war, progress, and sociology in the age of ideology filewar, progress, and sociology 311 war,...

War, Progress, and Sociology 311

War, Progress, and Sociology inthe Age of Ideology

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order andFreedom by Robert A. Nisbet (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress: 1953; San Francisco: Institute for ContemporaryStudies, 1990). (QC)

Cited Works of Robert Nisbet

“Foreward” to The American Family and the State , edited byJoseph R. Peden and Fred Glahe (San Francisco: PacificResearch Institute, 1986). (AS)

“Conservatism and Sociology,” The American Journal of Sociology48 (September 1952), 167-175. (CS)

The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America,1945-1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971). (DA)

“The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France,” TheAmerican Journal of Sociology 49 (November 1943), 156-64.(FS)

History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).(HP)

The Making of Modern Society (New York: NYU Press, 1986).(MM)

The Present Age: Progress and Authority in Modern America (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1988). (PA)

Sociology as an Art Form (New York: Oxford University Press,1976). (SA)

312 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society (NewYork: Knopf, 1970). (SB)

Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press,1969). (SC)

The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in WesternThought (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982). (SP)

The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). (ST)

Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).(TA)

Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays ( NewYork: Random House, 1968). (TR)

In the preface to The Quest for Community , Robert Nisbetexplained the theme of his work: “I have chosen to deal with the

political cause of the manifold alienation that lies behind thecontemporary quest for community.” (QC, vii) Although eco-nomic, religious, and cultural factors played a role in modernman’s alienation, the role of the state was preeminent in severingthe ties between the individual and his kin, church, and localassociations. Supplanting traditional communities, the state wasable to reorganize society with its ideology of individualism,secularism, and progress that was aimed at imperial expansion.The growing concentration of power in the state allowed it topenetrate successfully into “man’s economic, religious, kinship,and local allegiances” and dislocate “established centers of func-tion and authority” with its own mandate and bureaucraticorganization. (QC, viii) The decline of traditional communities,and the corresponding rise of individual alienation, was a directresult of the concentration of power and the complete sovereigntyof the modern state.

For Nisbet, communities rather than individuals were theunits of society, as best exemplified during the Middle Ages, whenthe “group was primary.” Honors, privileges, and immunities


were attached to communities because they were prior to theindividual in origin and authority: “whether we are dealing withthe family, the village, or the guild, we are in the presence of thesystems of authority and allegiance which were widely held toprecede the individual in both origin and right.” (QC, 81) Deci-sions of occupation, welfare, and family were decided not by theindividual but by the community. The medieval town “was itself aclose association, and its members—citizens in the medievalsense—were bound to live up to its articles and customs almostas rigorously as the peasants on the manor.” (QC, 81-83) Con-trary to Locke’s state of nature or Rawls’s original position,Nisbet contended that all individuals were born in a communityinstead of some a priori condition from which they could consentto a societal contract. Like Aristotle, Nisbet believed that thecommunity was prior to the individual in both origin and authoritybecause it was only in the community where the individual couldfind fulfillment and achieve self-sufficiency.

Not only did Nisbet reject the modern liberal premise ofabstract individualism, but he dismissed the idea of equality as thebasis for it. For Nisbet, a community was a hierarchal andauthoritative organization where humans sought fulfillment andself-sufficiency. One was a member of a community as a “father,mother, priest, soldier, student, or professor” where hierarchyinstead of equality defined the stratification of function and rolein the community. (DA, 44) As Nisbet said, “Wherever two ormore people associate, there is bound to be some form ofhierarchy, no matter how variable, changing from one actor to theother, or how minor. Hierarchy is unavoidable to some degree.”(TA, 238) The hierarchal nature of functions and roles provided“the visible bonds, roles, statuses, and norms” for a community’sboundaries of what was acceptable and unacceptable in thoughtand behavior. (DA, 41) In short, social and political stability wasimpossible for Nisbet without some form of hierarchy andauthority.

However, the stability of the community did not have to reston exploitation and power; rather, Nisbet pointed out that con-


sensus was the foundation for social and political order. Legiti-macy of the regime was rooted in “some manifestation of consen-sus,” whether it resided in the “family, monastery, or university,”and was the essence of community. (DA, 43-44) The stratificationof function and role in the community was based on habit, custom,and use where the individual was engaged in and part of “a patternof authority.” (SB, 142) Similar to proponents of civil society,Nisbet believed that the legitimacy of a community should notfound in the exploitation and power of the state—somethingwhich occurred when authority had broken down. 1 A community’slegitimacy in some sense was voluntarily given by its memberswhere individuals submit to a stratification of function and roleswithin that organization. Yet the community’s legitimacy was notentirely determined by the member’s choice because habit, cus-tom, and tradition provided a context in which the individualfound himself. As Burke had argued, the community, as prior tothe individual, already has been legitimatized by members beforethat individual even existed. When born into a community, themember’s context was already established and therefore themember had no choice other than to engage in and be a part of thatcommunity’s “pattern of authority.”

Crucial to a community’s “pattern of authority”—its cohesiveand consensual nature—was its function. As Nisbet wrote, “Noth-ing is so likely in the long run to lead to the decay of communitythan the disappearance of the function that established it in thefirst place, or the failure of some commanding function to take theplace of the first.” Nisbet did not specify what function a commu-nity should adopt except to suggest that “a community is strong inthe sense of some transcending purpose, some ideal or ideals.”(DA, 43) He also rejected utilitarian and commercial concerns asthe proper function of a community: “In the community of blood,kinship cannot be assessed in terms of either material or pecuni-ary interests. . . . And in the traditional community of scholars, inthe university, one prided himself on an aloofness to the kinds ofmaterial or dollar interests that actuated businessmen.” (DA, 45)This was not to say that utilitarian and commercial matters should


be neglected; rather, these concerns should not be the highestones for the community to seek. Again, Nisbet differed withmodern liberal thinkers who placed property as the foundationfor their new communal order.

