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Conservatism: Dream and Reality
The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book, The Quest for Community. In fact, Conservatism unites virtually all of Nisbet's work. In it, Nisbet deals with the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. The sovereign political state is more than a legal relationship of a superstructure of power, it is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of power.Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views of the individual and the state, a more useful approach adds the factor of social groups or communities mediating between the individual and the state. Such groups comprise "society" the protection of which is the "sole object" of the conservative tradition, according to Nisbet. This conservative ideology arose in the West as a reaction to the French Revolution and its perceived impact upon traditional society. Edmund Burke was the first spokesman of the new ideology. In this book, Nisbet argues that modern conservatism throughout the West can be seen as a widening of Burke's indictment not only of the French Revolution, but of the larger revolution we have come to call modernity.From Edmund Burke and his contemporaries such as Bonald, de Maistre, Haller, and Savigny, down to T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Michael Oakeshott, Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, and Russell Kirk, the essential themes of political conservatism remained the same. They are centered upon history, tradition, property, authority, liberty and religion, and attack equally the political collectivism and radical individualism that have the same irrational outcomes. Nisbet makes the point that, at present, conservatism is also in a crisis, one created in large measure by mixing in the political arena economic liberalism and welfare state socialism - a lethal mix for conservative politics.
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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277 people want to read
About the author
Robert A. Nisbet
52 books80 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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August 14, 2019
Robert Nisbet's Conservatism: Dream and Reality is similar in a lot of ways to Roger Scruton's Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, the latter of which I read immediately prior to reading the former. Both books are short introductions to philosophical conservatism, but while Scruton takes the reader on a more or less chronological journey through conservatism and its primary exponents, Nisbet says that his book is an "anatomy of conservatism," or an exploration of what is essential to conservatism as expressed in many of the same figures that Scruton covers. The difference between the two approaches is that Scruton does a great job of showing how conservatism developed over time, but Nisbet offers a better explanation of the fundamental components of conservatism and how they get applied to critical questions.
The "Dream and Reality" in the title is in reference to the necessary schism between an ideology (and Nisbet, unlike his friend Russell Kirk, has no problem using that word) and its political expression. In the introduction, Nisbet writes that "there is a relationship between practical politics and ideology, but there is no iron in the relationship, nothing to keep even the best disciplined party and its leaders ever faithful to the ideology. Emergencies, accidents, tactical decisions, may and often do lead to doctrinal apostasy. ...To try to derive the ideology from the decisions and acts of even the greatest of politicians more often than not leads to confusion." Nisbet references several politicians who he sees as ideological conservatives - Lincoln, Churchill, and perhaps most surprisingly, Bismark - who sacrificed their principles for political priorities at points throughout their careers. This, he thinks, did not detract from their status as authentic conservatives, and Nisbet's focus along these lines is tied directly to the time of this book's publication, which was in 1984, smack dab in the middle of Ronald Reagan's presidency. One senses that this is really the reason for Nisbet's writing of this book - to distinguish between the political conservatism of the Reagan Revolution and the philosophical conservatism of Edmund Burke (more on this in a moment).
Like Scruton, Nisbet starts his analysis of conservatism with Burke, whose response to the French Revolution is almost universally considered to be the starting point for philosophical conservatism. The reason Burke can be considered the originator of modern conservatism is because his arguments against the French Revolution were at once the first and the finest defenses of organic society against rationalism and the over-abstracted interpretations of liberty and individualism. As these concept arose out of the French Revolution and spread outside of France (and morphed into other revolutions), other figures adopted and added to Burke's arguments. Thus, to Burke Nisbet adds a litany of other conservative luminaries, including Alexis de Tocqueville (one of Nisbet's primary influences), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Disraeli, G. K. Chesterton, Irving Babbitt, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others.
