I noticed that a couple of you had a copy of my comments.
I had sent those to Mark, just to give him some sense for what I was going to say, although
I did notice there were several typos in it, and I've altered it at least somewhat for
those of you who've actually taken the trouble to look at them.
As you may have noted if you looked at that, I actually commenced my comments there by
By giving some advice to graduate students, by sharing some advice that I got as a graduate
student, the best advice I got in graduate school was from an older graduate student
who told me to choose a dissertation topic about which my dissertation committee cared
absolutely nothing and knew even less.
I didn't write a dissertation that I did much with, but I sailed through. I had a couple
of copy editing changes that I had to make and that was about it. But if the principle
I followed then, to good effect, is at all generalizable beyond that context, I may well
be acting very foolishly today because I will be talking about libertarianism and I'm at
My extensive purpose today is to consider the thinking of the conservative thinker and social theorist Robert Nisbet, who I will argue is aptly described as a libertarian-communitarian.
In addition to asserting that the phrase libertarian-communitarian is not oxymoronic, my ultimate purpose is to persuade
you that the only viable form of libertarianism is libertarian-communitarianism.
I will proceed by first giving a brief summary of Nisbet's thought, subsequently I will
describe his criticisms of several groups of people on the right including certain libertarians,
And I will conclude by identifying what I believe is a major failing in Nisbet's thought.
Many of you are too young to know the work of Nisbet real well, let me just tell you
a little bit about him.
He died in 1996 at the age of 82.
He was a post-stylist of the very first rank, really a wonderful author, arguably the first
American Communitarian, and a figure in the Renaissance in conservative thought that occurred
after 1950.
He published his first and most influential book, The Quest for Community, in 1953, at
the end of a three-year period that produced what he later called the freshette of books
of an unmistakable conservative character, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, Eric
Vogeland's The New Science of Politics, Leo Strauss' Natural Right in History, William
F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, and Daniel Buirsten's The Genius of American Politics.
As Russell Kirk observed, 1953 was the year the liberals began to listen, and Nisbet's
quest for community received wide and warm attention from reviewers across the political
spectrum. According to Nisbet, however, he had not particularly written the quest for
for a Community as a Conservative Book.
This is the case because until he read Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind in 1953, Nisbet
thought of conservatism as a European way of thinking associated with reaction to the
French Revolution.
Nisbet had studied this thought in great detail.
His dissertation was on the thinking of the so-called reactionary enlightenment, chiefly
the thinking of Bernard de Maistre and Chateaubriand, but whatever sympathies he may have had towards
He agreed with those such as Lionel Trilling and Lewis Hartz in the 1950s, who argued that liberalism was the only authentic and political intellectual tradition in America.
Certainly, he did not believe that a defense of business and opposition to the New Deal by themselves qualified one as a conservative.
In fact, we do well to remember that Herbert Hoover ran as a true liberal and that it was
not until the early 1970s that the Republican Party could claim to be the more conservative
party.
After all, it was the pro-business Republican Party that introduced the ERA into every Congress
after 1923, and it was the Republican Party that most supported civil rights legislation
and Opposed by State's Rights Democrats.
According to Nisbet, his view of conservatism
changed after he read Kirk's The Conservative Mind,
because Kirk gave scholarly and timely pedigree
to conservatism in America and the United States,
demonstrating the key role of Burke in both countries.
So convinced by Kirk was Nisbet that he
began to describe American soil as being particularly
In 1982, he claimed that there were two significant eruptions of conservative ideology in modern Western thought.
First in 1790 through 1810 in Western Europe chiefly, but to some degree in the United States.
And then in 1950 to 1970, largely in America.
Having mentioned Nisbet's debt and admiration to Russell Kirk, I should also mention Kirk's admiration for Nisbet.
For example, in The Politics of Prudence, Kirk says,
People may desire to commence their serious study of conservative thought by reading a succinct but sensible manual on the subject.
If so, I recommend particularly an agreeably slim volume by Robert A. Nisbet entitled,
entitled, Conservatism, Dream and Reality.
Kirk knew something of which he spoke.
He was, for decades, the Dean of American Conservatism.
And by all accounts, including Nisbet's,
he was the person most responsible for inciting
the post-World War II conservative intellectual
movement in America.
I agree with Kirk's assessment of conservatism, dream,
and reality.
In fact, I wrote the introduction
for the 2002 Transaction Edition of the book.
Nisbet's version of conservatism is simple, powerful, and quite appealing.
At the same time, however, I'm compelled to acknowledge my belief that Nisbet's version
of conservatism is somewhat peculiar, even perhaps singular.
Let me explain.
In an essay titled Still Questing, published in the Intercollegiate Review in 1993 to commemorate
On the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Quest for Community, Nisbet said that
any conservative group in the United States confronts a double task.
The first is to work tirelessly towards the diminution of the centralized, on-the-competent
and unitary state with its ever-growing debt and deficit.
The second and equally important task is that of protecting, reinforcing, nurturing, where
are necessary, the varied groups and associations which form the true building blocks of the
social order. Certainly any conservative would recognize the importance of those two tasks.
What is peculiar in Nisbett's view is that these are the exclusive and definitive conservative
tasks. As he put it in Prejudice as a philosophical dictionary, making it even simpler, the sole
The fundamental object of the conservative tradition is the protection of the social order and its constitutive groups from the enveloping bureaucracy of the nation-state.
Nisbet maintained throughout his career that conservatism includes just two complementary components, anti-statism and social pluralism.
It is this view of conservatism that led David Brooks a few years ago, soon after Nisbet died, in a piece that he wrote for the online AEI webpage, to call Nisbet an anti-individualist libertarian, and leads me to call him a libertarian communitarian.
Certainly, by his definition of conservatism, Nisbett qualifies as a quintessential conservative.
As I'll make clear in a few minutes, however, by this definition, many who call themselves conservatives do not qualify,
because they fail to nurture the communities constituting the social order, and or they favor statist initiatives.
Nisbet was in fact very quick to deny the label of conservatives to many who claimed it.
Nisbet's own social pluralism and anti-statism were maintained unwaveringly over the course of his long and very productive career.
In fact, in the Quest for Community, his first book, he announced the theme that united virtually everything he ever wrote.
He stated there, quote, I have chosen to deal with the political causes of the manifold alienations that lie behind the contemporary quest for community.
The real significance of the unitary state, he believed, was that it dislocated the authority and functions of traditional communities,
those of, chiefly, kinship, conscience, locale and voluntary association, leaving individuals isolated and unattached.
Like Tocqueville before him, Nisbet did not see the individual as opposed to one another.
He saw them as mutually reinforcing poles, each opposed to the social groups and associations lying between them.
Individual isolation and the fervent modern desire for a communal fellowship, Nisbet believed,
result from the erosion of intermediate communities caused by the sovereign western state.
According to Nisbet's ideal typical portrait, communities possess several requisite features.
First, communities have functions that they fulfill.
They arise to address perennial human needs and to solve problems.
As Nisbet says, quoting Ortega y Gasset,
quote, human beings do not come together to be together.
They come together to do something together.
2. A community's function must be transformed into a deeply held belief or dogma. The function
must seem good, the literal meaning of dogma. 3. Authority, not power, characterizes communities.
Authority arises through and is legitimized by spontaneous custom use and want, not as
as with power through external force.
Fourth, communities are hierarchical.
Within a community, one's identity is bound up with one's status and roles,
and it is impossible to raise such roles in a line of equality.
He says, to follow the specification of one's role in a community is to engage in and be part of a pattern of authority.
Fifth, communities are animated by a sense of honor
It elevates the concerns of individuals beyond the merely utilitarian or pecuniary.
And finally, communities sponsor feelings of solidarity and superiority.
Their essential features expose communities to both widespread suspicion and state encroachment
in the modern age.
To modern critics, these features are unsavory.
States are exclusive, intolerant, arrogant, inegalitarian and authoritarian.
And to these same critics, the state is seen to be a more fair and efficient provider of
social functions.
Nonetheless, according to Nisbet, it's not those features that lead to the decline of
community for the most part.
War has been the chief historical occasion and means for the state to consolidate its
The War State, he says, is the main cause of the welfare state.
In Twilight of Authority, a book he wrote in the mid-70s, one of his more influential
books, he estimates that 75% of all national programs in western societies designed to
equalize income, property and opportunity in the last 200 years have been, in the first
Concerning the United States specifically, Nisbet argued that although the full flowering of the welfare state occurred after the mid-1960s, the ultimate roots lie with Woodrow Wilson's actions during World War I.
1.
Nisbet says, quote, Wilson's political, economic, social and intellectual reorganization
of America in the short period of 1917 to 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, end quote.
Nisbet argued, in fact, that the New Deal was no more than an assemblage of government
structures modeled on those that existed in 1917.
Still according to Nisbet, it was World War II that gave the largest impetus to the idea
of the national community.
The real novelty and importance of World War II in Nisbet's eyes was that it created,
quote, a formal, official and lasting union between the intellectual and the national
Government, at least when the latter could be thought of as in trustworthy hands like
Wilson's or FDR's.
The Cold War followed, and the tie between the intellectual and national government became
even firmer.
