With the decline of intermediate institutions and the rise of alienation, the modern individual searched for community in the state, for it is the state that held the greatest promise and “evocative power” for an “image of community.” (QC, 33) The individual’s identification with the state is part of his national community contributed to the legitimatization of further state expansion into society. When intermediate institutions like the family or churches have disappeared, we are at the point that Tocqueville had predicted of the administrative despotic state where a majority tyranny dictated and instructed people in all incidents of their lives.
Citizens soon lose the capacity to think for themselves and become reduced to “timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”2 (II: 310, 313, 337, 345) For both Nisbet and Tocqueville, the rise of individualism and the state’s concentration of power were not contradictory impulses in democratic societies but rather complementary ones. Individualism — the mature and calm feeling that leads citizens to withdraw from society in order to pursue their private affairs — was the greatest opponent to liberty, especially in democracies where social and class structure was eliminated (at least psychologically among the citizenry). With the equalization of inheritance, democrats were forced to a life of economic independence, after which they had achieved, led them to believe that they were masters of their own destinies. The ties to intermediate institutions, the sentiments of obligation and loyalty, were transformed into independence and self-interest. (II: 104-06) Yet this newly-won independence became subsumed under the politics of majority tyranny, because democratic citizens believed all are endowed with an equal capacity for judging and evaluating truth. Thus, “the greater truth should go with the greater number,” with “the majority its ministering prophet” in politics. (II: 11-12)
This new form of politics was aptly described by Foucault as “bio-politics,” where the state guided and managed citizens according to a rational criterion of its own determination.3 With the decline of intermediate institutions, the state slowly assumed the role of supervising, structuring, and directing the lives of people. Under the “responsible management” of the state, the citizen was reduced to a passive entity: individuals were categorized by social sciences and then fitted into an assortment of institutions to better serve the state. At the center of this process was an architecture of control with multiple networks of power centers that treated citizens as objects and with nothing escaping its surveillance. With its access to technology, a vast bureaucracy, and an ideology of individualism and progress, the state now had acquired the capacities to equal its ambition to implement a politics to affect an entire population. From birth to death, the citizen’s life was under the administration of the state.
The emergence of the administrative despotic state usually occurred in times of war; as Nisbet observed, “Most of the great wars in the modern West have been attended by the gains in the political and social rights of citizenship as well as by increased nationalism and centralization of power.” (MM, 133) Creating a vast bureaucracy to oversee its war objectives, the state not only penetrated into every aspect of society but the “stifling regimentation and bureaucratic centralization of military organization is becoming more and more the model of associative and leadership relationships in time of peace and in nonmilitary organizations.” (QC, 43) When citizens become reduced to equal, homogeneous entities, the state can manipulate and incorporate them into its most effective and efficient goals. Genuine individuality becomes replaced with timidity and industry for the sake of the “national community.”
The emergence of the welfare state was an example of a bureaucracy modeled after the efficiency of the military to further the state’s objectives. Social reforms such as “the equalization of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of industries, the raising of wages and improvements in working conditions, worker-management councils, housing ventures, death taxes, unemployment insurance plans, pension plans, and the enfranchisement of formerly voteless elements of the population” were administered by the state. Furthermore, these social reforms were usually implemented during times of war or in the name of war. (QC, 40) According to Nisbet, 75 percent of all national programs in the last two centuries in western countries have been designed to equalize income, property, and opportunity that first arose out of the “war state and of the war economy.” (TA, 220)
In the United States, the origins of the state’s centralization of power resided in President Woodrow Wilson’s entry of the United States into World War I. For Nisbet, Wilson’s presidency was the crucial event for America during the twentieth century:
“[Wilson’s] political, economic, social and intellectual reorganization of America in the short period 1917-1919 is one of the most extraordinary feats in the long history of war and polity. . . . Within a few short months he had transformed traditional, decentralized, regional and localist America into a war state that at its height permeated every aspect of life.” (PA, 42-43)
Congress acceded to Wilson’s request for war powers, with wages, prices, and profits controlled by the national government; industries like the railroads and telegraphs nationalized; and civil liberties suspended. Nisbet was so disturbed by Wilson’s concentration of power that he compared his presidency to “the West’s first real experience with totalitarianism — political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community, and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings — came with the America war state under Woodrow Wilson.” (TA, 183)
The Wilson administrative state became the offspring for the social programs of the New Deal which were created and advocated by such progressive intellectuals like Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey. To Nisbet, the “so-called New Deal was no more than an assemblage of governmental structures modeled on those which had existed in 1917.” (TA, 184-85) The variety of programs and their acronyms — NRA, AAA, WPA — were not only national entities that centralized power but also were modeled after military organizations. In fact, the New Deal was often referred to as the “moral equivalent of war” and continued to advance the idea of a national community. When the United States entered into World War II, the notion of the national community became the only possible one for Americans to conceive of in their fight for self-preservation.
Nisbet recognized the connection between American intellectuals and the national government’s centralization of power. Not only were intellectuals active in the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, but they became even more involved in the governmental activities during the Cold War. As Nisbet described this period, “Political omnicompetence, with the state the spearhead of all social and cultural life; industrialization, however farcical in context; nationalization of education; rampant secularism; and growing consumer-hedonism—all this bespeaks modernity to the Western clerisy and the welcome sign of the developed, the progressive.” (PA, 73) In Nisbet’s lifetime, the idea of the national community as governed by intellectuals reached its apex under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, with its New Frontier, War on Poverty, Great Society, and the Vietnam War.
References
The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom by Robert A. Nisbet (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1953; San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990). (QC)
“Foreward” to The American Family and the State, edited by Joseph R. Peden and Fred Glahe (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986). (AS)
“Conservatism and Sociology,” The American Journal of Sociology 48 (September 1952), 167-175. (CS)
The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971). (DA)
“The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France,” The American Journal of Sociology 49 (November 1943), 156-64. (FS)
History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980). (HP)
The Making of Modern Society (New York: NYU Press, 1986). (MM)
The Present Age: Progress and Authority in Modern America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). (PA)
Sociology as an Art Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). (SA)
The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society (New York: Knopf, 1970). (SB)
Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). (SC)
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982). (SP)
The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). (ST)
Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). (TA)
Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968). (TR)
Notes
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
This article was originally entitled, “War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology,” in The Political Science Reviewer 36:1 (2007): 311-43.
The Big question now is how you get out of this satanic mess. Hence the importance of the recent YouTube colloquium, "Are we individuals?"