When the members of the community began to say “I” insteadof “we,” “one may trace the phases of dissolution of a community.”(DA, 44) For Nisbet, the sixteenth century was the beginning inwhich individuals became steadily more detached from their“close confinements of kinship, church, and association.” (QC,86) The modern individual who emerged from the sixteenthcentury understood communities as particularistic, exclusive,and egalitarian in an ideology of individualism, secularism, andprogress. This progressive emancipation of the individual was adirect result of the decline of the traditional communities fromwhich he has been emancipated. Although this transition con-tained a variety of economic, religious, and cultural factors, therole of the political state was preeminent in this transformation ofthe modern individual. (QC, 97)

The War StateFor Nisbet, the state was an artificial construct that was opposedto traditional communities and arose out of force in the condi-tions of war. (QC, 100) The state’s expansion of power duringtimes of war was especially evident to Nisbet, “Everywhere thestate, as we first encounter it in history, is simply the institution-alization, and projection to wider areas of function and authority,of the command-tie that in the beginning binds only the warrior-leader and his men.” (AF, xxi) The rise of the state was often at theexpense of kinship, as illustrated by Homer, whose epics painted“Greek society just beginning to face the pangs of conflict betweenits age-old kinship structure and the pressing needs of war.Eventually the political state won out.” (AF, xxi-xxii) In Athensitself, the state’s victory was assured with the CleistheneanReforms that abolished kinship and replaced it with the polis,individualism, and contract. Roman history was no different thanGreek when it came to the “conflict between patria potestas , the


sacred and imprescriptible sovereignty of the family in its ownaffairs, and the imperium militiae, the power vested in the militaryleaders over their troops.” (AF, xxxiii) When the empire replacedthe republic, the state triumphed over traditional kinship. Civiland religious life became one when Augustus was anointedPontifex Maximus , and the Institutes of Justinian codified thesovereign as the sole source of law and above it. As Nisbetdescribed the Roman family during this period, “By the fifthcentury, the once-proud Roman family had been grounded downby the twin forces of [the state’s policies of] centralization andatomization . . . .” (AF, xxxiii)

The rediscovery of the Institutes of Justinian during the earlymodern period greatly influenced the re-militarization of society;and with this re-militarization came war, which in turn assisted inthe state accumulating more power at the expense of traditionalcommunities. (TA, 167) Under the conditions of war, thesecommunities became subordinated to the state, and “Only throughthe State’s penetration of traditional social authorities to theindividuals who live under them can its authority be said to bemanifest.” (SB, 385) Individuals were to express their loyalty andidentity first and foremost to the state rather than to their kin,church, or local association. As Nisbet had observed, war pro-vides the most intense sense of community among its members,“the kind of community that is brought into existence by emer-gency and then reinforced by shared values and emotions whichreach the depth of human nature.” (P, 309) But this new sense ofcommunity was at the price of the traditional ones, with innova-tion and invention replacing custom and tradition. (P, 309-11)Over time, “we see the passage of the State from an exclusivelymilitary association to one incorporating almost every aspect ofhuman life.” (QC, 101)

Besides the state’s penetration into traditional communities,the condition of war also promoted the democratization ofsociety: “Democracy, in all its variants, is the child of war.” (P,312) As Nisbet recounted, the Cleisthenan Reforms created thefirst democracy, imperial Rome furnished entitlements to its


citizens, and the first mass infantry was formed during the lateMiddle Ages and had a direct affect on modern democracy’snotion of egalitarianism. Once a society had become democra-tized, it had an affect on the nature of war, with twentieth conflictsidentified with popular and moral aspirations. As Nisbet ob-served, “When the goals and values of a war are popular both inthe sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the his-toric, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and furtherinto the void.” (QC, 39) War now had become a type of crusadein the name of the nation, with its martial character more intenseand reach greater in range because it had become more popular.

The affinity between the conditions of war and the democra-tization of society led to the state’s centralization of power. Thestate’s removal of intermediate political and civil institutionscreated a condition in which men were equal in role, status, andfunction. In Nisbet’s words, “the very centralization of monarchi-cal and State power could not help but create the conditions fora growing interest in personal equality.” (QC, 107) By restrictingthe authority and power of intermediate institutions, the state canstress “upon the impersonality and equality of the law, to createa scene in which many traditional medieval inequalities had to bediminished.” (QC, 108) The state’s centralization of power pro-moted a passion of equality among its citizens where “[a]ll that hasmagnified equality of condition has necessarily tended to abolishor diminish the buffers to central power which are constituted bysocial classes, kindreds, guilds, and other groups whose virtualessence is hierarchy.” (TA, 209) The flattening of hierarchies intraditional communities resulted in a national community ofequality where the state becomes the sole source of power andauthority.

The disappearance of traditional communities coincided withthe rise of alienation among citizens: the individual was “up-rooted, alone, without secure status, cut off from the communityor any system of clear moral purpose.” (ST, 265) People feltpowerless to influence their own lives or the lives of others andtherefore withdrew from social and political organizations. (SB,


264-65) Lacking institutional resources, the individual had to relyupon his own subjectivity to direct his life, which often collapsedeither into a philosophical relativism or hedonistic calculations.Instead of cultivating genuine individuality and creativity, theindividual took “mechanical roles he is forced to play, none ofthem touching his innermost self but all of them separating manfrom this self, leaving him, so to speak, existentially missing inaction.” (ST, 266) Without any intermediate institutions, theindividual viewed the state’s impersonal bureaucratic institutionsas remote, incomprehensible, and fraudulent.

In addition to acting as barrier to the state’s power, interme-diate institutions served as the venue to cultivate values such aslove, honor, and loyalty that cannot be taught effectively by thevast, distant, impersonal state. In fact, when the state attemptedto indoctrinate such values into its citizenry, the result was adegradation of traditional dogmas, traditions, and values. (TR,130) Humans learn and acquire meaningful skills and values inconcrete contexts which only intermediate institutions, like thefamily or churches, can furnish. Without such groups that pointto higher purposes, humans reduce their relationships to contrac-tual ones, with property or currency being the common denomi-nator. Values of honor and loyalty become replaced with whatNisbet referred to as the “cash nexus”: “Every act of service,responsibility, protection an aid to others is an act presupposingor calling for monetary exchange, for cash payment.” (PA, 86) Itshould come to no surprise that the state’s centralization of powerpreceded and made possible the existence of capitalism. Capital-ism required the context of “a single system of law, sanctioned bymilitary power, to replace the innumberable competing laws ofguild, Church, and feudal principality.” (QC, 105) The vast powerof the state, and therefore its attractiveness, was its ability tostandardized objects and men, whether it was currency, property,or rights. The imposition of uniformity upon both objects andmen “provided a powerful political stimulus to the rise of capital-ism.” (QC, 105) It was in this homogenous environment wherecapitalism could emerge and thrive. Of course, the great irony for


Nisbet was that the continual expansion of state power hadundermined and even threaten capitalism: capitalism neededintermediate institutions—its moral capital and cultured order—in order to survive. As Nisbet observed, “Most of the relativestability of nineteenth-century capitalism arose from the fact ofthe very incompleteness of the capitalist revolution.” Capitalismrequired the “the continued existence of institutional and culturalallegiances which were, in every sense, precapitalist” in order toexist. (QC, 237)

