The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet

www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/01/conservatism-robert-nisbet-bradley-birzer.html

Bradley J. Birzer January 8, 2018

Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a
modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the
French Revolution…

When it came to the history of conservatism, the grand

sociologist and man of letters, Robert Nisbet,
disagreed with the mighty founder of modern
conservatism, Russell Kirk. The two, however, not only
admired the ideas of the other, but they also became
fast friends from their first exchange of correspondence
in the early 1950s. As if by providence rather than
coincidence, their respective masterpieces, The
Conservative Mind and The Quest for Community,
each arrived on bookshelves in 1953, along with a
number of allied books that augmented the formation Robert Nisbet
of the conservative movement: Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451; Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and
History; and Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics.

Truly, 1953 was an annus mirabilis.

For Kirk, following the teachings of Irving Babbitt, conservatism transcended all specific
manifestations of culture and could be readily found in places as diverse as Confucian
China, Hindu India, ancient Greece, Stoic Rome, medieval England, and colonial America.
Kirk saw conservatism as a natural longing to preserve the best of human thought as
divined by, through, and across the slow process of the experience of humanity, tied to an
omnipotent source of creation. Though Kirk made a convincing case for his vision of
conservatism through a myriad of books, essays, and speeches, he never convinced even
the majority of those identifying as conservatives that he was correct.

Nisbet, in direct contrast to Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology.
For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution
between the years 1790 through 1795. Perhaps even more dramatically, the entire
beginning of conservatism as a modern ideology rested upon the mind, soul, and writings
of one man—the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke. Though
conservatism developed as a reaction to late eighteenth-century revolutionary and
enlightenment thinking, Nisbet continued,it also reacted against the industrialization of
England. Industrialization was, however, only and always a secondary inspiration for
conservatism. Its primary cause was and always would remain the French Revolution. “All
of the central tenets of conservatism are direct responses to the varied laws and decrees
which issued forth from Revolutionary assemblies between 1790 and 1795 and which, to
many minds, threatened the destruction of European society.”
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Nisbet, then, traced Burke’s conservatism into the nineteenth century, claiming that one
could find equal parts of it in Alexis de Tocqueville’s republican Democracy in America and,
probably rather surprisingly to readers of The Imaginative Conservative, in Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon’s anarchist What Is Property?. What all three—Burke, de Tocqueville, and
Proudhon—shared in common was a fear of centralization of power and a love of natural
association and community. The radicals of the French Revolution, in contrast, wanted
nothing short of nationalism, collectivism, and the necessary destruction of all intermediary
institutions.

Beginning with Burke as conservative touchstone, Nisbet claimed, one could readily find
eight tenets of conservatism, culminating in a ninth that tied all of the previous eight
together.

First, the primacy of religion in the life of any people. No mere accidental or materialist
thing, religion, more than anything else, ties together natural associations and intermediary
institutions, allowing and even encouraging virtue, ethical behavior, and trust. Second, the
centrality of the natural two-parent family as not only pre-political but also as the basis of all
stability in society.

Third, the need to recognize distinctions in human abilities, achievements, and excellence,
all in direct opposition to the desire to homogenize and conform the human person.

Fourth, the understanding that property rights are not merely the rights to own land, but,
even more importantly, to own one’s self. Nisbet also claimed that conservatism prized
landed property, but, really, anything that was manifested tangibly as a result of human
labor and creativity.

Fifth, that human persons find their identity only in relation to time, space, ancestors,
friends, and neighbors.

Sixth, that all political power should devolve to the lowest and most immediate level
possible—what Catholics would call subsidiarity.

Seventh, that laws should derive from tradition, habit, and custom, rather than the latter
being formed by the former. As Burke put it, no law should exist that must be enforced only
by its own terrors.

Eighth, closely related to number six, but certainly not identical, all national authority should
possess “the highest possible degree of decentralization and diffusion of power.”

Finally, Nisbet wrote, claiming that his ninth point was really a summation of all of the
previous eight points: “Separation of society from political state, that is, preservation of
autonomy of society and its groups, along with the economy, from what Burke called
‘arbitrary power’ in the state.”

The danger of liberalism, classical or modern, Nisbet regretted, was and is that it saw and
sees the individual, not the free association of individuals, as the primary determinant in
society. Real power and liberty, he believed, could never come from any one person or the

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people as a whole, but rather as groups of individuals in competing and overlapping
associations. Nisbet is worth quoting at length on this:

Unlike liberalism, conservatism gives stress to social authority, recognizing that apart from
the checks supplied upon the moral and social lives of individuals, any genuine political
freedom is impossible. The increasingly collectivist character of liberalism during the past
century could have been predicted by any conservative, indeed was, in effect, by Burke. For,
dealing with the discrete, atomized individual as classical liberalism did, and ignoring the
importance of social groups and associations, it was inevitable that the liberal would in time
have only the state to turn to, to meet the social problems arising from industrialism and mass
democracy.

Though Nisbet labeled conservatism an “ideology,” there is nothing in his definition or the
implications of conservatism as outlined above that a Russell Kirk would find disagreeable.
Indeed, with Kirk, Babbitt, Christopher Dawson, T.S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Willa Cather,
and a host of other conservatives, liberalism—classical or modern—lacked the ability to
imagine, that is, the ability to connect one thing to another, to see the mysterious bonds of
brotherhood and friendship, to understand the nuance of family, or to appreciate the
romantic notions of place and space.

Instead, these conservatives all believed that one could approach an understanding of
society only in humility, only with trepidation, and self-consciously aware of the failings as
well as the glories of the person, not the individual.

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