaps Quest's most valuable and abiding quality is that it invites us to reflect on our own personal condition and yearnings, on the meaning in our own lives of alienation, disconnectedness, belonging, family, and community. The Quest for Community is therefore both a profoundly prescient work of political sociology and a remarkably revealing mirror held up to our own souls.

Washington, D.C.

January 1990