Alienation and AmericaWith the decline of intermediate institutions and the rise ofalienation, the modern individual searched for community in thestate, for it is the state that held the greatest promise and “evocativepower” for an “image of community.” (QC, 33) The individual’sidentification with the state as part of his national communitycontributed to the legitimatization of further state expansion intosociety. When intermediate institutions like the family or churcheshave disappeared, we are at the point that Tocqueville had pre-dicted of the administrative despotic state where a majority tyrannydictated and instructed people in all incidents of their lives.Citizens soon lose the capacity to think for themselves andbecome reduced to “timid and industrious animals, of which thegovernment is the shepherd.” 2 (II: 310, 313, 337, 345)

For both Nisbet and Tocqueville, the rise of individualism andthe state’s concentration of power were not contradictory im-pulses in democratic societies but rather complementary ones.Individualism—the mature and calm feeling that leads citizens towithdraw from society in order to pursue their private affairs—was the greatest opponent to liberty, especially in democracieswhere social and class structure was eliminated (at least psycho-logically among the citizenry). With the equalization of inherit-ance, democrats were forced to a life of economic independence,after which they had achieved, led them to believe that they weremasters of their own destinies. The ties to intermediate institu-tions, the sentiments of obligation and loyalty, were transformed


into independence and self-interest. (II: 104-06) Yet this newly-won independence became subsumed under the politics of major-ity tyranny, because democratic citizens believed all are endowedwith an equal capacity for judging and evaluating truth. Thus, “thegreater truth should go with the greater number,” with “themajority its ministering prophet” in politics. (II: 11-12)

This new form of politics was aptly described by Foucault as“bio-politics,” where the state guided and managed citizens ac-cording to a rational criterion of its own determination. 3 With thedecline of intermediate institutions, the state slowly assumed therole of supervising, structuring, and directing the lives of people.Under the “responsible management” of the state, the citizen wasreduced to a passive entity: individuals were categorized by socialsciences and then fitted into an assortment of institutions tobetter serve the state. At the center of this process was anarchitecture of control with multiple networks of power centersthat treated citizens as objects and with nothing escaping itssurveillance. With its access to technology, a vast bureaucracy,and an ideology of individualism and progress, the state now hadacquired the capacities to equal its ambition to implement apolitics to affect an entire population. From birth to death, thecitizen’s life was under the administration of the state.

The emergence of the administrative despotic state usuallyoccurred in times of war; as Nisbet observed, “Most of the greatwars in the modern West have been attended by the gains in thepolitical and social rights of citizenship as well as by increasednationalism and centralization of power.” (MM, 133) Creating avast bureaucracy to oversee its war objectives, the state not onlypenetrated into every aspect of society but the “stifling regimen-tation and bureaucratic centralization of military organization isbecoming more and more the model of associative and leadershiprelationships in time of peace and in nonmilitary organizations.”(QC, 43) When citizens become reduced to equal, homogeneousentities, the state can manipulate and incorporate them into itsmost effective and efficient goals. Genuine individuality becomesreplaced with timidity and industry for the sake of the “national


community.”The emergence of the welfare state was an example of a

bureaucracy modeled after the efficiency of the military tofurther the state’s objectives. Social reforms such as “the equal-ization of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of indus-tries, the raising of wages and improvements in working condi-tions, worker-management councils, housing ventures, deathtaxes, unemployment insurance plans, pension plans, and theenfranchisement of formerly voteless elements of the population”were administered by the state. Furthermore, these social re-forms were usually implemented during times of war or in thename of war. (QC, 40) According to Nisbet, 75 percent of allnational programs in the last two centuries in western countrieshave been designed to equalize income, property, and opportu-nity that first arose out of the “war state and of the war economy.”(TA, 220)

In the United States, the origins of the state’s centralization ofpower resided in President Woodrow Wilson’s entry of the UnitedStates into World War I. For Nisbet, Wilson’s presidency was thecrucial event for America during the twentieth century:

[Wilson’s] political, economic, social and intellectual reorganiza-tion of America in the short period 1917-1919 is one of the mostextraordinary feats in the long history of war and polity. . . .Within a few short months he had transformed traditional,decentralized, regional and localist America into a war state thatat its height permeated every aspect of life. (PA, 42-43)

Congress acceded to Wilson’s request for war powers, withwages, prices, and profits controlled by the national government;industries like the railroads and telegraphs nationalized; and civilliberties suspended. Nisbet was so disturbed by Wilson’s concen-tration of power that he compared his presidency to “the West’sfirst real experience with totalitarianism—political absolutismextended into every possible area of culture and society, educa-tion, religion, industry, the arts, local community, and family


included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings—camewith the America war state under Woodrow Wilson.” (TA, 183)

The Wilson administrative state became the offspring for thesocial programs of the New Deal which were created and advo-cated by such progressive intellectuals like Herbert Croly, WalterLippmann, and John Dewey. To Nisbet, the “so-called New Dealwas no more than an assemblage of governmental structuresmodeled on those which had existed in 1917.” (TA, 184-85) Thevariety of programs and their acronyms—NRA, AAA, WPA—were not only national entities that centralized power but alsowere modeled after military organizations. In fact, the New Dealwas often referred to as the “moral equivalent of war” andcontinued to advance the idea of a national community. When theUnited States entered into World War II, the notion of thenational community became the only possible one for Americansto conceive of in their fight for self-preservation.

Nisbet recognized the connection between American intellec-tuals and the national government’s centralization of power. Notonly were intellectuals active in the Wilson and Roosevelt admin-istrations, but they became even more involved in the governmen-tal activities during the Cold War. As Nisbet described thisperiod, “Political omnicompetence, with the state the spearheadof all social and cultural life; industrialization, however farcical incontext; nationalization of education; rampant secularism; andgrowing consumer-hedonism—all this bespeaks modernity to theWestern clerisy and the welcome sign of the developed, theprogressive.” (PA, 73) In Nisbet’s lifetime, the idea of the nationalcommunity as governed by intellectuals reached its apex underthe Kennedy and Johnson administrations, with its New Frontier,War on Poverty, Great Society, and the Vietnam War.

Intellectuals and IdeologyThe relationship between American intellectuals and politicalleaders was not confined to the Democratic Party. The mostrecent example of this alliance between an intellectual and politi-cal elite can be found in President George W. Bush’s administra-


tion, with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the expansion of thewelfare state in education and Medicare. These policies werecreated, supported, and justified by neo-conservatives, who,during the Cold War, were anti-communist, pro-free-market, andsupporters of traditional cultural values. 4 For neo-conservatives,democracy was a superior form of government because it pro-tected human liberty; and other regimes that curtailed humanfreedom, like the Soviet Union, were deemed evil. Regimestherefore were evaluated and ordered, with democracy as thebest, totalitarian as the worst, and authoritarian governments assomewhere in between. 5 For the neo-conservatives, the UnitedStates should have prevented the Soviet Union from spreadingtotalitarian regimes around the world as well as have promoteddemocratic ones (or in conditions when it was not possible,supported authoritarian ones).