But, since Nisbet is specifically rejecting a chronological view of the topic, he is able to marshal the perspectives from all these varied sources (but primarily from Burke and Tocqueville) to explain the conservative position on a wide variety of issues, as well as how that position differs from that of liberals, socialists, and rationalists. These topics range from interpretations of history (with conservatives viewing history as a complicated story of man's successes and failures, not a tool to prove specific lessons), views on liberty (which conservatives view as arising primarily from the development of culture rather than from abstract principles), criticisms of egalitarianism (which conservatives see as inherently incompatible with both liberty and a just society), and the defense of property (which to conservatives has historically tended to mean hard property like land, rather than modern conceptions of soft property like shares in mega-corporations). On all these topics, Nisbet clearly explains not only the conservative position, but why conservatives hold it, which contributes a great deal to the understanding of what is distinctive in the conservative worldview.
Nisbet closes his book with an estimation of where conservatism stands after the Reagan Revolution of 1980 (or, as Nisbet termed it, the "Reagan Phenomenon"). Rather than seeing this as a smashing victory for conservatism, Nisbet sees it as the confluence of various coalitions that coalesced behind Reagan the candidate. He notes that the mishmash of groups labeled "conservative" that formed this coalition varied from authentic conservatives (traditionalists) to populists to "Far-Right"ers, or what was at times called the "Moral Majority."
Nisbet sees true conservatives as being overwhelmed by these other factions in the Reagan era, and Reagan he sees as essentially a New Deal Democrat who says conservatives things. He heaps scorn on the Moral Majority, which he sees as attempting not to diminish government power and devolve it to its proper scale and duties, but to grow its power and place it in the "right" hands. The two topics that Nisbet mentions specifically are abortion and prayer in schools, as he criticizes the attempts on the part of the "Far Right" to nationalize these issue through constitutional amendments and other centralized measures. Nisbet states his belief that attempting to remove these issues from the family's purview has the effect of reducing the power of the family, a concern that runs all the way through Nisbet's writing, beginning with his first book, The Quest for Community.
On these topics, Nisbet's reasoning is sound enough, and it's important to note that he's not making libertarian arguments about rights, nor is he advocating for abortion or against school prayer. Rather, he's arguing for these issues to be addressed at the proper point in society, which Nisbet clearly thinks is not at the political level, and certainly not at the nationalized political level. However, it seems to me that Nisbet doesn't give due attention in this discussion to the fact that it was leftist cultural revolutionaries who nationalized these issues, notably in Roe v. Wade, so while it may be inadvisable and unconservative to nationalize the issues, conservatives are in some way simply playing with the cards they've been dealt. Interestingly, recent developments at the state level on these topics would seemingly be more in line with what Nisbet would consider an appropriate way for a conservative to handle the issues.
Overall, Nisbet thinks that the Reagan Phenomenon is not a conservative one, and that most of the people who were beginning to gather under the conservative banner were not conservatives in the line reaching back to authentic conservative presidents like Taft, Coolidge, and Cleveland and further back to philosophical conservatives like John Adams and Burke. Nisbet is prescient in some ways about what conservatism would become in the wake of Reagan's coalition victory, though his analysis strikes me as perhaps a bit too negative, given what liberalism has become since then.
Reading Nisbet here I was reminded of Kirk's assessment of conservatism and its various groupings at the end of his Prospects for Conservatives, in which he noted optimism about the future of conservatism if its various strands could emphasize prudence more than their own priorities. Between Nisbet's (almost angry) pessimism and Kirk's optimism probably lies the truth about Reagan, the conservatism of the 80s, and the potentialities of its future. Certainly there is room for criticism, but Nisbet's treatment of Reagan stands in fairly stark contrast to his apologias for Churchill, Lincoln, and Bismark earlier in the book, each of whom he considers a conservative who sold out conservative principles at some point in their careers. This he seems not to hold against each of them, making his treatment of Reagan at least a little curious, unless he thinks Reagan never really left the New Deal Left of his youth.
Whatever the case, Nisbet's concerns about political conservatism, specifically that of Reagan, are based in his own commitment to an authentically conservative view of society, which he expounds well throughout the book. Whether this kind of conservatism will ever again pass out of a dream and into reality remains a question, but Nisbet does a fantastic job of explaining why conservatism is a dream worth holding and striving for.
The "Dream and Reality" in the title is in reference to the necessary schism between an ideology (and Nisbet, unlike his friend Russell Kirk, has no problem using that word) and its political expression. In the introduction, Nisbet writes that "there is a relationship between practical politics and ideology, but there is no iron in the relationship, nothing to keep even the best disciplined party and its leaders ever faithful to the ideology. Emergencies, accidents, tactical decisions, may and often do lead to doctrinal apostasy. ...To try to derive the ideology from the decisions and acts of even the greatest of politicians more often than not leads to confusion." Nisbet references several politicians who he sees as ideological conservatives - Lincoln, Churchill, and perhaps most surprisingly, Bismark - who sacrificed their principles for political priorities at points throughout their careers. This, he thinks, did not detract from their status as authentic conservatives, and Nisbet's focus along these lines is tied directly to the time of this book's publication, which was in 1984, smack dab in the middle of Ronald Reagan's presidency. One senses that this is really the reason for Nisbet's writing of this book - to distinguish between the political conservatism of the Reagan Revolution and the philosophical conservatism of Edmund Burke (more on this in a moment).
Like Scruton, Nisbet starts his analysis of conservatism with Burke, whose response to the French Revolution is almost universally considered to be the starting point for philosophical conservatism. The reason Burke can be considered the originator of modern conservatism is because his arguments against the French Revolution were at once the first and the finest defenses of organic society against rationalism and the over-abstracted interpretations of liberty and individualism. As these concept arose out of the French Revolution and spread outside of France (and morphed into other revolutions), other figures adopted and added to Burke's arguments. Thus, to Burke Nisbet adds a litany of other conservative luminaries, including Alexis de Tocqueville (one of Nisbet's primary influences), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Disraeli, G. K. Chesterton, Irving Babbitt, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others.
But, since Nisbet is specifically rejecting a chronological view of the topic, he is able to marshal the perspectives from all these varied sources (but primarily from Burke and Tocqueville) to explain the conservative position on a wide variety of issues, as well as how that position differs from that of liberals, socialists, and rationalists. These topics range from interpretations of history (with conservatives viewing history as a complicated story of man's successes and failures, not a tool to prove specific lessons), views on liberty (which conservatives view as arising primarily from the development of culture rather than from abstract principles), criticisms of egalitarianism (which conservatives see as inherently incompatible with both liberty and a just society), and the defense of property (which to conservatives has historically tended to mean hard property like land, rather than modern conceptions of soft property like shares in mega-corporations). On all these topics, Nisbet clearly explains not only the conservative position, but why conservatives hold it, which contributes a great deal to the understanding of what is distinctive in the conservative worldview.
Nisbet closes his book with an estimation of where conservatism stands after the Reagan Revolution of 1980 (or, as Nisbet termed it, the "Reagan Phenomenon"). Rather than seeing this as a smashing victory for conservatism, Nisbet sees it as the confluence of various coalitions that coalesced behind Reagan the candidate. He notes that the mishmash of groups labeled "conservative" that formed this coalition varied from authentic conservatives (traditionalists) to populists to "Far-Right"ers, or what was at times called the "Moral Majority."
Nisbet sees true conservatives as being overwhelmed by these other factions in the Reagan era, and Reagan he sees as essentially a New Deal Democrat who says conservatives things. He heaps scorn on the Moral Majority, which he sees as attempting not to diminish government power and devolve it to its proper scale and duties, but to grow its power and place it in the "right" hands. The two topics that Nisbet mentions specifically are abortion and prayer in schools, as he criticizes the attempts on the part of the "Far Right" to nationalize these issue through constitutional amendments and other centralized measures. Nisbet states his belief that attempting to remove these issues from the family's purview has the effect of reducing the power of the family, a concern that runs all the way through Nisbet's writing, beginning with his first book, The Quest for Community.
On these topics, Nisbet's reasoning is sound enough, and it's important to note that he's not making libertarian arguments about rights, nor is he advocating for abortion or against school prayer. Rather, he's arguing for these issues to be addressed at the proper point in society, which Nisbet clearly thinks is not at the political level, and certainly not at the nationalized political level. However, it seems to me that Nisbet doesn't give due attention in this discussion to the fact that it was leftist cultural revolutionaries who nationalized these issues, notably in Roe v. Wade, so while it may be inadvisable and unconservative to nationalize the issues, conservatives are in some way simply playing with the cards they've been dealt. Interestingly, recent developments at the state level on these topics would seemingly be more in line with what Nisbet would consider an appropriate way for a conservative to handle the issues.
Overall, Nisbet thinks that the Reagan Phenomenon is not a conservative one, and that most of the people who were beginning to gather under the conservative banner were not conservatives in the line reaching back to authentic conservative presidents like Taft, Coolidge, and Cleveland and further back to philosophical conservatives like John Adams and Burke. Nisbet is prescient in some ways about what conservatism would become in the wake of Reagan's coalition victory, though his analysis strikes me as perhaps a bit too negative, given what liberalism has become since then.
Reading Nisbet here I was reminded of Kirk's assessment of conservatism and its various groupings at the end of his Prospects for Conservatives, in which he noted optimism about the future of conservatism if its various strands could emphasize prudence more than their own priorities. Between Nisbet's (almost angry) pessimism and Kirk's optimism probably lies the truth about Reagan, the conservatism of the 80s, and the potentialities of its future. Certainly there is room for criticism, but Nisbet's treatment of Reagan stands in fairly stark contrast to his apologias for Churchill, Lincoln, and Bismark earlier in the book, each of whom he considers a conservative who sold out conservative principles at some point in their careers. This he seems not to hold against each of them, making his treatment of Reagan at least a little curious, unless he thinks Reagan never really left the New Deal Left of his youth.
Whatever the case, Nisbet's concerns about political conservatism, specifically that of Reagan, are based in his own commitment to an authentically conservative view of society, which he expounds well throughout the book. Whether this kind of conservatism will ever again pass out of a dream and into reality remains a question, but Nisbet does a fantastic job of explaining why conservatism is a dream worth holding and striving for.
March 15, 2024
4.5 stars--A better guide to conservative theory (which Nisbert cleaves, perhaps too much, from the practice of conservative politicians) than most I've read. But aside from that, it's a great communitarian angle on what conservatism is.
Nisbet approaches conservatism as an ideology, in contrast to other thinkers who portray is as anti-ideological. He locates its core in the continuation of feudalist ideas of organic society, with families, guilds, and corporations all playing important roles. Rights were seen less as individual affairs and more as located in the intertwined groups that made up society. For Nisbet, modern conservatism emerged as a response to the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Communism, all of which threatened to individualize people, impose a materialistic rationality, and enrich centralized sources of power. He also points to movements like Wesleyanism that weakened religious establishment, and to philosophical trends like utilitarianism that reduced humanity to a mechanical aggregation of individual interests.
Conservatives are united not just in opposition to these things, but in favor of various precepts. Chief among them for Nisbet is "the right -- grown out of history and social development -- of the whole intermediate structure of the nation to survival against the tides of both individualism and nationalism." For Nisbet, the mediating institutions and local customs (which Burke called "prejudices") are essential to the flourishing of communities and individuals alike. These intermediary bodies each serve as sources of authority, sharing in divinely distributed authority.
Another central one is the importance of property, which inherently puts conservatism at odds with redistributive visions. My own personal politics uphold property as important but recognize certain limits on it. Conservatives see more tension between liberty and equality than I do. I'm *very* far from a Marxist, but I think a little more fairness wouldn't encumber, but in fact, empower our society. In this section, Nisbet goes a little too far to justifies the more lefty actions of people like Disraeli as signs of pragmatism as opposed to actual compromises on ideological bases. In my view, these actions actually reflect more ideological moderation than Nisbet might admit.
There is also in Nisbet's conservatism a reverence for tradition and a tendency to see the accretive, longstanding unwritten constitution serving as a bedrock to documents like the US Constitution.
Despite being a classic conservative writer, Nisbet had (would have even more today) numerous bones to pick with the modern American right. He skewers culture warriors for being too aggressive in wanting to impose moral values from above, contrasting this with a conservatism favoring religious establishment as *civic religion*. In addition, he reiterates Burke and Tocqueville's scorn towards wealth rooted not in the land but in financial machinations, noting that criticisms of capitalism have a long tradition on the right. Nisbet summarizes a large body of conservative thought, putting his own unique communitarian gloss on the history. In an era where the right begins to question and hopefully evolve away from fusionism, Nisbet's corpus is worth rediscovering.
Nisbet approaches conservatism as an ideology, in contrast to other thinkers who portray is as anti-ideological. He locates its core in the continuation of feudalist ideas of organic society, with families, guilds, and corporations all playing important roles. Rights were seen less as individual affairs and more as located in the intertwined groups that made up society. For Nisbet, modern conservatism emerged as a response to the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Communism, all of which threatened to individualize people, impose a materialistic rationality, and enrich centralized sources of power. He also points to movements like Wesleyanism that weakened religious establishment, and to philosophical trends like utilitarianism that reduced humanity to a mechanical aggregation of individual interests.
Conservatives are united not just in opposition to these things, but in favor of various precepts. Chief among them for Nisbet is "the right -- grown out of history and social development -- of the whole intermediate structure of the nation to survival against the tides of both individualism and nationalism." For Nisbet, the mediating institutions and local customs (which Burke called "prejudices") are essential to the flourishing of communities and individuals alike. These intermediary bodies each serve as sources of authority, sharing in divinely distributed authority.
Another central one is the importance of property, which inherently puts conservatism at odds with redistributive visions. My own personal politics uphold property as important but recognize certain limits on it. Conservatives see more tension between liberty and equality than I do. I'm *very* far from a Marxist, but I think a little more fairness wouldn't encumber, but in fact, empower our society. In this section, Nisbet goes a little too far to justifies the more lefty actions of people like Disraeli as signs of pragmatism as opposed to actual compromises on ideological bases. In my view, these actions actually reflect more ideological moderation than Nisbet might admit.
There is also in Nisbet's conservatism a reverence for tradition and a tendency to see the accretive, longstanding unwritten constitution serving as a bedrock to documents like the US Constitution.
Despite being a classic conservative writer, Nisbet had (would have even more today) numerous bones to pick with the modern American right. He skewers culture warriors for being too aggressive in wanting to impose moral values from above, contrasting this with a conservatism favoring religious establishment as *civic religion*. In addition, he reiterates Burke and Tocqueville's scorn towards wealth rooted not in the land but in financial machinations, noting that criticisms of capitalism have a long tradition on the right. Nisbet summarizes a large body of conservative thought, putting his own unique communitarian gloss on the history. In an era where the right begins to question and hopefully evolve away from fusionism, Nisbet's corpus is worth rediscovering.
November 11, 2017
Since the election of Donald Trump, conservatism is increasingly being conflated with fascism, Nazism, racial supremacy and xenophobia. For some, it’s a direct equivalence. Unfortunately, the incessant usage of these smears has not only undermined the true meaning of conservatism, but the entire suite of words used as epithets against conservatives. Given progressivism’s rampant vandalism of language, it’s especially useful to peel back the layers of autistic screeching that have besmirched the mantle of conservatism and take stock of its ideological roots. For anyone seeking a good primer on the classical conception of conservatism, Robert Nisbet’s Conservatism: Dream and Reality is a good place to begin.
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February 10, 2021
Nisbet wants to explain too many things in this book, but he fails to explain them clearly and accessibly.
August 17, 2014
I really dig it. As political philosophy goes, this is good. But I'm still not convinced political beliefs of any sort are worth my freakin' time. Mother Maria is preaching the Gospel in my head. I dunno.
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