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Twilight of Authority
Sociology
287 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Robert A. Nisbet
55 books81 followersAmerican sociologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside and as the Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University.
After serving in the US Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) contended that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows in combating the centralizing power of the national state.
Nisbet is seen as follower of Emile Durkheim in the understanding of modern sociocultural systems and their drift. Often identified with the political right, Nisbet began his career as a political liberal but later confessed a conversion to a kind of philosophical Conservatism
After serving in the US Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) contended that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows in combating the centralizing power of the national state.
Nisbet is seen as follower of Emile Durkheim in the understanding of modern sociocultural systems and their drift. Often identified with the political right, Nisbet began his career as a political liberal but later confessed a conversion to a kind of philosophical Conservatism
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 10, 2019
Twilight of Authority is something of a follow-up to Nisbet's 1953 classic, The Quest for Community. In Quest, an important book in the post-World War II conservative movement, Nisbet made the case that the modern, centralized state was built on the ruins of traditional, non-state institutions like the family, the church, and the community. Twilight continues these themes, but the passage of 20 years has both sharpened Nisbet's analysis and made him noticeably more jaded, with Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal looming large in Nisbet's obvious pessimism.
Nisbet believes that the political community - by which he means not just the state, but the entire array of concepts, including rights and liberties, and feelings that are entailed in political questions and opinions - is losing favor, and with it the rights and liberties that Nisbet believes made Western progress possible. At the root of this decline is the state's growth that Nisbet discussed in Quest, which he still believes has come at the expense of voluntary associations. A new wrinkle in this narrative, however, is that Nisbet believes that the state has proven itself incapable of fulfilling the functions it has taken from voluntary associations, and has proven itself to be corrupt to boot. Hence the decline of faith in the political community among individuals who, having been deprived of their traditional associations, find their new centralized association unfulfilling.
Nisbet observes a couple of interesting social consequences of these trends. First, he uses architecture to point out how the state has well outgrown the human scale. He quotes columnist Russell Baker who, upon observing the grotesque size and design of government buildings, wrote, "My misgivings are not about the wretched architects, who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities. They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things. Those most likely to be affected are men who work in such arrogant surroundings. And so, it is not surprising that of late we have seen a curious tendency for Government people to differentiate between duty to Government and duty to country in a most ominous way."
Nisbet further notes the dramatic increase in the role and function of the president, not just in the American government, but in American society. He writes, “There is the ever-growing centrality of the image of the President and, with this, the constantly augmenting attention to the President by public and press alike. Not only what the President thinks on a given public issue, but what he wears, whom he dines with, what a major ball or banquet he may choose to give, and what his views are on the most trivial or cosmic of questions - all of this has grown exponentially in the regard lavished by press and lesser political figures upon the presidency during the past four decades. The first care of royalty, beginning if we like with Alexander and coming down to the absolute monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, coming down indeed now to our own day, is that of being constantly visible, and naturally in the best and most contrived possible light for the people." Nisbet thinks that Richard Nixon's trespasses would be quickly forgotten once another figure like the idolized John F. Kennedy came along, because “There are too many powerful voices among intellectuals - in press, foundation, and elsewhere - that want a royal President provided only that he is the right kind of individual." Not only were Nisbet's predictions on this point accurate, they have startling relevance in our own day, in which we see the cultural elite and the intelligentsia bemoan the current Commander-in-Chief, which they see as unsuitable to their sensibilities, but have no reservations about endowing the office of president itself with all their hopes and expectations. That this situations plays out in reverse when a Democrat is president only offers confirmatory evidence of Nisbet's thesis.
There are further ways in which Nisbet's analysis would made modern audiences, right and left, uncomfortable. Regarding the effect of war on society, Nisbet states his belief (which can also be found in The Quest for Community) that war and militarism generally work to destroy traditional institutions and values, in addition to limitations on state power. He writes, "I do not think it extreme to link the breakdown in moral standards in all spheres - economic, educational, and political, as well as in family life - to the effects of two major wars - celebrated wars! - in this century. What is in the first instance licensed, as it were, by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum." He continues, "Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. Basic social institutions can, on the incontestable record, survive depression, plague, famine, and catastrophe. They have countless times in history. What these and related institutions cannot survive is the transfer of their inherent functions and authorities to a body such as the military, which has...its own dominant values, symbols, constraints, and processes of consensus." It should be noted that Nisbet is not a pacifist, but a realist. He believed at the time that it was inadvisable to drastically reduce military capabilities while the United States faced a strong enemy (the Soviet Union). But he also recognized that unchecked militarism destroyed the very things that military defense was supposed to be protecting.