This sense of American exceptionalism—the United Stateshad a unique role to play in the protection and spread of freedomthroughout the world—was shared and encouraged by Americanintellectuals, including neo-conservative thinkers. 6 According tothem, the United States’ commitment to liberal democracy, afree-market economy, and the spreading of these ideals through-out the world made it exceptional. As the exemplar nation thatpromoted democracy and capitalism, the United States was seenas part of an ideology of exceptionalism and progress that becameattractive to intellectuals and political elites, whether they werefrom the left or right. As I will show later, for Nisbet the notionsthat democracy was inherently the best form of regime or thatprogress could occur in the realm of history were flatly rejected.The form of government mattered less than its relationship tointermediate institutions to Nisbet; and the idea that the statecould promote freedom in the name of progress was consideredby him silly, for the concept of progress itself had becomedistorted into an ideology that justified the state’s centralizationof power.

After the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda on Septem-ber 11, 2001, the Bush administration was in a position to


centralize more power in the national government because thestate was at war. In the name of national security, civil libertieswere curtailed, the national bureaucracy expanded, and anotherwar was justified. Rather than being immune to the state’s drivefor war, the United States under the Bush Administration wasmerely another example of a state that expanded its power in anideology of exceptionalism and progress. As Nisbet noted, ideolo-gies were the justifications of a centralized, bureaucratic, nationalstate. This transformation began in war time conditions and hasbeen sustained by subsequent wars in order support the state’sideology. The problem for society was that wars can be justifiedon ideology as fed by intellectuals rather than evidence.

The Bush doctrine that emerged after September 11, 2001,“called for offensive operations, including preemptive war againstterrorists and their abetters, more specifically against the regimesthat had sponsored, encouraged, or merely tolerated any ‘terror-ist group of global reach.’” 7 Like Wilson, Bush’s foreign policycontained a moral component in the promotion of democracy, asin the case of Iraq. The most articulate justification of the IraqWar can be found in the national security presidential directiveentitled “Iraq: Goals, Objectives, and Strategy” that the Presidentsigned on August 29, 2002. 8 The United States’ objectives were toeliminate weapons of mass destruction, to prevent Iraq frombeing a threat to regional stability, to liberate the Iraqi peoplefrom tyranny, and to create a society based on pluralism anddemocracy. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz believedthat “it was necessary and it would be relatively easy” to toppleSaddam Hussein because, in Vice President Dick Cheney’s words,the United States would be “greeted as liberators.” 9

This ideology of exceptionalism and progress—that the rest ofthe world eventually would become part of the liberal democraticand capitalist order—was the centerpiece to the neo-conservative’sideology. Fukuyama’s variation of the modernization thesis in TheEnd of History and the Last Man predicted that all societies wereconverging into a single order of democracy and capitalism.Although there has been some disagreement among these think-


ers about how much the United States should promote democracyaround the world, the underlying belief remained the same. Ofcourse, this ideology has been questioned by the Iraqi War’saftermath: weapons of mass destruction were not discovered,regional instability has become greater in the Middle East afterthe American invasion, and the Iraqi people are engaged in a civilwar, in which the United States military is entangled. Worst of all,the number of international terrorists and threats to the UnitedStates are on the rise, as the “Iraq conflict has become the ‘causecelebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involve-ment in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for theglobal jihadist movement.” 10

Underlying this ideology was a belief that humans, specificallybureaucrats, can direct events in a progressive and directionalfashion. With respect to war, the “revolution in military affairs”(RMA), or more commonly known as the Rumsfeld doctrine, wasthe latest manifestation of the belief that bureaucracies can guide,direct, and control human events. Proponents of RMA believedthat technology was the primary driver of change in war. Byproviding superior information to leaders, the RMA would enablepolitical and military leaders to make better decisions on thebattlefield.11 The cultivation of character and training of soldierswas secondary to investment in technology, weaponry, and infor-mation systems.

The United States’ quick and relatively low-cost defeat of Iraqseemed to justify the RMA, but the subsequent insurgency andcivil war exposed the flaws of this doctrine. The problem of thedoctrine was that the enemy became indistinguishable fromcivilians, thereby negating the American technological or infor-mational advantage. Furthermore, the use of asymmetrical weap-onry such as suicide bombers undermined the United Statesadvantage in conventional weapons. The insurgency had to befought in neighbors, from door-to-door instead of from the sky orsea where missiles could be launched. The virtues of prudence,discretion, and courage were more necessary in combating thistype of conflict than weapon systems or transformation doctrine.


The blending of civilians and combatants, the use of low-technology weaponry, and the propaganda of ideas in a decentral-ized network was known as “fourth generation warfare.” 12 Most ofthe post–World War II conflicts the United States has beenengaged have been fourth-generational: Vietnam, Lebanon, So-malia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What determined the outcome ofthis type of conflict was will instead of technology, with sub-national actors, manipulation of the media, and the cooperationof civilians as the main theaters of battle. Organizations like Al-Qaeda and the insurgent groups in Iraq have used this type ofwarfare with great success. What the United States military neededto do was become more flexible in its organization and responses tothe enemy. In other words, the United States must abandon theRMA and focus more on training of the infantry, media propa-ganda, and nation-building. Philosophically speaking, the under-lying belief that the centralized state, with its vast and impersonalbureaucracy can control and direct events, must be replacedwith intermediate institutions and individual decisions.

The suggestions of fourth-generation war advocates coin-cided with Nisbet’s ideas on bureaucracy, intermediate institu-tions, and progress. Instead of relying upon the command-and-control of the Pentagon, the United States military should trustthe intermediate institutions of battalions, media groups, andnon-governmental organizations to make decisions in a battle thatwas defined not by certainty of information but by contingency ofevents. In order that these institutions to make the correct andprudent decisions, the United States will have to invest intotraining and cultivation of character in its soldiers, which again ismost effective among small groups with their local sentiments andattachments. But for this to be accomplished, the idea thathumans solely can direct history in the name of progress must firstbe dismissed.

