Twenty-five years ago today, the famed American sociologist Robert Alexander Nisbet died in his home in Washington, DC. However, given a year and a half of plague-induced lockdowns, the astronomical growth of state power and state intrusion into the private decisions of individuals, and increasing civil unrest and violence, Nisbet is the thinker we need now more than ever.
Nisbet’s thoughts on the importance of community and the dangers state power poses to organic social cohesion rendered him one of the most insightful figures of his time. He saw that the exercise of totalitarian state power was different in degree – but not in kind – from the intrusions of democratic society, and both could have the same deleterious effects upon America’s social fabric.
Writing in “The Quest for Community” in 1953, Nisbet investigated the political causes of social disintegration through a process he later described as “social nihilism and political affirmation.” Nisbet found that affirming greater levels of political power led to a decline in social health. He warned that “the State has become in the contemporary world, the supreme allegiance of men and, in most recent times, the greatest refuge from the insecurities and frustrations of other spheres of life.” The modern state had become what Otto von Gierke called “a process of permanent revolution.”
In Nisbet’s view, the state constantly undermines social order through prioritizing its alleged needs above those of non-state associations and coopting functions that had been formerly reserved to private associations. Long ago, the state had attained a supremacy that no association – not the Catholic Church, not the business corporation, and certainly not what’s left of the family – could hope to challenge.
Whatever problems emerge, the state promises that its intrusions will solve them and provide security in an insecure world. The result of this development, Nisbet explained, is that “State and politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church.” Both kinship and religion, which provided material security and meaning for individuals for thousands of years, are no match for the security and meaning political power promises to provide. The awesome power of the state is endowed with an imaginative allure that outshines the limited assurances of smaller associations that are mired in mundane details and frequent frustrations.
Nisbet argued that changes wrought by decades of state intrusion had transferred the citizen’s primary identity from social associations to political associations, especially at the national level. This transfer of allegiance is inherent in the logic of individualism. Where a person might have thought of himself primarily in terms of family (as a Smith or a Jones), religion (as an Episcopalian or Catholic), or local community (as a resident of Bopperville or Kopperville), he is now primarily a citizen of the state. These secondary associations are valuable insofar as they bolster a person’s primary political identity.
The problem is that the state cannot deliver on the material benefits and psychological security it promises. Writing in the 1970s, Nisbet argued that the civil unrest of that decade was inevitable given the subsequent inability of the state to maintain the allegiance and legitimacy of the social associations it replaced. Not only did the state fail to deliver on the social functions it took from private groups, but its overreach rendered it incapable of delivering basic duties such as maintaining social order. No thesis better explains the summer of 2020.
COVID-19 exacerbated this greater social crisis. The pandemic struck at the core of social cohesion, encouraging social distancing, lockdowns, face coverings – all things that chip away at our relationships with institutions and associations. While COVID-19 is not the state’s fault, the poor condition of our social institutions is a result of the very state intrusion Nisbet descried. Decades of state intervention and cooption of social functions eroded social relationships, bringing about an epidemic of loneliness and deaths of despair.
What would Nisbet have us do? Paradoxically, the current crisis gives us a chance not to step back but to step up and reinvest in our social institutions. While COVID-19 may have annihilated what little was left of our social institutions, we have the chance to reweave the social fabric in a way that is appropriate to our present circumstances. Several principles from Nisbet’s work can help us do this.
First, we must focus upon function. Nisbet writes, “Unless new institutional functions are performed by a group – family, trade union, or church – its psychological influence will become minimal.” To achieve psychological security, private groups must be able to provide material security. Second, we must eschew the political for the personal and focus on recovering social health. We don’t need another political campaign. Washington will not save us; nor will Harrisburg, Sacramento, or Albany. Third, we should focus on the local. Have face-to-face interactions with your family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. A personal touch in an impersonal age will do more good than hundreds of likes, retweets, or social media posts.
Luke C. Sheahan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University and a Non-Resident Scholar in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism.
