Robert Nisbet's Conservatism

American sociologist Robert Nisbet (1913-96) wrote a book entitled Conservatism: Dream and Reality, which was published in 1986. Nisbet was a widely read, erudite fellow and the book adds some things to other writings on conservatism, at least it articulates some conservative principles in a fresh manner. However, there are several things that bother me about the book. One of these is Nisbet's giving far more words to criticism of the French Revolution than he does to the Industrial Revolution. On p. 64 Nisbet wrote:

Yet another aspect of the conservative philosophy of property in modern history is found in the frequent criticisms of capitalism, together with its industrialism, commerce, and technology, by conservatives. As I have stressed above, conservativism is almost as much a response to the industrial as the democratic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

I have several problems with this statement: 1) my reading suggests that it is not true that his emphasis has been almost as much on the industrial revolution; as I read him criticism of the French Revolution gets far more attention and always is mentioned first, while the critique of capitalism and industrialism appears as second and something tacked on after fulsome criticism of the French Revolution; and, 2) this "democratic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century" must, in large part be a a reference to the French Revolution and it is at least questionable whether that Revolution was primarily 'democratic' as it had significant elitist elements. In general, I think Nisbet and other conservatives use 'democratic' somewhat loosely. He certainly approves of the republican, representaive system articulated in the U.S. Constitution which was certainly democratic in some sense even if not absolutely so.

His secondary emphasis on the Industrial Revolution and capitalism is important because it seems to me likely that these forces have had far more profound influence upon the modern world than the French Revolution. Certainly this is utterly true of the United States; the U.S. Constitution and federal government were already in place when the French Revolution occurred and although the latter was a topic of heated debate in the U.S. it had minimal influence upon U.S. institutions. However, the only true social revolution the U.S. has undergone is the Industrial Revolution. I believe American 'conservatives' like Nisbet are less consistent in the application of conservative principles to the Industrial Revolution because that would be a bit too non-conformist in the USA. The American Ideology pretty much holds capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the highest regard for their contribution to American consumer abundance. Nonetheless, I believe it is inconsistent and timid to hold certain principles and yet soft pedal their application where it is politically inconvenient.

Nisbet makes it clear that the revolutionary social change, the destruction of local groups and authority and 'massification' of modern urban capitalist life, the crass materialism, and the individualism of American industrial capitalism are thoroughly repugnant to a genuine conservative philosophy; yet glorification and protection of American industrial capitalism are a major tenet in the pseudo-conservatism of William F. Buckley, et. al. from the the 1950s until today. Under the pressures of political ambition and will to power, actual conservative principles have been jettisoned by American pseudo-conservatives.

How Did the US Lose "Community"?

In recent posts I've pointed out the central value that genuine conservatives place upon local, face-to-face, decentralized groups: family, school, church, local government, etc. These are what make up a true sense of "community." Robert Nisbet (1913-96) was an American sociologist and conservative who was invited by President Reagan to give a prestigious lecture in the late 1980s as recognition of his conservative contribution. I haven't read enough Nisbet yet to determine if I'd categorize him as a genuine conservative or pseudo-conservative but I'll be reading more soon. Probably his most famous book was published in 1953 as The Quest for Community which he later republished as Community and Power (1962, Oxford UP). As I said in a previous post:

Usually such analyses [of the loss of face-to-face community] (see Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, first published in 1953) have emphasized the state as sucking up the powers of localities and creating the mass society. I suspect this is because in America it is relatively rare to read mainstream academics who are willing to criticize American industrialization leading to huge centralized corporations as a primary factor in creating atomized ‘mass’ individuals whose primary function is to consume in a self-indulgent fashion.

Let's examine what it was in American life that led to the loss of face-to-face community? In 1957 American historian Samuel P. Hays published a rather popular book entitled The Response to Industrialism: 1885-1914. This is an excellent look at this period. Hays' (pp. 1-2) opening paragraphs stated:

The history of modern America is, above all, a story of the impact of industrialism on every phase of human life. It is difficult for us today fully to imagine the implications of this change, for we did not know an earlier America firsthand.... Looking backward scarcely more than forty or fifty years, [the American of 1914] fully recognized that his country had changed rapidly and fundamentally.... Seldom, if ever, in American history had so much been altered within the lifetime of a single man.... Formerly, perhaps, he had resided in the intimate surroundings of his town or rural community. If he remained there in 1914, he had encountered with some fear the expansion into the countryside of a new urban culture that threatened the familiar order with strange, even dangerous, ides. Or moving to Chicago, one of the nation's rapidly growing urban centers, he had experienced the indifference of city people toward each other, which contrasted sharply with the atmosphere of the small community from which he had come.... If he had been especially sensitive to personal values, he would have looked with horror upon the way in which the impersonal forces of industrialism seemed to place one at the mercy of influences far beyond one's control. In such an atmosphere how could personal character count for anything; how could anyone exercise personal responsibility?