Progress and HistoryThe concept of progress was a crucial feature in the ideology ofthe war state to justify its centralization of power at the expense


of intermediate institutions. Citizens voluntarily have sacrificedtheir privileges and liberties to the state if they believed that thefuture promises more than the past. The justification of “makingthe world safe for democracy”—whether it was against theGermans, Japanese, Soviets, or Islamic fundamentalists—onlybecame persuasive if the concept of progress existed; otherwise,there was no compelling reason why citizens should submitthemselves to the state. Given this fact, it should come to nosurprise that intellectuals were not only the best equipped but alsoplayed an active role in presenting the case of progress on behalfof the national government to its democratic citizenry. As Nisbethad noted, the concept of progress in our times “had reached itszenith in the Western mind in popular as well as scholarly circles.From being one of the most important ideas in the West it becamethe dominant idea.” (HP, 171)

For Nisbet, the concept of progress was neither uniquelymodern nor entirely secular in origin and history. Rather thanemerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the con-cept of progress was founded in the Greek and Roman attemptto understand their histories. The key to understanding progressto the classical mind was the idea of nature ( physis or natura):the nature of any object—animal, plant, a person, or even acivilization—“was simply a pattern of growth and change thatwas held to be inherent in it, natural to its very structure orbeing.” (MM, 39-40) The task of classical science was to identifythe nature or essence of an object and trace its development andprogress sequentially over a period of time. Thinkers like Plato,Aristotle, Seneca, and other classical thinkers each wrote onhuman development that occurred over several generations. 13

(SC, 15-61; HP, 13-26)Christian theologians and philosophers fused the classical

notion of nature with the Israelite conception of sacred history inorder to describe human events as something “that could not havebeen other than it actually was.” (P, 239) In other words, Goddirected human progress as it unfolded in history; or as Nisbetwrote, “All of the essential ideas involved in the philosophy of


progress—slow, gradual, and continuous advance through timeof all mankind, in a pattern of successively higher stages ofdevelopment, the whole process revealing, necessity, direction,and purpose—are to be found in the Christian philosophy ofhistory.” (P, 239) However, the nature of human history was notin reference to the external events—a series of unintelligible andtherefore meaningless events—but to the spiritual developmentof mankind. The Christian philosophy of history for Nisbet wasessentially Augustinian in its belief of temporal historical neces-sity and ecumenical spiritual unity. (HP, 59-76) The concept ofprogress was to be discovered not in the city of man but in the cityof God. In this sense, the concept of progress as a spiritualexperience of the divine available to all humans reached itsgreatest refinement in the Christian philosophy of history.

The mistake of modern thinkers was to misplace the conceptof progress to the realm of historical necessity. Although the “themove from the Christian to the ‘modern’ concept of progress wasshort and uncomplicated,” this replacement took place sequen-tially in the works of Turgot, Lessing, and Kant, where humanprogress was not determined solely by God’s grace but also bynatural causes. (P, 240) The Enlightenment philosophers forNisbet argued that both God and nature—the former accessibleby faith, the latter by reason—provided humans the path towardsprogress. In spite of permitting God’s existence, the Enlighten-ment thinkers not only had redefined the divine as a distant watch-maker deity, but they have allowed reason an equal, if notsuperior, epistemological claim to knowledge in nature. Thissource of knowledge, nature, did not refer to the essence of ahuman being but to the external causes and relations of man’senvironment. Consequently, nature and reason were held to beco-equal to God and faith as epistemological and metaphysicalrealities. Progress no longer translated into man’s spiritual devel-opment to the divine but also to his relation to the external worldof nature and its causes.

By the nineteenth century, the concept of progress haddegenerated into an article of popular faith with the divine


entirely disappeared. Social evolutionary theorists dominated theage with their redefinition of progress as something completelynatural, directional, immanent, continuous, and necessary. (SC,168-88) Progress solely resided in the realm of historical neces-sity that was accessible only by reason, and more specifically,scientific reason. With the introduction of the comparativemethod, Western civilization became measured against its ownpast as well as against other civilizations were evaluated todetermine the progress of human development. Unstated andassumed was that contemporary Western civilization—alienatedindividuals, a centralized state, an ideology of secularism—werethe criteria against which other past and present civilizations wereto be measured against. This assumption would be exposed andsomewhat dismantled in the twentieth century after two worldwars and the rise of postmodernism.

Nisbet himself doubted the assumptions of nineteenth-cen-tury evolutionary theories: “Change is not natural, not normal,much less ubiquitous and constant. Fixity is. . . . If we look atactual social behavior, in place and in time, we find over and overthat persistence in time is the far more common condition ofthings.” (SC, 270) Furthermore, change is not directional: “Pat-terns, rhythms, trends are inescapably subjective. There is noinherent relation to the data. However persuasive a given ‘direc-tion’ may be to our acquired interests or values, it has noindependent or objective validity.” (SC, 285) Consequently,theories that claim progress or directional change in the realm ofhistorical necessity were fundamentally flawed. According toNisbet, there was no inherent progress or direction in historybecause events were in the state of continual flux. By contrast,human nature was a constant. (SC, 298) If we resorted to theclassical understanding of nature as discovering the essentialaspect of human beings, we discover that progress occurred onlyin sacred and not temporal history. The claims of social evolution-ary theorists therefore were misplaced not only metaphysically inthe realm of historical necessity but also epistemologically in thedenial of the divine.


In spite of its falsity, the concept of progress remained “apowerful intellectual force behind Western civilization’s spec-tacular achievements” that cemented people to the past, present,and future. (P, 241) But the transformation of the concept hascreated a condition of crisis in contemporary society: “[societies]are destroyed by all the forces which constitute their essence.”The result was a society that “steadily [is] losing the minimalrequirements for a society—such requirements being the veryopposite of the egoistic and hedonistic elements that dominateWestern culture today?” (HP, 356) With the disappearance of thespiritual dimensions of man’s existence, society can conceive ofprogress only in temporal and material terms. This modernconception of progress has become emptied of any transcendingsignificance for citizens and as a result can bind people togetheronly in a false ideology of individualism, secularism, and state.

From the social scientist’s perspective, the modern concep-tion of progress has no utility. The concept of progress wasoriginally born in the “classical world, sustained by religion fromthe third century on, and now threatens to die from the loss ofreligious sustenance.” (P, 242) Nonetheless, Nisbet believed thatrecovery of the religious sustenance behind the concept ofprogress was possible, for there was a “faint, possibly illusory,signs of the beginning of a religious renewal in Western Civiliza-tion, notably in America.” (HP, 356) If this renewal was possible,then we were likely to regain “a true culture in which the core isa deep and wide sense of the sacred” and “the vital conditions ofprogress itself and of faith in progress—past, present, andfuture.” (HP, 357) Progress in this sense was not a matter ofhistorical necessity but one that transcended human hedonisticegoism for community and removed a utopian belief in politics asa means of salvation.

Ideas in HistoryThe confidence in progress that bureaucrats proclaim in direct-ing historical change was undermined by the absence of a direc-tional law in the realm of historical necessity. History was a series


of discrete events rather than intelligible laws inherent in anytemporal and material process from which someone can uncoverand discern. As Nisbet wrote, change was contingent, episodic,and variable. There were constants in human nature but they were“of little help in accounting for variables” to explain historicalchange. (SC, 298) The multiplicity of factors that caused histori-cal change were too numerous for the bureaucrat to capture andmanipulate for the state’s ends. Like progress, the notion of adirectional change in history as discovered and guided by an elitewas a faulty one at best and a destructive one at worst.

For Nisbet, the constancy in human nature—the nature oressence of the person—was his ideas as forces in the realm ofhistorical necessity: “everything vital in history reduces itselfultimately to ideas, which are the motive forces . . . Above all, manis what he thinks the transcending moral values are in his life andin the lives of those around him.” (TA, 233) Nisbet allowed for theinfluence of social, economic, and political factors to influencehistorical events, but he believed intellectual, moral, and ethicalideas were paramount in the shaping of social community andpolitical sovereignty. In this sense, Nisbet was similar to the neo-conservative thinkers in their emphasis upon ideas as the movingforces in history. However, Nisbet differed from the neo-conservatives in two important respects: 1) he recognized othervariables, such as economics, culture, and religion, played a vitalrole in the shaping of events; and 2) he rejected any directionalsense of history or conception of progress that was strictlytemporal in nature. There was no cause, direction, or movementin history for thinkers to discover, and any attempt to do so wouldbe futile. The only fundamental thing we can know with somecertainty was the constancy of human nature and the ideas thatthey produce.

According to Nisbet, the two great traditions in Westernsocial and political thought were political monism and socialpluralism, with the former started by Plato and the latter byAristotle. Social pluralism made a clear distinction between thestate and society and was characterized by a “relationship that


exists between the political state, whatever its form of govern-ment, and the several institutions of the social sphere.” (TA, 245-46) The form of the government mattered less than its relation-ship to intermediate institutions, for “a government monarchialor oligarchical in structure can be a free government if—as hasbeen the case many times in history—it respects the otherinstitutions of society and permits autonomies accordingly in thesocial and economic spheres.” (TA, 246) By contrast, politicalmonism was the preeminence of the state, so that “[s]uch groupsas family, locality, neighborhood, church, and other autonomousassociations are almost uniformly reduced to their individualatoms, made into unities dependent upon concession of existenceby the state, or in some other way significantly degraded.” (TA,245)

Although Plato was the first political monist in the West, itwas Hobbes and Rousseau who were the first modern represen-tatives of this tradition where “the affirmation in each instance isthe state conceived as being, not force, not repression, butjustice, freedom, and tranquility for the individual.” (SP, 10) Thesocial contract rather than natural or social associations was thebasis of political sovereignty: individuals would fulfill their rightsnot in local groups or traditional associations but in the state. ForHobbes, “the greatest claim of the absolute State lay in its powerto create an environment for the individual’s pursuit of his naturalends.” (QC, 137-38) Rousseau went even further than Hobbes inproclaiming that “there is no morality, no freedom, no commu-nity outside the structure of the State.” (QC, 140) WhereasHobbes was content to tolerate individuals to pursue their ownends within the state, Rousseau was the “first of the modernphilosophers to see in the State a means of resolving the conflicts,not merely among institutions, but within the individual himself.”(QC, 140) The state for Rousseau was absolute, indivisible, andomnipotent with its general will reconciling both social andindividual conflict through civil religion. (SP, 37-45) The indi-vidual lived a free life as determined by the state.

In the tradition of modern social pluralism, with its emphasis


on local communal associations against the arbitrary and imper-sonal power of the state, Nisbet cited the works of Burke, Acton,Tocqueville, Lammenais, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. Burke’sReflections on the Revolution in France was given particularattention by Nisbet as the father of modern social pluralism.Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution was rooted in his“profound belief in the superiority of traditional society and itscomponent groups and associations, as well as what he regardedas its inherent organic processes of change, over-centralizedpolitical power.” (SP, 53) It was the “rationalist simplicity” of theFrench Revolution that Burke had feared because of its destruc-tive effect upon the intermediate institutions of traditional groupsand local associations. (SP, 56) Sentiments such as love andloyalty were best cultivated in small groups rather than in a“national community.” In fact, a genuine national communitycould exist only when individuals were able to transcend theirlocal attachments for the greater good, or as Burke wrote, “thelove of the whole depends upon the subordinate partiality.” (PS,58) But if there were no intermediate institutions in society, thencitizens would not have anything to sacrifice or transcend for thenational community. Paradoxically then, traditional groups andlocal associations made possible a national community, becausethey provided something from which citizens could transcend.

The other thinker that was given a preeminent place in themodern social pluralist tradition by Nisbet was Tocqueville:“There is a clear and logical line of descent from Burke’s espousalof traditional groups and associations, his belief in limits on allforms of power, and his advocacy of traditional pluralism and ofdecentralization to the fundamental principles in Tocqueville’sclassic Democracy in America . . . .” (SP, 58) According to Nisbet,Tocqueville’s central thesis was that alienation led modern societyfrom intermediate institutions to the state centralization so thatthe power of modern democracy was rooted in public opinion.(ST, 120) The solution to further concentration of state powerwas the preservation of intermediate institutions and federalism:“Fundamental among the causes of continued freedom in Ameri-


can democracy, Tocqueville shows us, is the American principleof division of authority in society.” (SP, 65) The division ofauthority between the national and state governments—as well asin intermediate institutions that served as a barrier against thestate—fragmented the state’s authority and power in society. (SP,68) Tocqueville’s insights into the federal principle and interme-diate institutions as the key features to preserve liberty in Ameri-can democracy influenced Nisbet’s own work and methodology instudying the United States.

The State of SociologyNisbet’s selection of the traditions of political monism and socialpluralism was part of his overall project of restoring sociology toits classical foundations. Most historians of social thought haveregarded sociology “as a logical and continuous outcome of theideas which had commanded the intellectual scene during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (FS, 157) To Nisbet, thiswas an inaccurate characterization: sociology arose in directresponse to the French Revolution that sought to destroy society.(FS, 159) The government destroyed the churches and guilds,abolished familial and property rights, and declared education asthe sole function of the state. The destruction of society promptedthe discipline of sociology, with Burke, Comte, and others hopingto rebuild society and its intermediate institutions. (FS, 161; CS,172) Concepts such as “social, tradition, custom, institution, folk,community, organism, tissue, and collective” were re-introducedinto intellectual life in the aftermath of the French Revolution andbecame the foundation of the discipline of sociology. (C, 77)

Unfortunately for Nisbet, sociology usually adopted one oftwo approaches to the study of intellectual history: it either haveanalyzed individual thinkers or concentrated on schools of thought.Both of these approaches contained serious flaws. The focus onthe individual thinkers’ ideas ignored the cultural, economic, andpolitical impact upon the thinker’s thought. Ideas consequently“are treated as extensions of shadows of single individuals ratherthan as the distinguishable structures of meaning, perspective,


and allegiance that major ideas so plainly are in the history ofcivilization.” (ST, 3) Nevertheless, this approach was superior tothe second method, which concentrated on schools of thought.The study of ideas in this approach made them irreducible givensthat resisted analysis. (ST, 4) That is, schools of thought wereabstractions of ideas that presented themselves as a systematicaccount of reality, regardless of whether they actually corre-sponded to that reality. These ideologies were a further removalfrom reality that the sociologist was trying to penetrate.