He says, quote, political omnicompetence, with the state the spearhead of all social
and cultural life, industrialization, however farcical in context, nationalization of education,
rampant secularization and growing consumer hedonism, all this speaks modernity to the Western
Clarity and the welcome sign of the developed, the progressive."
Before World War I, socialist and liberal intellectuals viewed the state as a threat
to liberties, but after a century of wars and the moral equivalents of war, the left-leaning
two great traditions in Western thought, what he called, on the one hand, political monism and what he called, on the other hand, social pluralism.
This distinction bears little relationship to the more conventional distinctions between liberal and conservative or between progressive and traditional thought.
Political monism begins with Plato and includes Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham and Lenin, among many others.
According to Nisbet, each of these thinkers blended social nihilism with political affirmation.
And the affirmation in each instance, he says, is the state conceived as being not force or repression, but justice, freedom and tranquility for the individual.
Nisbet states in Twilight of Authority that within this tradition, such groups as family, locality, neighborhood, church and other autonomous associations
are almost uniformly reduced to their individual atoms, made into unities dependent upon concession of existence by the state, or in some other way significantly degraded.
Among the political monists, Nisbett called Hobbes and Rousseau the prime catalytic agents in modern political thought, and in 1953, in a letter to Russell Kirk, he called Rousseau the real demon of the modern mind.
The tradition of social pluralism, on the other hand, begins with Aristotle and includes
Aquinas, Burke, Tocqueville, Acton, Pradhan and Kripadkhan.
For these thinkers, freedom proceeds less from the form of government than it does from
From the relationship of government, whatever its form, to the communities comprising society.
As Nisbet says, a government monarchical or oligarchical in structure can be a free government,
if has been the case many times in history.
It respects the other institutions of society and permits autonomies accordingly in the
social and economic spheres.
For pluralists, liberty cannot exist if the power of the state has reached out to encompass
all spheres of social, moral, economic and intellectual existence.
The chief aim of social pluralists is to nurture and preserve the groups and associations constituting
the social order for Nisbet.
Nisbet considered Aristotle, Burke and Tocqueville the most important social pluralists, but
But he admired social pluralism in any form, be it called conservative, liberal or radical.
Indeed, it's worth stressing that Pradhanan Kripadkin, both advocates of anarchist mutualism,
were among the thinkers that Nisbet most admired.
Nisbet's rather ecumenical view of social pluralism is worth stressing because he was
very discriminating when assessing conservatives in terms of their social pluralism and anti-statism.
He denied the label of conservative in Conservatism, Dream and Reality, Prejudices, a Philosophical
Dictionary and various essays to militarists, populists, social conservatives and libertarians.
Concerning militarists, he said flatly that the military spirit and conservatism have
have nothing in common because war undermines the parochial affections while enhancing the
power of the state and its centralized bureaucratic machinery.
For their part, Nisbet says that populists dream the conservative nightmare, a society
in which all constitutional limitations upon the direct power of the people or any passing
Regarding social conservatives, Nisbett denied that those aligned with the far right, especially
evangelicals, are genuine conservatives.
He stated that conservative, in the Burkean sense of the term, could not be applied to
most evangelicals because Burke distrusted enthusiasm in any form.
Some evangelicals in his bit maintain, quote, there is an incessant desire to prove to others
the exclusive truth of a single way of life or thought.
At any rate, he observed that such groups as the moral majority and the Christian coalition
seek to replace, quote, the social and economic provider state with what he called the moral
provider state.
He concluded that the far right is less interested in Berkian immunities from government than
And it is in putting a maximum of government power in the hands of those who could be trusted.
Finally, in an essay titled, Conservatism and Libertarians, Uneasy Cousins, first published
in 1980, Nisbet described libertarians as reliable and strident anti-status, but he denied
that they are genuine conservatives because they are not social pluralists.
He says, more and more, one has the impression that for libertarians today, individuals are
alone real, institutions are but their shadows.
I believe the state of mind is developing among libertarians in which the coercions
of family, church, local community and school will seem almost as inimical to freedom as
those of the political government.
He adds, libertarians appear to see social and moral authority and despotic power as
elements of a single spectrum, as an unbroken continuity.
If their argument goes, we are to be spared leviathan, we must challenge any and all forms
of authority, including those that are inseparable from the social bond, end quote.
In short, he says, among certain libertarians, the authority of communities is mistaken for
the power of the bureaucratic state, and such authority is deemed as greater threat to liberty
as state power.
Nisbet identifies no libertarians by name in this essay, although I certainly have known
libertarians who seem to deem the authority of natural institutions or voluntary associations
is no different from the coercive power of the state.
At the same time, however, certain libertarians clearly also qualify as social pluralists.
Like Nisbet, they fear state power because it atomizes society and destroys communities,
to my mind anyway.
If Nisbet is well described as a libertarian communitarian, and as far as I know I'm the
Because of his anti-statism and his social pluralism, the same can be said of Friedrich Hayek, Charles Murray and David Boas, despite their sometimes very different rhetoric.
For each of these thinkers, we are animated by natural social sentiments, and our happiness depends in large measure upon our capacity to spontaneously pursue our social ends.
In his classic essay Individualism, True and False, Hayek observes that for the old wigs or classical liberals,
as far as I know he never called himself a libertarian, he always called himself an old wig or a classical liberal,
the term self-love and selfish interest did not mean, quote,
did not mean egotism in the narrow sense of concern with only the immediate needs of one's
person proper.
The self for which alone people are supposed to care did as a matter of course include
their family and friends, and it would have made no difference to their argument if it
had included anything for which people did in fact care.
If you've got your copy of the Second Treatise, look to see what Locke says about self-love.
It's not limited to us. It's us and our friends. It's our self-love which causes us to be partial towards ourselves and our friends.
and that is what causes the condition of war in the state of nature.
Such care and concern, Hayek argued, is in fact instinctual.
He says in The Fatal Conceit,
Our instincts of solidarity and altruism are molded in the environment of the face-to-face tribe.
In his writing, of course, in The Fatal Conceit and earlier writing, he's very much an evolutionary thinker.
He says, quote, an isolated man would soon have been a dead man. The primitive individualism described by Thomas Hobbes is hence a myth. End quote.
He says that within the extended order, the old instinctual responses such as solidarity and altruism continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collaboration,
Even though they are incapable by themselves of creating a basis for the extended order.
Nonetheless, according to Hayek, reconciling our natural instincts with the extended order is as necessary as it is terribly difficult.
He says, rather famously,
If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos, i.e. of the small band or tribe, or of, say, our families, to the macro-cosmos, our whiter society, as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.
Such efforts lead to the fatal conceit and the years of socialism.
What Hayek states in the next sentence, which completes his paraphrase of Kant, is just as important, however.
Quote, if we were to apply, always to apply, the rules of the extended order to our most intimate groupings, we would crush them. End quote.
These rules, of course, the rules of contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain and privacy, according to Hayek, if extended beyond their proper sphere are as destructive as the fatal conceit.
At least that's how I read his paraphrase of Kant there.
Arguably, this is precisely what anti-communitarian libertarians, like the ones Nisbet criticizes, seek to do.
For his part, Murray says in his book, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government,
The pursuit of individual happiness cannot be an atomistic process.
It will naturally and always occur in the context of communities.
The state's role in enabling the pursuit of happiness depends ultimately on nurturing not individuals, but the associations they form."
And before I proceed, I would think that, in fact, the pursuit of, in pursuit of happiness in good government would qualify as both a libertarian and a communitarian classic.
I think it's a wonderful book, personally.
Murray believes with Nisbet that it is not enough to be an anti-statist if that anti-statism combines with an unalloyed valorization of the individual.
As Tocqueville observed 170 years ago, the tutelary administrative state is not the enemy of socially disembodied individuals.
Rather, such a state depends upon the existence of such individuals.
In order to develop this point, I will dilate for a moment on several observations made
by David Boas in his chapter on civil society and libertarianism, a primer.
Given their simultaneous and equal concern for civil society and free market, Boas asserts
That had the term not been wrongly appropriated and utterly corrupted by statists, the right term for libertarian would be socialist.
Page 24 of Libertarianism. He's not being perverse there.
He's simply saying that if we made a legitimate distinction between society and the state and terms were used appropriately,
We didn't allow statists to choose the term socialism.
It would be an apt description for a libertarian.
He asserts, quote, we can barely survive and hardly flourish
without interacting with other people.
We want to associate with others to achieve instrumental ends,
producing food, exchanging goods, developing technology,
but also because we feel a deep human need for connectedness,
for Love and Friendship and Community.
The associations we form with others make up what we call civil society.
We call these associations civil society because that is what the Scottish moralists called
them.
But for Marx, who got the term from Hegel, who got it from Adam Ferguson, civil society,
which includes markets, was a great evil, the source of social atomization for which
The Irony, as Boas says, is that Marxism created in the Soviet Union a society far more atomized than anything in the capitalist world.
Boas's important point is that the concentration of state power creates de-socialized individuals, a point made long ago by Tocqueville.
The other side of the Tocquevillian equation not mentioned by Boas needs to be stressed, at least if I want to get some disagreement, however, that valorizing individuals, deeming them as alone real, and believing that institutions are mere shadowy emanations necessarily leads to the growth of the state.
The causal arrow does not move just one way. Individualism and the concentration of state power necessarily grow in tandem. When individuals are atomized, the state is the only institutional organ capable of undertaking significant tasks.
Consequently, I would assert that any libertarian who is not also a communitarian in the vizbedian sense of the term, not the habits of the heart sense of the term, and social pluralist, one who advocates an epidermal form of individualism, who employs contractual language to describe all relationships, who believes that authority is indeed one with power, and who fails to comprehend our innate sociability,
In keeping with his anti-statism and social pluralism, and the conclusions of both the
quest for community and the twilight of authority, Nisbet suggests that the great need of our
Our age is to address the balance between the power of the unitary state and the authority
of communities.
What we need, he suggests, is a new laissez-faire, a form of laissez-faire that has as its object
not the abstract individual, whether economic or political man, but rather the social group
or association.
The new laissez-faire would supplement, not replace, the old laissez-faire, because the
The liberal values of freedom and autonomy are best achieved when community flourishes,
when conditions foster diversity of culture, plurality of association, and the division
of authority.
Of course, Nisbet recognized the legitimate role of the national state regarding issues
of justice, national defense, and public works.
Extensive administration and arbitrary power, both of which Nisbet feared, should not be
Confused with Strong and Energetic Government within its Proper Sphere. The latter is as
necessary to spontaneous sociability as the former are dangerous. But, Nisbet says, from
the centrality of the government, it does not follow that it must be omnacompetent,
responsible for daily existence and ever in our lives, and worst of all, pretend moral
teacher, guide to virtue and mother of spirit.
From these few comments, it should be clear that Nisbet's fear of the government as a
moral teacher and mother of spirit was indiscriminate.
He feared such a government, be it of the left or right.
What my brief comments cannot convey is just how rich a resource Nisbet's works are for
any committed social pluralist and anti-statist.
From issues of perennial concern, such as the sources of corrosive self-doting and the
The Vital Role of the Family to the Maintenance of Social Order and Individual Achievement
To the more timely issues of School of Vouchers, which he was writing about in the 1970s, the
use of faith-based organizations to administer government programs, and community approaches
to crime, Nisbett's works are a potential source of great illumination.
As tempted as I am to conclude on this laudatory note, I will not do so, because I believe
that Nisbet had a glaring failure in his thinking, which requires notice, if for no other reason
than to save my comments from hagiography.
Simply put, for all his genius and insight, Nisbet failed to fully recognize the role
of Human Nature in Human Affairs, or to use a term Dennis Wrong used years ago to criticize
the tendencies of sociological thinking, Nisbet had an over-socialized view of human beings.
More simply yet, Nisbet was a social constructivist. In his view, human nature is neither a leash
nor a guide. What human beings are and do is the result of culture and social inventions.
For example, in Twilight of Authority, he writes of our quote, natural impulses towards
social initiative and social invention, but this inventiveness is completely detached
from nature, biology and instinct.
He says quote, the origins of kinship in man's history are of course lost, but we do better
Consider to conjure up a vision of some primitive salon, the Athenian lawgiver, then of mere
instinct in the fashioning of structures as ingeniously designed as clan, moiety and tribe,
with their complex requirements of endogamy and exogamy, and their delicate balancing
of authority and responsibility."
He continues, if mankind's earliest social inventiveness is to be seen in kinship after
to the Invention of Agriculture and the Metallurgical Arts.
The local community was invented, he says, quote, in every legitimate sense of the word,
local community with its complex functions and roles was a social invention.
The flipside of Nisbet's social constructivism is what might be called his biophobia, an
aversion to biological explanations of virtually any social phenomenon.
Biophobia and social constructivism are maintained today by a bewildering array of people ranging
from most feminist and literary deconstructionists on the left to many anti-Darwinian Christians
and conservatives on the right.
I need not be a Darwinian biologist to believe, however, that although nature is always expressed
via nurture, no biologist believes in genetic determinism, natural inclinations and even
natural institutions exist.
I would submit, for instance, that at this point the evidence is overwhelming that kinship,
The requirements of endogamy and exogamy, reciprocal friendship, in-group tribal affections,
out-group tribal animosities, and local community are not historical products of inventive geniuses.
They are grounded in the most vigorous inclinations of human nature.
They have existed as long as our species has existed.
Although the precise form and condition of these inclinations is of course influenced
by Culture and Social Invention.
Nisbet's social pluralist heroes, Aristotle, Burke,
and Tocqueville, maintain this view.
Each of these thinkers argued for the importance
of intermediate institutions, because such institutions
express essential natural human sentiments.
Although Aristotle grounded the social order in human nature
far more thoroughly than did Burke and Tocqueville.
Nisbet's justifications for local and parochial institutions, by contrast, are made in terms
of their functionality and efficiency. Such terms can be reliable, but without a bedrock
standard in human nature, one's argument can be overturned by references to functionality
and efficiency. For example, I believe the evidence is very strong that nature recommends
that children be raised by their biological parents and other kin, and certainly Nisbet
also defended traditional notions of the family, but if efficiency and functionality are the
standards justifying the traditional family, then those who believe the state can and should
take an active role in raising children will likely gain ground by invoking these same
standards.
In any event, I believe that Nisbet's neglect of human nature weakens his case for communities
or Intermediate Institutions, and that his belief in social invention led him to several
dubious conclusions.
For example, he cited the youth communes of the 1970s as indicating the recovery of community,
and he was friendly towards Emil Durkheim's corporatism, a scheme by which professions
and industries would be arranged on communal principles.
Without a full acknowledgement of human nature, there are no means by which to recognize the
limits of social invention.
In this regard, I will note my own view that Burke's acquaintance David Hume, in an inquiry
concerning the principles of morals, and Burke's good friend Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, provide the most convincing and complete accounts ever written on the natural
Social passions are instincts and their relationship to social institutions, historical and otherwise.
As Nisbet once observed, the moral philosophy of the Scottish moralist was richly socio-biological,
just as Aristotle's had been.
The Scottish moralist, he said, quote, located the source of every significant pattern of
behavior in some passion drive or instinct.
Altruism, Smith thought, was the innate drive in man that made society possible, just as
the instinct to truck and barter, to buy and sell, was the true source of the economic
system.
Smith, of course, never used the term altruism.
The term was coined by Auguste Comte in the mid-19th century, but he did argue that benevolence,
selfless regard for others, is grounded in natural social passions that weaken with social
In order from strongest to weakest ties, our parents, children, siblings, extended family, friends, colleagues and neighbors are recommended to our care by nature, according to Smith.
Our goodwill is unlimited, he argued, but our good offices, our active duties, are inherently limited.
Universal benevolence, he believed, is utterly impotent.
Nisbet also criticized universal benevolence, but if local community is a social invention
ungrounded in nature, and if social inventions are to be assessed in terms of their utility,
why should we not hope that institutions based upon universal benevolence will replace local
communities?
At the very least, Nisbet provides no reason to not experiment with such social inventions.
During Smith, let me note one more important point. Although Smith argued for the existence
of innate drives and moral sentiments, he is aptly described as being sociobiological.
As most of you know, he hardly denied the significance of such institutions. For example,
the propensity to truck barter and exchange may be innate, but Smith's attacks on the
mercantile system and the wealth of nations make perfectly clear he believed that free
Free and unregulated markets, which simultaneously release our innate drives and harness them
for the public good, are anything but inevitable even within commercial societies.
I've just taken a side there and note that for Smith, we are of course by nature social,
but we're not by nature political.
Political regimes only emerge in the hurting stage, they're not part of the original condition.
Smith argued social institutions can easily warp the natural moral sentiments even if these
sentiments can never be entirely perverted.
As Nisbet's student Jerry Mueller says, Mueller studied with Nisbet at Columbia. Many of you
would know his book, Mind in the Market, a wonderful book. In another book, his book
on Smith, he says of Smith, he was a psychological institutionalist. In both his major works,
This sought to identify the institutional means by which the better angels of our nature
could be deduced and by which even our baser instincts might be made to serve the greater
good.
Returning in conclusion to Nisbet, his neglect of human nature may be considered something
of an occupational hazard because sociologists are given to social constructivism.
Specifically, though, Nisbet was greatly influenced by Emile Durkheim, who asserted,
quote, individual natures are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms, end quote.
Like Durkheim, Nisbet overappraised the importance of the social factor in molding individual nature,
of Human Nature, and he mis-assessed the plasticity of human nature, in my view anyway.
Consequently, as great a thinker as I believe Nisbet was, I also believe that sure guidance
for an understanding of our social nature and institution actually comes from the likes
of human Smith.
Like Nisbet, they were social pluralists and anti-statists, but they grounded their views
used in a systemic, systematic and truthful account of human nature.
In short, classical liberals, about whom Professor von Mises wrote so eloquently, were the original and most insightful libertarian communitarians.
I assume I'm supposed to take some questions or observations.
Overall, I think your points are well taken, and that a lot of libertarians have written things about the importance of voluntary associations towards the maintenance of social order and so on and so forth.
But when libertarians talk about individualism, they mean it in two senses, when they talk about legitimate individualism.
The first is metaphysical, namely that only individuals exist. Social institutions never exist apart from the actions of individuals.