Nisbet was also concerned about what he saw as the increasingly strident push for equality in American society. Again, here qualification is needed. Nisbet was not opposed to ending true inequality, but he felt that, once commenced, the desire for inequality was insatiable. He wrote, "It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality... In this respect it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions which offer, just by virtue of the impossibility of ever giving them adequate representation in the actual world, almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions." Again, the difficulty Nisbet identifies is that there is a sense in which equality is a proper feature of society, but once it goes from being what Thomas Sowell would call a process equality to equality of result, its nature changes. Nisbet adds, “The tragedy in our time is that what is good in the ethic of equality is fact becoming swamped by forces - of power above all - which aim not, really, at equality in any civilized sense but at uniformity, leveling, and a general mechanization of life."
Nisbet thinks that none of the above problems can be solved by either political centralization or radical individualism. Indeed, he believes that the latter would simply lead back to the former, writing, “Nowhere, not in economy, state, or culture in any of its forms, do we in fact find aggregates of 'individuals.' What we find are human beings bound, in or or other degree, by ties of work, friendship, recreation, learning, faith, love, and mutual aid." Without these ties, not only social degeneration but the loss of political freedom is the result. “Each such association," he writes, "is a nursery of freedom, if only because it is built around a value or idea that men wish to be free to espouse. Voluntary associations are buffers between individual and state."
Ultimately, there's not much new in Nisbet's conclusions, but he does a magnificent job of showing the consequences of continuing to move further away from these voluntary associations, just as he would again a decade and a half later in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. Nor would that analysis have changed much in the two decades since Nisbet's death. Time has the tendency to either cast doubt on a writer's opinions and conclusions, or validate them. My opinion is that, for Nisbet, time has had the second effect.
Nisbet believes that the political community - by which he means not just the state, but the entire array of concepts, including rights and liberties, and feelings that are entailed in political questions and opinions - is losing favor, and with it the rights and liberties that Nisbet believes made Western progress possible. At the root of this decline is the state's growth that Nisbet discussed in Quest, which he still believes has come at the expense of voluntary associations. A new wrinkle in this narrative, however, is that Nisbet believes that the state has proven itself incapable of fulfilling the functions it has taken from voluntary associations, and has proven itself to be corrupt to boot. Hence the decline of faith in the political community among individuals who, having been deprived of their traditional associations, find their new centralized association unfulfilling.
Nisbet observes a couple of interesting social consequences of these trends. First, he uses architecture to point out how the state has well outgrown the human scale. He quotes columnist Russell Baker who, upon observing the grotesque size and design of government buildings, wrote, "My misgivings are not about the wretched architects, who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities. They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things. Those most likely to be affected are men who work in such arrogant surroundings. And so, it is not surprising that of late we have seen a curious tendency for Government people to differentiate between duty to Government and duty to country in a most ominous way."
Nisbet further notes the dramatic increase in the role and function of the president, not just in the American government, but in American society. He writes, “There is the ever-growing centrality of the image of the President and, with this, the constantly augmenting attention to the President by public and press alike. Not only what the President thinks on a given public issue, but what he wears, whom he dines with, what a major ball or banquet he may choose to give, and what his views are on the most trivial or cosmic of questions - all of this has grown exponentially in the regard lavished by press and lesser political figures upon the presidency during the past four decades. The first care of royalty, beginning if we like with Alexander and coming down to the absolute monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, coming down indeed now to our own day, is that of being constantly visible, and naturally in the best and most contrived possible light for the people." Nisbet thinks that Richard Nixon's trespasses would be quickly forgotten once another figure like the idolized John F. Kennedy came along, because “There are too many powerful voices among intellectuals - in press, foundation, and elsewhere - that want a royal President provided only that he is the right kind of individual." Not only were Nisbet's predictions on this point accurate, they have startling relevance in our own day, in which we see the cultural elite and the intelligentsia bemoan the current Commander-in-Chief, which they see as unsuitable to their sensibilities, but have no reservations about endowing the office of president itself with all their hopes and expectations. That this situations plays out in reverse when a Democrat is president only offers confirmatory evidence of Nisbet's thesis.