And these are from the first two paragraphs of a 193 page book. I find it difficult to understand how writers like Nisbet can blame the centralized government for the atomization of local communities into mass urban societies where local authority based upon small face-to-face groups has been lost. Industrialization in the 19th century created a 'social revolution' possibly comparable at least in part to the French Revolution. However, since our social values are so partial to business, economic progress and industrialization, I think some writers pass over this because it would seem to attack the very foundations of American values; rather it is so much easier to blame it on the central government because anti-government feeling is almost equal to pro-business feeling in the American ideology.

I am NOT saying that we ought to roll back the clock to a pre-industrial age or any such thing. My point is a descriptive one: if we are trying to understand the breakdown of local 'autonomous' social groups and the trading of local community and local authority for modern atomized 'mass society' then let's be accurate about what the primary cause was; it was industrialization.

Examining Genuine American Conservatism

In my continuing attempt to define conservatism and to clarify what 'conservatism' means in an American context I am currently re-reading Clinton Rossiter's Conservatism in America (Second Edition Revised, 1962). This is a wise and important book that deserves more attention 45 years after this Second Edition appeared.

But let me remind why this whole definitional project is necessary. If one goes back to my first post, Why Pseudo-Conservatives are not "Conservative", you can see that it is essential that I carefully define what 'conservative' actually means. This is necessary preparatory to showing that most of those Americans usually referred to today as "conservatives" or "neo-conservatives" are in fact not 'conservative' at all but are radicals pressing programs of extreme change in American life which, if they continue to be successful, will probably lead to the decline and fall of what has been admirable in American life and values. To a large extent this is the brunt of Claes Ryn's identification of "the New Jacobins" in his America the Virtuous.

Let me briefly sketch some of Clinton Rossiter's main points. First, he distinguished "Conservatism" with a capital 'C' from small 'c' conservatism, and he did so for an excellent reason. Conservatism (capital 'C') is the tradition of socio-political philosophy going back to Edmund Burke (1729-97). Rossiter rightly claims that since America was founded upon a basically 'liberal' tradition that emphasized, reason, progress, individualism, democracy, liberty and equality, and since nearly all Americans subscribe to this basically 'liberal' philosophy, that Burkean Conservatism is not prominent in America's primary traditions. Remember that Burke's founding of Conservatism was a reaction to the first truly social revolution in modern history, the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a truly social revolution because it aimed at society-wide overthrow of most of the foundations of France up to that time: it aimed to overthrow the monarchy as a system of government and replace it with a republican form of government, it aimed to overthrow the higher social orders of nobility and priesthood as privileged rulers of society, with the priesthood it aimed to overthrow the existence of an Established religion and replace it with Reason as religion, and it aimed to overthrow what remained of a feudal economy with one based more on freedom of enterprise (see William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, Second Edition, 1988).

In comparison to the great French social revolution against which Burke inveighed, the so-called "American Revolution" is really more appropriately labeled a War for Independence; it was certainly not a social revolution. Perhaps this is why Burke was relatively sympathetic to American colonial complaints. After the War for Independence America was socially, politically, and legally nearly identical with what it had been prior to that War. Thus, America was founded upon English constitutional liberalism and, since it never had a feudal nobility, a local monarchy or an established religion, it never needed a social revolution; it has been based upon a liberal philosophy from its inception.

So American conservatism must always be seen as existing within this essentially liberal tradition. That is why I quoted Peter Viereck in a prior post so prominently: :

…romanticizing conservatives refuse to face up to the old and solid historical roots of most or much American liberalism…. In contrast, a genuinely rooted, history-minded conservative conserves the roots that are really there, exactly as Burke did…. American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism…. The Burkean builds on the concrete existing historical base, not on a vacuum of abstract wishful thinking. When, as in America, that concrete base includes British liberalism of the 1680’s and New Deal reforms of the 1930’s, then the real American conserver assimilates into conservatism whatever he finds lasting and good in liberalism and in the New Deal…. [I]n America it is often the free trade unions who unconsciously are our ablest representatives of the word they hate and misunderstand: conservatism. The organic unity they restore to the atomized ‘proletariat’ is… providential…. So we come full circle in America’s political paradox; our conservatism, in the absence of medieval feudal relics, must grudgingly admit it has little real tradition to conserve except that of liberalism—which then turns out to be a relatively conservative liberalism.(last emphasis added)

Point: Rossiter, like Viereck, shows that American small 'c' conservatism has to be seen as based within an essentially liberal tradition and thus won't be precisely the same as Burkean capital 'C' Conservatism. Indeed, as Rossiter wrote on p. 96:

even in [America's] most conservative moments, when we most want to be at rest, we come to rest on a tradition--the famous Liberal tradition--that speaks out loud and clear in the language of liberty and equality, democracy and progress, adventure and opportunity. This is the reason that no one, neither the foreign observer nor the American himself, will ever quite understand what the American says and does. The American, like his tradition, is deeply liberal, deeply conservative. If this is a paradox, so, too, is America.

However, Rossiter made a point that I believe is fundamental to understanding a force within the American experience that really does come closest to meriting the label "revolutionary": the force set free by American capitalism in the latter part of the 19th century, the force of the Industrial Revolution. Although it is frequently a subordinate point in Rossiter's book, he nonetheless notes that the Industrial Revolution was probably the major revolutionary force in American history (at least, I would argue, until the 20th century). Rossiter (p. 16), when recounting "important events for the rise of conscious conservatism" mentions the French Revolution and Burke's critique of it and then adds "the Industrial Revolution, which made change rather than stability the essential style of the social process...." On pages 94-6 Rossiter enlarges on the significance of the American Industrial Revolution in a passage I consider extremely important and which I here quote at length:

we must... [make] the distinction between change, a transformation of values or institutions in which government plays no direct part, and reform, a transformation... through the conscious use of political authority. Industrialization, which puts children to work in factories, is change; child-labor legislation, which takes them out again, is reform. When men build railroads or invent assembly lines or convert atomic energy into power, thus transforming the lives of millions of people, that is change. When other men pass laws to regulate railroads or raise wages of men on assembly lines or license producers of atomic power, that is reform. Now, if we look again at our history, we find that many of our so-called conservatives, the "wise and good and rich" on the American Right, were in an important sense not conservatives at all. While they could always be counted on to oppose reform, they were casual or at best ambivalent about change. In point of fact, they had an immense stake in social change--specifically, in the transformation of this country from a predominantly agrarian-rural to a predominantly industrial-urban society.... [T]hey worked vast changes in every part of our system. They were, indeed, among the most marvelous agents of social and moral change the world has ever known, and it does them something less than historical justice to classify them simply as conservatives.

The liberals, on the other hand--the great progressives like Jefferson, Jackson, Bryan, La Follette and Wilson--were deeply troubled by the restless, untamed surge toward the Hamiltonian dream of busy factories and bustling cities. Each of these men, in his own generation, saw the order he knew and loved being weakened by the rapid advances of invention and technology. And each, in his own way, looked to reform to chasten change and mitigate its worst effects....

After the Civil War, when at last it became apparent to both sides that government was alone equal to the challenge of change, the progressives shifted their attitude toward political authority from hostility to sympathy, while the men of the Right, who were willing to use government to their own ends but not to see others use it against them, moved into a posture of determined opposition to reform. The paradoxes in the American experience had come to full flower: the agents of change were opposed to reform, the opponents of change committed to it. Small wonder that words like liberalism and conservatism lost much of their meaning for Americans, especially since both sides in the struggle were now arguing in the language of full-blooded Liberalism.

What Rossiter came close to saying here is that it is persons known as 'liberals' and 'progressives' who have been most concerned to 'conserve' the values they saw in American society at its founding and before industrilization and urbanization so profoundly changed it.

Let me just add a note to clarify what I meant above when I said that the Industrial Revolution was the most socially mutative force "at least, I would argue, until the 20th century." I suspect that there have been two forces in American history that have wrought changes coming closest to meriting the term 'revolutionary', the Industrial Revolution that began in the 19th century and the rise of American imperialism that began shortly before the end of the 19th century (see Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow). It is precisely the present-day pseudo-conservative's knee-jerk allegiance to protecting the power of those who run and benefit from huge corporations made possible by the Industraial Revolution and this same pseudo-conservative's thoroughly unbalanced and belligerent support for contemporary American imperialism and world domination that makes the pseudo-conservative the most powerful voice for extremism and radical change on the contemporary American scene. "Conservative" indeed!