Finding both approaches inadequate, Nisbet decided to study“unit-ideas” where one began “with neither the man nor thesystem, but with the ideas which are elements of the system.” (ST,5) These unit-ideas had to be general but distinct, continuous yetdiscrete, and provided a theoretical perspective to understandsocial and political reality. By focusing on unit-ideas, the sociolo-gist can account for cultural, economical, political, and otherfactors that influenced their formations while not making any ofthese structural variables the primary explanatory cause. Unit-ideas also were anchored in a civilizational reality, unlike schoolsof thought that were abstracted from anything concrete andtherefore subject to speculative fantasies about the directionalnature of history. Rooted in unit-ideas, Nisbet’s sociology thusprovided a correction to the approaches that had focused eitheron the individual thinker or schools of thought.

Some examples of unit-ideas were community, authority,status, the sacred, and alienation. Following the Hegelian tradi-tion, Nisbet claimed these unit-ideas were created when an ideaand its “conceptual opposite, to a kind of antithesis, from whichit derives much of its continuing meaning in the sociologicaltradition” came into conflict. (ST, 6) In the case of community,the unit-idea not only referred to local communities but toreligious institutions, occupations, and the family. When com-pared to its opposite—the state, with its impersonal institutionsand contractual obligations—the unit-idea of community becamecrystallized in distinction and meaning.

Nisbet continued with his clarification of unit-ideas with


authority, status, and the scared. Authority was practiced inintermediate institutions and legitimized by function, tradition,and custom, while power was rational, centralized, and popular.(ST, 107) Status was the individual’s position “in the hierarchy ofprestige and influence that characterizes every community andassociation,” with its antithesis as class: a new hierarchy createdby the individualization and fragmentation of society. (ST, 6, 177)Finally, the sacred referred “to the totality of myth, ritual,sacrament, dogma, and the mores in human behavior; to thewhole area of individual motivation and social organization thattranscends the utilitarian or rational and draws its vitality fromwhat Weber called charisma and Simmel piety.” (ST, 221) Itsantithesis was the secular as characterized by utility or rational-ity.

Interesting, Nisbet did not create an opposite for alienation:the sense of estrangement and rootless when one was cut off fromcommunity. Rather, Nisbet called alienation the inversion ofprogress, i.e., the forces that produce progress also create alien-ation. (ST, 264-70) Emptied of any transcendental meaning, themodern concept of progress can mean anything that humans wantto subscribe to it in the realm of historical necessity. As statedbefore, usually the content furnished into the concept of modernprogress was the promise of national security or material pros-perity, which, in turn, required the state to centralize power at theexpense of intermediate institutions. Citizens must be alienatedfrom their local attachments and obligations in order to identifywith the “national community” and to serve its goals in the nameof progress. This particularly was true in times of war, whencitizens voluntarily alienated themselves from intermediate insti-tutions for national and progressive causes. The end result was anatomized society led by a “progressive” state.

Unit-ideas most clearly emerged when there was a “conflictbetween two social orders,” such as the “feudal-traditional andthe democratic-capitalist,” with thinkers like Tocqueville andWeber writing about the “tension between the values of politicalliberalism and the values of a humanistic or cultured conserva-


tism, however reluctant this conservatism might be.” (ST, 316;317) The current problem confronting sociology was that thetheoretical paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centurieswere still in place and consequently have become outdated andoverused. As Nisbet pointed out:

It thus becomes ever more difficult to squeeze creative juices outof the classical antitheses, that, for a hundred years, haveprovided theoretical structure for sociology. . . . It becomes evermore difficult to extract new essence, new hypothesis, newconclusion, from them. Distinctions become ever more tenuous,examples ever more repetitive, vital subject matter ever moreelusive. (ST, 138)

What were required of sociology were new unit-ideas, whichonly can emerge of out of imagination and intuition rather thanmethodological innovations and research designs. (ST, 319)

The sociologist must be inspired by his creative and intellec-tual impulses to direct his discipline away from scientism—thebelief that the scientific methodology provided the only source ofknowledge about reality. For Nisbet, sociology was dominated byscientism, which explained its dependence upon outdated unit-ideas to explain reality. According to Nisbet, not one unit-idea wasderived from scientific analysis: “Without exception, each ofthese ideals [unit-ideas] is the result of thought processes—imagination, vision, intuition—that bear as much relation to theartist as to the scientist.” (ST, 18-19) The sociological unit-ideasof the bourgeoisie and worker, the bureaucrat and intellectualwere a result of a creative act “that is not different in nature fromwhat we have learned of the creative process in the arts.” (SA, 9)What sociologists needed to do today was to create new unit-ideasthat “have a significant relation to the moral aspirations of anage,” such as the problems of individualism, urbanization, andsecularism. (CS, 168)

Nisbet was pessimistic about the prospects of sociology’s, andthe social sciences’ in general, future as a discipline. The inability


to generate new unit-ideas because of the predominance ofscientism in the social sciences made the their contributions tosociety “minimal when not actually counterproductive, and thatin so many of the projects of social reconstruction designed bysocial scientists for government execution more harm than goodhas been the result—as in the benignly intended but disastrous‘wars’ against poverty, ethnic discrimination, poor housing, slums,and crime.” (HP, 347) Furthermore, the social sciences hadbecome politicized to such an extent that objectivity was difficultto achieve. (P, 287) Given the influence of these two factors in thesocial sciences, scientism and the politicization, Nisbet was nothopeful about the social sciences being able to diagnose thenature of society. The discipline of sociology had become cor-rupted and outmoded in this age of ideology.

The Age of IdeologyIn its quest to create a national community, the state centralizedpower at the expense of intermediate institutions with an ideologyof individualism, secularism, and progress. The introduction ofegalitarianism into society destroyed the established hierarchiesof traditional communities and fostered alienation among citizenswhere they have no recourse to fulfill their communal longingother than in the national state. The result was individualismwhere people pursued private interests instead of public obliga-tion, leaving those tasks to intellectuals and bureaucrats. Notconceiving of anything higher than the state, both the intellectualand bureaucrat promoted secularism in order for the citizen tofind meaning and significance in the realm of historical necessity;and this history had become redefined as progressive where thestate would provide its citizens security and prosperity in thefuture.

The emergence of this ideology coincided with the state’scentralization of power—a process that was accelerated in timesof war. The destruction of intermediate institutions and theremoval of transcendence from the public sphere allowed thestate to defined wars in moral and spiritual terms; and the


democratization of society enabled the state to mobilize allresources of the population towards war, thereby making it amass, ideological movement. Rather than the exception, theUnited States has been exemplar of these processes of democra-tization, centralization, and ideological justification. With itsbelief in exceptionalism and progress, the United States sincePresident Wilson has conceived of history as one of necessity thatinevitably will lead to liberal democracies and free-market econo-mies.

The ideology of “making the world safe for democracy”contained a state-sanctioned moralism that enabled the UnitedStates to justify its wars to its citizenry. Wars are presented to theAmerican public in ethical, moral, and sometimes even in spiritualterms to rationalize the curtailment of civil liberties, the nation-alization of industries, or the monitoring of intermediate institu-tions. In the name of national security, the state was permitted tocentralize its power; and with the promise of progress, the statewas able to ask its citizens for sacrifice and commitment to itsnational cause. In the end, we are left with Tocqueville’s admin-istrative despotic state and Foucault’s “bio-politics”: citizens areguided, supervised, and directed by the state from their birth totheir death.

This ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress haseven penetrated into the American military establishment, withits belief that bureaucracies some day will be able to guide anddirect human events with perfect informational certainty. Thepractical consequences of such a belief were investment intotechnology, weaponry, and information systems instead of thecultivation of character and training of soldiers in intermediateinstitutions, where such values as honor and loyalty were bestdeveloped. As a consequence, the United States military waspoorly prepared in confronting the new type of conflicts thatemphasized flexibility, prudence, and the propaganda of ideas.Rather than relying upon a vast bureaucracy to control anddictate events, the United States military was forced to reinventitself to make decisions not by certainty of information but from


the contingency of events.The inability for the United States military to diagnose the

post-Iraqi situation correctly was due to this ideology of individu-alism, secularism, and progress. The emptying of transcendencefrom the public sphere has allowed ideologies to take its placeunder progressive causes, like “making the world safe for democ-racy.” This process of eliminating spiritual history from politicsand society emerged during the early modern period with theintroduction of nature and reason as equal metaphysical andepistemological realities to the realities of God and faith. By thenineteenth century, reality was conceived solely in the realm ofhistorical necessity that was given significance and meaning bysocial evolutionary theorists and other ideologues. Progressbecame an immanent process, which contents could be filled byanyone’s speculative fantasy.

This removal of the Christian philosophy of history, with itstwo sets of account as historical and spiritual, reduced reality intothe single realm of historical necessity. With this new condition,the re-introduction of religion into the public sphere now wasunderstood not in the spiritual realm but only in the historicalone: the city of God has been infused into the city of man.Spiritual progress became understood in the terms of historicalprogress. Thus, we should not doubt the sincerity of the religiousdeclarations of political and intellectual elites, but we shouldquestion in which city did they understood their spiritual andreligious views to be.

For Nisbet, significance and meaning in the realm of histori-cal necessity was not possible, because “Patterns, rhythms,trends are inescapably subjective. There is no inherent relation tothe data.” (SC, 285) Theories, as found in social sciences, thatclaim progress existed in history should be regarded as suspect.History was a series of discrete events with no inherent, intelli-gible laws. Whether it was the bureaucrat or intellectual, theattempt to discover such a meaning in history for Nisbet washopeless.

The correction to this age of ideology was the recovery of the


social sciences on classical foundations in order to diagnose thefundamental problems of society. Nisbet established the founda-tions of sociology on the traditions of political monism and socialpluralism, with his understanding of unit-ideas as the new basis ofthis discipline. By taking into account culture, economics, andpolitical factors into his methodology, Nisbet was able to avoidthe intellectual reductionism of neo-conservatives in understand-ing reality, but he still was able to give preeminence to ideas as theprimary motivating force in history. Nisbet also avoided thespeculative fantasies in his analysis because he rejected the notionthat history had any pattern or directional change inherent withinit. In this sense, Nisbet’s sociology was able to provide us adiagnosis of reality without reductive analyses or extraordinaryprojections about it.

The quest for community was a permanent and constant onein human nature for Nisbet, so any attempt to eradicate this desirewas impossible. The question that confronted him was wherewould this longing be fulfilled: in the state or in intermediateinstitutions? Clearly for Nisbet, it was intermediate institutionslike the family, the church, and local associations. But for us, theproblem is even more complicated because we lack the concep-tual apparatus to make sense of our own alienation in this age ofideology. Nisbet also recognized this plight, which is why hesought to establish sociology on the classical foundations ofnature and transcendence. The challenge before us now is whetherwe can follow in Nisbet’s footsteps.

Lee TrepanierSaginaw Valley State University

NOTES1. I prefer the term intermediate institutions rather than civil

society because it seems closer to Nisbet’s description of thisreality. The modern usage of civil society often denotes a politicalor ideological connation instead of an analytical and empiricalone that Nisbet had used. Some examples of the modern usage of


civil society are Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (OxfordUniversity Press, 2006); Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty:Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Penguin, 1994), 3-4; andRobert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining SocialCapital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , 2 vols.,Phillips Bradley, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945). Citationsare volume and page number.

3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978).

4. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism(New York: Basic Books, 1978); Kristol, Irving. Two Cheers forCapitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Podhoretz, Norman.The Present Danger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980).

5. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorship and Double Standards,”Commentary (November 1979).

6. Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf,2006); Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: TheAmerican Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1997); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United Statesand the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the TwentiethCentury (Princeton University Press, 1994).

7. Charles Kesler, “Democracy and the Bush Doctrine,”Claremont Review of Books 5: 1 (Winter, 2004), 18.

8. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon andSchuster, 2004), 154-55.

9. Ibid., 21-22; Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview withTim Russert on Meet the Press , September 10, 2006.

10. “Declassified Key Judgments of the National IntelligenceEstimate ‘Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for theUnited States’ dated April 2006” at www.dni.gov/press_releases/Decalssfied_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf; also see Anonymous,Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror(Washington DC: Brassey’s, Inc. 2004).

11. Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and theCourse of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham Books,


2006); Frederick W. Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transforma-tion of the American Military Policy (New York: Encounter Books,2006).

12. Col. Thomas X.Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On Warin the Twenty-First Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2006);F. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War, The Strategic Theory ofJohn Boyd (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006).

13. It was Lucretius who was the first one to introduce theterm “progress” ( pedetemtin progedientes ) to describe the natureof human development over time (HP, 37-46).

war, progress, and sociology in the age of ideology filewar, progress, and sociology 311 war,...

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