The Quest for Community Quotes

“Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mistery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalismo hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know it. (…) To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Man's alienation from man must lead in time to man's alienation from God”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a militar unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Not the free individual but the lost individual; not Independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not the conquer but to be conquered; these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Genuine freedom is not based upon the negative psychology of release. Its roots are in positive acts of dedication to ends and values. Freedom presupposes the autonomous existence of values which men wish to be free to follow and measure up to.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“The historical emphasis upon the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationship that must in fact uphold the individual’s own sense of integrity. (…) “When the relation between man and God is subjective, interior (as in Luther) or in tímeles acts and logic (as in Calvin) man’s utter dependence upon God is not mediated through the concrete facts of historical life”, writes Canon Demant. And when it is not so mediated, the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and insupportable.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Other and more powerful forms of association have existed, but the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“The clear tendency of modern wars is to become ever more closely identified with broad, popular, moral aspirations: freedom, self-determination of peoples, democracy, rights, and justice.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“The old laissez faire failed because it was based on erroneous premises regarding human behavior. As a theory it failed because it mistook for ineradicable characteristics of individuals qualities that were in fact inseparable from social groups. As a policy it failed because its atomistic propositions were inevitably unavailing against the reality of enlarging masses of insecure individuals. Far from proving a check upon the growth of the omnicompetent State, the old laissez faire actually accelerated this growth. Its indifference to every form of community and association left the State as the sole area of reform and security.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“One of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“Culture does not exist autonomously; it is set always in the context of social relationships.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“The idea of decline is no more, no less, correct than the idea of progress. History is neither progress nor decline alone. It is both. What is determinative in the historian's judgment is simply that aspect of the present he chooses to illuminate.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Thus, in the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, we cannot help but see the sharp challenge that was given to the medieval Catholic concept of religion as being essentially an affair of hierarchical organization, sacrament, and liturgy. For an increasing number of human beings, after the sixteenth century, the corporate Church ceases to be the sole avenue of approach to God. In the devotions of Protestants, ritual, symbolism, hierarchy, in short all the appurtenances of the church visible, wane or disappear in religious life. Out of this atomization of religious corporatism emerges the new man of God, intent upon salvation through unassisted faith and unmediated personal effort.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“The notion of an impersonal, even hostile society is common--a society in which all actions and motives seem to have equal value and to be perversely detached from human direction. Common too is the helplessness of the individual before alien forces--not the hero who does things, but as Wynham Lewis has put it, the hero to whom things are done. The disenchanted, lonely figure, searching for ethical significance in the smallest of things, struggling for identification with race or class or group, incessantly striving to answer the question, "Who am I, What am I", has become, especially in Europe, almost the central literary type of the age.

Not the free individual, but the lost individual; not independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not to conquer but to be conquered; these are the major states of mind in contemporary literature.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“We need a laissez faire that will hold fast to the ends of autonomy and freedom of choice; one that will begin not with the imaginary, abstract individual but with the personalities of human beings as they are actually given to us in association. ... To create the conditions within which autonomous individuals could prosper, could be emancipated from the binding ties of kinship, class, and community, was the objective of the older laissez faire. To create conditions within which autonomous groups may prosper must be, I believe, the prime objective of the new laissez faire. ...
What we need at the present time is the knowledge and administrative skill to create a laissez faire in which the basic unit will be the social group. The liberal values of autonomy and freedom of personal choice are indispensable to a genuinely free society, but we shall achieve and maintain these only by vesting them in the conditions in which liberal democracy will thrive—diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom

“Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society. But in hard fact no social group will long survive the disappearance of its chief reasons for being, and these reasons are not, primarily, biological but institutional. Unless new institutional functions are performed by a group—family, trade union, or church—its psychological influence will become minimal.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“In Protestantism there has been a persistent belief that to externalize religion is to degrade it. Only in the privacy of the individual soul can religion remain pure. There has been little sympathy for the communal, sacramental, and disciplinary aspects of religion. Protestant condemnation of the monasteries and ecclesiastical courts sprang from a temper of mind that could also look with favor on the separation of marriage from the Church, that could prohibit ecclesiastical celibacy, reduce the number of feast days, and ban relics, scapularies, images, and holy pictures. The gilds were suspect, and even the bonds of wider kinship could often be regarded with disfavor on the ground that they represented a distraction from the direct relation of the individual to God.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom