QUEST FOR COMMUNITY (AND RISE OF THE STATE)

PART 2, FURTHER ARCHEOLOGY OF EARLY FEDERAL POPULIST SCHOLARSHIP

“The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature arose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.”

Statement of the [French Revolution’s] Committee of Public Safety

The Quest for Community is an impressively erudite and textured work. I couldn’t possibly, in a single post, do justice to all the multilayered arguments provided there by Nisbet. Some of those themes and insights will be more valuably leveraged in later posts on other aspects of his thought. Others, alas, will have to be passed over, left for you to discover, should any of this inspire you to take-up reading the book. For this post, I only want to emphasize those aspects that simultaneously echo and yet also deepen the ideas I’ve been trying to flesh out on this substack for the last many months. In this post, and throughout this series, I’m going to give him lots of room to speak for himself, and get reasonably well down into the details. By the end, hopefully the arguments I borrowed from Piccone and possibly Innis will be thrown into much sharper relief, thanks to Nisbet’s detailed and careful historical analysis. 

In his first, 1953, book Nisbet argues that him and his readers find themselves at the tail of a multi-century process of political centralization and individualization, resulting in a dangerously powerful state and its mirror image: a world of demoralized, psychologically crippled people. Such people, though, he argues, to varying degrees have recognized that there is something vitally important missing from their lives. That missing thing was the bonds of community that tie together a society; the very bonds that had to be destroyed, through triumphalist individualism, for the power of the state to have arisen to its present dominance. Nisbet finds America of the mid-20th century hungry for a recovery of what’s been lost. It was this variously recognized, often inchoate urge that he characterizes as the quest for community.

He charts this longing quest in both sociological data, as well as in the works of many scholars and men of letters: e.g., in literature, philosophy, and sociology. The latter category might be surprising to some readers, today, since sociology has largely been captured by forms of abstract, symbolic analysis which serve to undermine appreciation of the organic, quotient, tactile experiences of lived community: e.g., semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and much of so-called “cultural theory.” But Nisbet reminds us that at the middle of the 20^th century, when sociology was still a relatively young discipline, it was easier to recall that its pioneers – e.g., Comte, Tönnies, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber – were acutely aware of the recent deterioration of community as the foundation of modern life, and furthermore often warned about the danger of that deterioration and sometimes even suggested potential remedies.¹

There was also an irony at the heart of this situation, which Nisbet nicely teases out. To fully grasp it though, we need to lay out Nisbet’s fuller argument. Again, most of this line of argument already will be familiar to long time readers of this substack. But Nisbet does flesh out its historical detail, as well as advancing the date of recognition for these conditions of Piccone’s new populism. Treating the community-damaged malaise of what for him was the present age, Nisbet looks back for his comparison of humanity’s social potential to the medieval period:

medieval economy and law are simply unintelligible if we try to proceed from modern conceptions of individualism and contract. The group was primary; it was the irreducible unit of the social system at large.

The family, patriarchal and corporate in essence, was more than a set of interpersonal relations. It was a fixed institutional system within which innumerable, indispensable functions were performed. Upon it, rather than upon the individual, were levied taxes and fines; to it, rather than the individual, went the honors of achievement. In its corporate solidarity lay the ground of almost all decision affecting the individual—his occupation, welfare, marriage, and the rearing of his children. Property belonged to the family, not the individual, and it could not easily be alienated from the family. Law began with the inviolable rights of the family over its members, and public law, such as it was, could not generally cross the threshold of the family.

Even in the towns, where there was a freer air, where there was inevitably a greater amount of individual autonomy, we cannot miss the decisive role of corporate association. What were the towns—at least those which were not survivals of the Roman Empire—but, in origin, associations of merchants and tradesmen. The walls surrounding so many of these towns were no thicker than the protective framework of corporate rights which lay in the charters of the towns. A town was more than a simple place of residence and occupation; it was itself a close association, and its members—citizens, in the medieval sense—were bound to live up to its articles and customs almost as rigorously as the peasants on a manor. Within the town were innumerable small associations, the guilds—organizations based first upon occupation, to be sure, but also upon sacred obligations of mutual-aid, religious faith, and political responsibility. Here, too, in these urban social organizations we are dealing with structures of authority and function which long resisted the later efforts of businessmen and political rulers to subjugate or destroy them.

Despite the mobility, greater than many earlier historians were wont to realize, reflected in medieval commerce, in the great fairs, in the wanderings of scholars, in the administration of the Church, not to mention the innumerable holy quests, the literature of the age reveals a mentality dominated by matters of allegiance, membership, tradition, and group solidarity. Law and custom were virtually indistinguishable, and both were hardly more than the inner order of associations.

Such overlapping associations, with their polyvalent forms of identity and authority, constituted the communal cell tissue of humanly scaled societies. Though Nisbet was writing many decades before the emergence of the evolutionary psychology literature, which has demonstrated the deeply social nature of humans, he clearly understood how fundamental to human mental and social health was such networks of family and association.

At the same time, Nisbet also acknowledges that such associations were not some utopia or panacea to all human urges. The authority in such associations, for the great value they offered in offsetting the potential dominance of other influences – creating polycentric authorities, which prevented any one from monopolizing power over the people who lived within them – could be at times experienced as limiting. Sometimes authority within any one family or association could be exercised in arbitrary or pernicious ways. It would be mistaken to romanticize such family and associative bonds.

Nisbet’s point wasn’t that such medieval communal bonds were perfect, but rather that they were sculpted to the human scale, they provided off-setting authorities, and membership in their ranks provided a strength in numbers, which was multiplied by the number of such memberships to which one could appeal. Nisbet was fond of quoting self-styled anarchist (right-wing socialist, according to Michéa!) Pierre Joseph Proudhon: “Multiply your associations and be free.”

For Nisbet, then, this medieval era freedom and humanly scaled society began to be eroded by the encroachment of what we’d today call modernity. For him, the prime manifestation of this process was the rise of the state. Though, as we’ll see in a future post, it was the imperative of war and the military that informed that ascendency of the state. As we’ve seen in prior posts to this substack, Nisbet too emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in advancing this encroachment. He particularly, and more so in future books, points to Jean Jacques Rousseau as providing the French revolutionaries the blueprint for this encroachment. In Rousseau’s analysis, the individual is only free once fully immersed in the General Will. But the General Will can only exist when there are no intermediary institutions or associations that divide the loyalty of the citizen. Thus, the very associations, institutions, and even families, that constituted the cell tissue of medieval society had to be eradicated to create the General Will and achieve true freedom.

In this, though, Rousseau was only drawing the logical conclusion of recent history leading up to his own time. The Reformation, for instance, with its assertion of the fundamental role of the individual’s relationship with God, had already pushed dramatically in this direction. The importance of the invention of the printing press, facilitating the wide publication of the Bible in the vernacular languages, was central to facilitating this isolation of the individual in worship and communion. It is unsurprising, then, to discover that the Germanic princes backed the Reformation, for instance providing protection to the likes of Luther from agents of the Papacy, as the events of the Reformation served to free them from the influence of the Catholic Church.

With this promotion of atomized individualism, unsurprisingly, then, the bonds of obligation and mutual aid, characteristic of medieval society, became the very obstacles that had to be overcome for the triumph of the state. Again, we’ll let Nisbet speak at length on the topic.

It is indeed this curtailment of group rights by the rising power of the central political government that forms one of the most revolutionary movements of modern history.

if we look not to imaginary beginnings in the never-never land of ethnological reconstruction but to historically connected sequences of change in such specific areas as ancient Athens, Rome, or modern England and France, we discover that the rise and aggrandizement of political States took place in circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities.

If we are more commonly struck by these conflicts in some of the dramatic revolutions of modern Europe—1789, 1848, 1917—the fact remains that they are revealed throughout the course of modern political and social history. Whether in the writings of Luther and Calvin, in the pages of the French Encyclopedia, the economic essays of Hume or Smith, or in the works of Rousseau, Marx, and Mazzini, we cannot miss the implied conflicts of allegiance and authority. They are the very stuff of both intellectual and institutional history.

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 guilds 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. Works, liturgy, sacrament, and polity might be desirable, but only individual faith was crucial.

To refer categorically to the State is to risk a degree of abstraction and empirical unreality that leaves in view none of the concrete manifestations of political behavior in modern history.

On the other hand, not to deal with the State categorically is to risk losing, in the varied sequences of diplomatic, military, and political events the essential unity of the State as an idea system in the modern West and, more important, the powerful and cohesive nature of the State as an institution, as a system of human allegiances and motivations.

Unlike either kinship or capitalism, the State has become, in the contemporary world, the supreme allegiance of men and, in most recent times, the greatest refuge from the insecurities and frustrations of other spheres of life.

The fact that almost no sphere of life in the contemporary world is removed from the processes of political behavior is no more of a justification for the historical blurring of distinction between State and society than is the fact that, in the medieval world, no sphere of life was wholly removed from the authority of the Church.

And as important as was the rise of the state itself, as we saw in discussions of the French peasants during the French revolution, and Polanyi’s discussion of “the great transformation” in England, contrary to the delusions of many libertarians and ultra-free marketers, the most important impact of the radically new powerful state was the ability to impose capitalist relations and arrangements upon people who’d previously been protected from radical commodification of their lives and communities by those very intermediary, medieval communal bonds discussed above.

Philosophically, what is new in capitalism is not the pursuit of gain. This is a timeless pursuit. Rather it is the supposition that society's well-being is best served by allowing the individual the largest possible area of moral and social autonomy. It was this moral and social autonomy that the surviving medieval corporations tended to block; through both force and principle the new middle class sought to exterminate or check at least the traditional communal authorities.

Behind the new discipline, represented by the factory bell and the overseer, the precise division of the day into units of wages-time, the mechanical modes of machine-driven precision, and the long series of minute regulations, there was “the great, impersonal system,” within which human beings existed for the workday, not as members of society but as individual units of energy and production.

with respect to the rise of capitalism, we may give full credit to internal conflicts of a purely economic sort in the guild system and to the influence of the middle class, but it is a fair generalization that, apart from the massive changes that were taking place in the structure of political power during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, capitalism would never have come into existence. The State's development of a single system of law, sanctioned by military power, to replace the innumerable competing laws of guild, Church, and feudal principality; its deliberate cultivation of trade in the hinterland; its standardized systems of coinage, weights, and measures; its positive subsidies and protections to those new businessmen who were seeking to operate outside the framework of guild and Church; its creation of disciplined State workhouses—all provided a powerful political stimulus to the rise of capitalism. Above everything else, the State offered, through its efforts at territorial consolidation of law, a scene increasingly impersonal and calculable—a scene within which businessmen might operate as individuals rather than as members of a traditional group. It is in these terms, indeed, that one historian has been led to wonder how far capitalism was the work of the businessman at all, and how far it was the consequence of the overthrow of the medieval system by the military might of the absolute State.

A fair question, then, in response to all this, might be, how did these things happen? How were people lured away from the traditional protection of their many associations and communal bonds into a centralist world of state monopolized power over their lives? And answering that question fleshes out the great historical irony, highlighted by Nisbet, to which I referred earlier in this post. For, it turns out that this eradication of medieval communal freedom – Proudhon’s multiple associations (which, as we’ve acknowledged, had their tradeoff costs) – was achieved through a rhetorical inversion of its prime virtue. In other words, the empowering of the state, and concurrent descent to (arguably, from the medieval or temporal’s perspective) the nadir of human freedom, is fueled ironically by a hopeful response to none other than a promise of freedom. Again, let’s let Nisbet sketch out the dynamic for us.

Force alone will not explain the psychology of allegiance, or the growing moral dependence upon political action. The early distrust of the political sovereign in Western Europe and the traditional reliance upon religious and social systems for protection and security have been dissolved only by a growing conviction that a type of “freedom” comes from political power.

To Rousseau the real oppressions in life were those of traditional society—class, church, school, and patriarchal family. How much greater the realm of individual freedom if the constraints of these bodies could but be transmuted into the single, impersonal structure of the General Will arising out of the consciousness of all persons in the State.

The proffer of, first, the personal power of the monarch and, then, the power of the seventeenth-century legal State in support of those eager to be freed of medieval group restrictions must be seen as one of the most powerful causes of modern, Western individualism in all spheres of life.

In the medieval world there was relatively little concern with positive, discrete rights of individuals, largely because of the diffuseness of political power and the reality of innumerable group authorities. But when the consolidation of national political power brought with it a destruction of many of the social bodies within which individuals had immemorially lived and taken refuge, when, in sum, law became a more centralized and impersonal structure, with the individual as its unit, the concern for positive, constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals became urgent.

To compare the position of the political power of the State in the thirteenth century with that power today is to realize that fundamental among all the “emancipations” of modern history has been the emancipation of the State from the restrictive network of religious, economic, and moral authorities that bound it at an earlier time.

So, what was always presented, by the spatials, as the greater potential for individual freedom, wound up being really the greater freedom of the state from the many, longstanding familial and communal obstacles to the exercise of such exclusive political power. Being liberated from the obligations and authority of familial and communal bonds and obligations did not, as suggested, create a society of free individuals, but rather of individuals under the undivided, monopoly of liberated state power.

The Quest for Community has much more to say than this. But as Nisbet’s opening salvo, it is perhaps most noteworthy for having laid out the terrain of the problem of modern society: the loss of community, its historical explanation, and the political, social, and psychological consequences of those historical events. The book covers other important dimensions of these historical processes, as well as some rudimentary ideas about potential corrections to the triumph of the spatials – manifest in the form of the expansive, administrative state of the managerial class.

Those are matters that we’ll unpack, turning to other books of Nisbet’s, in more detail in posts to come. But this seems to lay the groundwork for such efforts moving forward. So, if these topics interest you, and you haven’t yet, please…

And, if you know someone else, who might enjoy what we do here, please…

1. In fact, though I haven’t yet read it, apparently in The Sociological Tradition, Nisbet argues that the same critical response to the French Revolution, which gave shape to conservatism, was likewise the roots of sociology. So, conservatism and sociology have a common intellectual source. Like Nisbet, I identify as a historical sociologist. My MA was in history. And though my PhD was in communication studies; in the North American tradition, communication studies was very much a sub-discipline of sociology, particularly under the influence of the first-generation Chicago school: in my case, particularly, Robert Park and Roderick McKenzie. So, it’s inspiriting to be reminded by Nisbet that sociology once was focused on real, material, institutional human life. As opposed to the obsession with abstract, symbolic analysis which has colonized the discipline since the later 20th century. Humans certainly are uniquely symbolic animals (see my early book, Not for the Common Good: Evolution and Human Communication). And that facility for symbolism, like everything, has its pros and cons. It deserves attention in sociological research. However, being uniquely symbolic certainly doesn’t mean primarily so, and definitely not exclusively so. Which are impressions one might validly ascertain from the research product of so many sociology departments in recent decades.