And the second is moral, namely that when we judge the value of those institutions, we look at their effects on individuals.
We don't say, you know, families are good because they're families. We say they're good because they hurt their children, because they perform these functions.
And if you deny those points, you're left with only two options. One is that either the institutions are good in themselves.
themselves. And that seems to be the way that NISPIT is going from your presentation of it. And the other way is that these institutions exert forces beyond the ability of individuals to control, and that then the state needs to come in and make sure those forces are benevolent, which is the left-wing way of taking the argument that institutions have their own power. So that's why I think I'm kind of hesitant to talk about institutions as anything but the results of individual action, because otherwise you end up in one of those two positions.
I guess I feel comfortable with what you're saying, at least I understand what you're saying.
But I'm not certain, I'm just not clear on the significance of that original distinction, the metaphysical and then the moral.
I'm just being dim, I guess. But why is that distinction significant for someone who would be a libertarian?
Well, I'm just saying that we don't mean that you reject voluntary associations by that.
There are two sentences in which we mean that individuals are the fundamental moral units
and that they're the fundamental metaphysical units.
And that so both when we're talking about the characteristics of institutions,
hence the metaphysical point, and when we're talking about their values,
the moral point, we may have to make an appeal to individuals.
Okay. Now if I were not a libertarian on the metaphysical dimension and said, for example, that the family is a natural institution that exists as a consequence of biological urges and hormones and things of that sort, would I be violating some tenet of libertarianism?
Not as a political philosophy, I'm just talking about the metaphysics from which libertarians approach the institution.
They're not denying that man has a social nature, that he has a tendency to associate, and so on and so forth.
But rather, these institutions, you can't just point to something and say, that's a family.
It's always composed of individuals.
There's a complex of actions together that we call family relations, because they're of a certain character.
Well, I feel comfortable with that.
I just want to clarify, somewhere Mises points out that if you observe a group of men and women planting a flag on an area of land,
those people could be, depending on their thoughts and the meanings of their actions, being representatives of the British Crown.
Or, with those same actions, they could be claiming for themselves.
It depends on what their, you know, the meanings of those actions always depend on their thoughts.
So they are real in a different sense than the British government is real.
Or to take a more current example, when the tanks, the Soviet tanks, have their guns pointing out at the crowd around the parliament building,
and the Communist Party holds up, they were acting as part of the Soviet state, but when
their minds changed over a few days and the turrets turned inward, so the guns were pointing
at the parliament, then the Soviet state disappeared as a thing because people's ideas changed.
Individuals are real in a different way than these institutions are.
depend on their thoughts and meanings, and so when you say that libertarians believe that it's just a mere shadowy emanation,
I don't think that's necessarily the right way of putting it, or a clear way of putting it.
Well, I think you were quoting me there, but I was paraphrasing Lisbeth earlier. I did change, I just thought I wouldn't state it exactly.
I was paraphrasing something that he asserts.
And again, it's a really wonderful essay.
It has been reproduced a couple of times.
You don't have to go back to 1980 and find the modern age.
It's really a wonderful essay.
But alas, there are no footnotes.
And he mentions no libertarians by name.
It's kind of unsettling.
But I've certainly known libertarians who seem to me to get fairly close to that.
But on the other hand, I've known others who are self-professed libertarians, like Boas and Murray, who don't seem to be talking that language to me.
I'm sorry, should I go back to...
It's just a quick comment. The reason that I find concern is when I see statements like the abstract individual,
Just seems wrong to me. The individuals are real, and they're more real in a sense than the institutions, which are just a result of their actions.
Well, again, I feel comfortable with that. Right here?
I'm a little concerned about the usage of social pluralism and the grouping of NISBID with Hayek, specifically in regards to the way NISBID talks about the two forces of conservatism.
The first to be anti-status and the second to protect, reinforce, nurture where necessary the very groups and associations which form the true building blocks of the social order.
I'm curious if this second task doesn't present an excessive emphasis on the intrinsic qualities of particular institutions
and ignores the more Hayekian conception of recognizing the process in which we create institutions that a more Misesian would say that is categorized by volunteerism and ownership and property that we can systematically recognize the benefits of, say, capitalist organizations versus status organizations but to just say, to support the groups and associations which form the true building blocks of the social work
I mean, it implies things like churches and businesses, but I think an effect of framing it that way might turn into like a bipartisan platform conception, in which we're more interested in particular policy issues and the stances in which these institutions take versus these other institutions.
So the libertarian would be left to say, I'm an advocate of the church over the state, but that doesn't necessarily close the door at eliminating that church from becoming stated.
I should say this, I may be the only sociologist in the country who calls himself a classical liberal, and who teaches Hayek and has for 17 years in a core class.
I'm a great enthusiast for Hayek. I would have to concede this, he spends much more time talking about the importance of the rules of the extended order.
That's the important thing in Hayek. But I do think that those passages I
quoted are really quite important. As in all classical liberal thought, there's a
fundamental divide between institutions wherein strangers meet and institutions
that are familial. You can find it in Hume, Smith, the realm of benevolence, the realm
of Justice, and it may be, just trying to make sense of what Nisbett is saying there,
for those who he's criticizing, there may be a certain temptation to neglect the significance
of those, I'll even use the term, natural institutions of the family.
I was online just yesterday and came across an essay by a woman who's named many of
A libertarian, though, I'm not certain she still calls herself that, Jennifer Roback Morse, on the family.
And I think she's quite eloquent on the family and points some very important things out to libertarians.
As the family gets weaker and weaker, the state necessarily grows.
I'll recommend this essay. I can't remember the name of the contract in the title.
It was in the April policy review. So again, I'm just trying to make sense of Nisbet's description there of people in 1980 who he calls libertarians.
I don't think that's Hayek. Now, the fact is, I think we'd all agree, it's vastly more important to talk about the rules of the extended order and make a defense for those.
Those. But it's not either or. That in fact, we've got to at the same time recognize the
importance of natural institutions, I use plural, I think there's only one, the family,
and then voluntary associations at the same time. So at least to some degree I'm trying
to just justify what strikes me as really excessive rhetoric there when he's talking
When I came across Mises, I was curious as to how he was so well accepted into the conservative movement.
Then when I read your statements about him denying the term conservative to established conservatives,
I wondered even more, why was he so welcomed in the umbrella of the greater conservative movement
if he was really born in their theoretical side.
It is a good question, and it's something of a mystery.
He was an engaging man and a man with quite a bit of public influence.
He was an extremely handsome man, not that I'm thinking people too influenced by that sort of thing,
but it is peculiar that he got away with things.
I gave a presentation in April to ISI Group, a conference of about 300 people.
Much of what I said today was drawn from that.
And there I had occasion to point out that he was not pro-abortion, but he was anti-anti-abortion.
And boy, in that crowd, they just shut off.
He was not opposed to abortion.
He just shut down. I could see the crowd, most of them very religious, intensely evangelical and catholic students.
It was over. I didn't need to say anything more after that. Nisbet pitched it.
And I even had a fellow from Christendom College say, should we have had this conference on Robert Nisbet?
He's not a conservative. Early on he was very close to Russell Kirk.
Issues like abortion did not loom large for people who called themselves conservative in 50 to 73 when he was establishing his reputation.
He did write beautifully. He really was a wonderful stylist of the English language.
It's worth reading even if you don't think you'll like him because of his capacity to turn a phrase.
And he was well connected. He ended up at AEI. He was close with people like Irving Kristol and others.
Certainly, no doubt, there were people who wouldn't have much talk with Nisbet, who called themselves conservatives.
I did want to get one on their hand. We need to finish within two minutes, is that right?
Let me just note this, the real mystery for me as a sociologist, again, a peculiar sociologist,
someone who calls himself a classical liberal, how did he flourish so much within my field?
He was a sociologist and a conservative. Many of you have been on college campuses, though
seldom go together, but he did extremely well. He was a dean at Riverside, was the
According to Wilfer McClay, the highest paid professor in the United States when he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at Columbia,
was the president of the Pacific Sociological Society and a conservative.
Again, this may just be that I came of age as a sociologist in the 70s and 80s,
And there were about three of us who would fall anywhere on the right side of the spectrum.
I'm exaggerating. There are more than three. But that, for me, is even a larger mystery.
How did he flourish as much as he did in sociology?
I said I would get your hand, so maybe we should make this the last question.
I was just wondering if you could elaborate on the quote where he says,
I believe I got that quotation I didn't put that
I put the page in on that. I just put some of those page numbers in there to remind me.
I believe that came from the present age. If not, it was from the twilight of authority.
But I must say that it struck me as reminiscent of debates that were going on at an earlier time in the 70s
and maybe into the early 80s about modernization and all of that.
The rhetoric there strikes me as being something from another era.
Now, he can't be described here as someone who is opposed to modernization overall.
At least I wouldn't feel comfortable if I left the sense that he believed that the poor ties should remain poor forever.
But he did think that among what he called the Clarity, there may have been a certain
indifference to local institutions. Anything that represented modernity was ipso facto good.
That's what he's asserting there. I wouldn't want to defend it. When we look at what has
has happened in Asia since he wrote that. Industrialization is damn nifty.
Well, I guess we're out of time. Thank you.