There are further ways in which Nisbet's analysis would made modern audiences, right and left, uncomfortable. Regarding the effect of war on society, Nisbet states his belief (which can also be found in The Quest for Community) that war and militarism generally work to destroy traditional institutions and values, in addition to limitations on state power. He writes, "I do not think it extreme to link the breakdown in moral standards in all spheres - economic, educational, and political, as well as in family life - to the effects of two major wars - celebrated wars! - in this century. What is in the first instance licensed, as it were, by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum." He continues, "Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. Basic social institutions can, on the incontestable record, survive depression, plague, famine, and catastrophe. They have countless times in history. What these and related institutions cannot survive is the transfer of their inherent functions and authorities to a body such as the military, which has...its own dominant values, symbols, constraints, and processes of consensus." It should be noted that Nisbet is not a pacifist, but a realist. He believed at the time that it was inadvisable to drastically reduce military capabilities while the United States faced a strong enemy (the Soviet Union). But he also recognized that unchecked militarism destroyed the very things that military defense was supposed to be protecting.
Nisbet was also concerned about what he saw as the increasingly strident push for equality in American society. Again, here qualification is needed. Nisbet was not opposed to ending true inequality, but he felt that, once commenced, the desire for inequality was insatiable. He wrote, "It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality... In this respect it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions which offer, just by virtue of the impossibility of ever giving them adequate representation in the actual world, almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions." Again, the difficulty Nisbet identifies is that there is a sense in which equality is a proper feature of society, but once it goes from being what Thomas Sowell would call a process equality to equality of result, its nature changes. Nisbet adds, “The tragedy in our time is that what is good in the ethic of equality is fact becoming swamped by forces - of power above all - which aim not, really, at equality in any civilized sense but at uniformity, leveling, and a general mechanization of life."
Nisbet thinks that none of the above problems can be solved by either political centralization or radical individualism. Indeed, he believes that the latter would simply lead back to the former, writing, “Nowhere, not in economy, state, or culture in any of its forms, do we in fact find aggregates of 'individuals.' What we find are human beings bound, in or or other degree, by ties of work, friendship, recreation, learning, faith, love, and mutual aid." Without these ties, not only social degeneration but the loss of political freedom is the result. “Each such association," he writes, "is a nursery of freedom, if only because it is built around a value or idea that men wish to be free to espouse. Voluntary associations are buffers between individual and state."
Ultimately, there's not much new in Nisbet's conclusions, but he does a magnificent job of showing the consequences of continuing to move further away from these voluntary associations, just as he would again a decade and a half later in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. Nor would that analysis have changed much in the two decades since Nisbet's death. Time has the tendency to either cast doubt on a writer's opinions and conclusions, or validate them. My opinion is that, for Nisbet, time has had the second effect.
November 17, 2019
Prophetic in so many ways concerning the development of the imperial presidency since FDR and the destruction of American institutions since the 1960s.
July 5, 2016
An excellent follow-up to his "Quest for Community." Nisbet highlights the loss of authority in various social spheres (university, language, family, neighborhood, etc.,) which subsequent vacuum is filled by mere political power and bureaucratization. He underscores the need for the revival of specifically SOCIAL order that is not politically enveloped and legally constituted. His remedy is for us to construct "social inventions;" social structures similar to those of the medieval city, citizen, guild, family, kindred-type which was eclipsed by the Renaissance, especially the rise of individualism. He sees this as fundamentally local and organic which also means decentralized. These social inventions may have political or non-political goals in mind but the important thing is that they are not subsumed under the authority of the Political State. Surely this is a timely (classic?) read. Tolle lege!
February 1, 2011
Insightful. Very relevant for our current political and cultural issues.
October 9, 2014
Nisbet is a recent discovery for me. His work is very important and really needs to be read by more today.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews