Nisbet’s selection of the traditions of political monism and social pluralism was part of his overall project of restoring sociology to its classical foundations. Most historians of social thought have regarded sociology “as a logical and continuous outcome of the ideas which had commanded the intellectual scene during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (FS, 157) To Nisbet, this was an inaccurate characterization: sociology arose in direct response to the French Revolution that sought to destroy society. (FS, 159) The government destroyed the churches and guilds, abolished familial and property rights, and declared education as the sole function of the state. The destruction of society prompted the discipline of sociology, with Burke, Comte, and others hoping to rebuild society and its intermediate institutions. (FS, 161; CS, 172) Concepts such as “social, tradition, custom, institution, folk, community, organism, tissue, and collective” were re-introduced into intellectual life in the aftermath of the French Revolution and became the foundation of the discipline of sociology. (C, 77)
Unfortunately for Nisbet, sociology usually adopted one of two approaches to the study of intellectual history: it either have analyzed individual thinkers or concentrated on schools of thought. Both of these approaches contained serious flaws. The focus on the individual thinkers’ ideas ignored the cultural, economic, and political impact upon the thinker’s thought. Ideas consequently “are treated as extensions of shadows of single individuals rather than as the distinguishable structures of meaning, perspective, and allegiance that major ideas so plainly are in the history of civilization.” (ST, 3) Nevertheless, this approach was superior to the second method, which concentrated on schools of thought.
The study of ideas in this approach made them irreducible givens that resisted analysis. (ST, 4) That is, schools of thought were abstractions of ideas that presented themselves as a systematic account of reality, regardless of whether they actually corresponded to that reality. These ideologies were a further removal from reality that the sociologist was trying to penetrate. Finding both approaches inadequate, Nisbet decided to study “unit-ideas” where one began “with neither the man nor the system, but with the ideas which are elements of the system.” (ST, 5) These unit-ideas had to be general but distinct, continuous yet discrete, and provided a theoretical perspective to understand social and political reality. By focusing on unit-ideas, the sociologist can account for cultural, economical, political, and other factors that influenced their formations while not making any of these structural variables the primary explanatory cause. Unit-ideas also were anchored in a civilizational reality, unlike schools of thought that were abstracted from anything concrete and therefore subject to speculative fantasies about the directional nature of history. Rooted in unit-ideas, Nisbet’s sociology thus provided a correction to the approaches that had focused either on the individual thinker or schools of thought.
Some examples of unit-ideas were community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation. Following the Hegelian tradition, Nisbet claimed these unit-ideas were created when an idea and its “conceptual opposite, to a kind of antithesis, from which it derives much of its continuing meaning in the sociological tradition” came into conflict. (ST, 6) In the case of community, the unit-idea not only referred to local communities but to religious institutions, occupations, and the family. When compared to its opposite — the state, with its impersonal institutions and contractual obligations — the unit-idea of community became crystallized in distinction and meaning.
Nisbet continued with his clarification of unit-ideas with authority, status, and the scared. Authority was practiced in intermediate institutions and legitimized by function, tradition, and custom, while power was rational, centralized, and popular. (ST, 107) Status was the individual’s position “in the hierarchy of prestige and influence that characterizes every community and association,” with its antithesis as class: a new hierarchy created by the individualization and fragmentation of society. (ST, 6, 177)
Finally, the sacred referred “to the totality of myth, ritual, sacrament, dogma, and the mores in human behavior; to the whole area of individual motivation and social organization that transcends the utilitarian or rational and draws its vitality from what Weber called charisma and Simmel piety.” (ST, 221) Its antithesis was the secular as characterized by utility or rationality. Interesting, Nisbet did not create an opposite for alienation: the sense of estrangement and rootless when one was cut off from community. Rather, Nisbet called alienation the inversion of progress, i.e., the forces that produce progress also create alienation. (ST, 264-70)
Emptied of any transcendental meaning, the modern concept of progress can mean anything that humans want to subscribe to it in the realm of historical necessity. As stated before, usually the content furnished into the concept of modern progress was the promise of national security or material prosperity, which, in turn, required the state to centralize power at the expense of intermediate institutions. Citizens must be alienated from their local attachments and obligations in order to identify with the “national community” and to serve its goals in the name of progress. This particularly was true in times of war, when citizens voluntarily alienated themselves from intermediate institutions for national and progressive causes. The end result was an atomized society led by a “progressive” state.
Unit-ideas most clearly emerged when there was a “conflict between two social orders,” such as the “feudal-traditional and the democratic-capitalist,” with thinkers like Tocqueville and Weber writing about the “tension between the values of political liberalism and the values of a humanistic or cultured conservatism, however reluctant this conservatism might be.” (ST, 316; 317) The current problem confronting sociology was that the theoretical paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were still in place and consequently have become outdated and overused. As Nisbet pointed out:
“It thus becomes ever more difficult to squeeze creative juices out of the classical antitheses, that, for a hundred years, have provided theoretical structure for sociology. . . . It becomes ever more difficult to extract new essence, new hypothesis, new conclusion, from them. Distinctions become ever more tenuous, examples ever more repetitive, vital subject matter ever more elusive.” (ST, 138)
What were required of sociology were new unit-ideas, which only can emerge of out of imagination and intuition rather than methodological innovations and research designs. (ST, 319) The sociologist must be inspired by his creative and intellectual impulses to direct his discipline away from scientism — the belief that the scientific methodology provided the only source of knowledge about reality. For Nisbet, sociology was dominated by scientism, which explained its dependence upon outdated unit-ideas to explain reality. According to Nisbet, not one unit-idea was derived from scientific analysis: “Without exception, each of these ideals [unit-ideas] is the result of thought processes — imagination, vision, intuition — that bear as much relation to the artist as to the scientist.” (ST, 18-19) The sociological unit-ideas of the bourgeoisie and worker, the bureaucrat and intellectual were a result of a creative act “that is not different in nature from what we have learned of the creative process in the arts.” (SA, 9) What sociologists needed to do today was to create new unit-ideas that “have a significant relation to the moral aspirations of an age,” such as the problems of individualism, urbanization, and secularism. (CS, 168)
Nisbet was pessimistic about the prospects of sociology’s, and the social sciences’ in general, future as a discipline. The inability to generate new unit-ideas because of the predominance of scientism in the social sciences made the their contributions to society “minimal when not actually counterproductive, and that in so many of the projects of social reconstruction designed by social scientists for government execution more harm than good has been the result — as in the benignly intended but disastrous ‘wars’ against poverty, ethnic discrimination, poor housing, slums, and crime.” (HP, 347) Furthermore, the social sciences had become politicized to such an extent that objectivity was difficult to achieve. (P, 287) Given the influence of these two factors in the social sciences, scientism and the politicization, Nisbet was not hopeful about the social sciences being able to diagnose the nature of society. The discipline of sociology had become corrupted and outmoded in this age of ideology.
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)
This article was originally entitled, “War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology,” in The Political Science Reviewer 36:1 (2007): 311-43.
A very fine presentation of key concepts from Nisbet's work, showing its continuing relevance and import. Thanks!