Robert Nisbet Archives ~ Page 2 of 4 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Is Conservatism an Ideology?

By Bradley J. Birzer|2020-04-25T03:15:59-05:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Ideology, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors|

In his excellent, short book, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Robert Nisbet had no problem in identifying conservatism as an ideology. Whereas his friend, Russell Kirk, had repeatedly resisted defining the faith as anything other than a “way of being” quite contrary to all ideologies (in essence, an anti-ideology). Nisbet proclaimed it one of three ideologies [...]

Moving Toward Dread Conformity

By Bradley J. Birzer|2020-04-10T11:06:40-05:00April 8th, 2020|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Civil Society, Civilization, Conservatism, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors|

In 1953, Robert Nisbet published “The Quest for Community,” a book that reveals to us that our own quest has become something both natural and unnatural. That is, it is natural to desire to belong, but it is horrifically unnatural in the ways we choose to commune. 1953 was a banner year for the conservative [...]

Measuring the Influence of Russell Kirk & Other Conservative Authors

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-08-01T17:26:59-05:00May 12th, 2019|Categories: Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Culture, Eric Voegelin, Irving Babbitt, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk|

By using Google’s Ngram Viewer, we find that Russell Kirk’s reputation hit its highpoint in 1964, and then began a painful decline that remained unabated until his death in 1994. What does Ngram tell us about other conservative authors, like Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Christopher Dawson? While I would never consider myself [...]

The Quest for Modern Conservatism

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-05-27T12:43:22-05:00January 28th, 2018|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Bradley J. Birzer, Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, History, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk|

The job of every conservative is twofold: First, he must fight tirelessly against the centralized, unitary state; second, he must do everything possible to promote that which makes the free society not just an ordered one, but a good one. Prior to the publication of Russell Kirk’s masterful The Conservative Mind in 1953, no real [...]

How Power Destroys Community

By Bradley J. Birzer|2019-10-10T13:42:05-05:00January 22nd, 2018|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Civil Society, Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, History, Robert Nisbet|

Power, in and of itself, has become an “ideology,” according to Robert Nisbet. It is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding nuance… As I had the opportunity to write in my previous essay for The Imaginative Conservative, Oxford University Press gave the grand sociologist and historian of ideas, Robert A. Nisbet, a chance to [...]

Aliens in America!

By Bradley J. Birzer|2019-10-10T13:08:21-05:00January 15th, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Community, Conservatism, Culture, Featured, History, Robert Nisbet|

In no society in the world, Robert Nisbet believed, has any people become so remote from nature as have Americans. As technology allowed him to dominate or ignore nature, the American became detached from place, having neither loyalty nor respect for the land that once nourished him… After the rather massive and—at least to the [...]

The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-04-27T21:06:48-05:00January 7th, 2018|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Culture, Edmund Burke, History, Imagination, Irving Babbitt, Religion, Robert Nisbet, Romano Guardini, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Tradition|

Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution… When it came to the history of conservatism, the grand sociologist and man of letters, Robert Nisbet, disagreed with the mighty founder of modern [...]

The Role of the University in the Twilight of the West

By Bradley J. Birzer|2018-10-30T14:31:11-05:00May 16th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Education, Featured, Robert Nisbet, Tradition|

The primary purpose of the university is to preserve the great ideas of the past and to introduce the present generation to timeless conversations, thus preserving such wisdom for countless and unknown future generations… Conservatives rarely remember the profound influence Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) had on the press, academia, and the public at large in [...]

Ten Books That Shaped America’s Conservative Renaissance

By Jeffrey O. Nelson|2022-01-17T13:57:28-06:00March 12th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Economics, Edmund Burke, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Friedrich Hayek, George Nash, Ludwig von Mises, M. E. Bradford, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Conservative Mind, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Wilhelm Roepke, William F. Buckley Jr.|

If we are to know and rebuild a conservative civil social order in this country, then we need to “rake from the ashes” of recent American history the books that influenced a generation of conservative scholars and public figures, books whose message resonated with much of the American populace and resulted in astonishing political triumphs. [...]

Robert Nisbet vs. The State

By Bradley J. Birzer|2019-09-03T18:31:45-05:00February 14th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Featured, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Woodrow Wilson|

Because we Americans have become so infatuated with the power and person of the presidency, we have forgotten our republican duty to promote our sovereignty in legislative bodies… If you were interested in finding the single harshest and yet reasoned critic of the twentieth-century nation-state, you would not, strangely enough, turn to a libertarian. You [...]

The Urban Crisis Revisited

By Robert Nisbet|2017-03-07T15:41:34-06:00February 8th, 2017|Categories: Books, Civil Society, Featured, Robert Nisbet, Social Institutions, The Imaginative Conservative|

Given the nature of our politically-driven, morality-obsessed middle class society, and its passion for direct action, it follows that the more persons there are who are dedicated to solving problems, the more problems there have to be… The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) Once in a great while there [...]

The Conservative Reformation

By Mark C. Henrie|2022-08-13T15:25:45-05:00September 16th, 2016|Categories: Agrarianism, Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk|

Two decades ago, George Nash, in his The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,[1] told the story of how American conservatism was forged rather uneasily as a political movement from three intellectual groupings: traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists. Today on the conventional “Right,” however, we find many libertarians who argue as vigorously against the opponents of [...]

The Death of Community?

By Jane Clark Scharl|2019-10-23T12:44:29-05:00August 19th, 2016|Categories: Community, Culture, Robert Nisbet|

In the 1950s, Robert Nisbet summarized the effects of nineteenth-century individualism on modern humans in the book The Quest for Community: “[Nineteenth-century] individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” His brutally honest assessment is only more true today; our public universities are busy [...]

Still Questing for Community

By Robert Nisbet|2023-03-06T22:57:50-06:00April 11th, 2016|Categories: Books, Community, Essential, Featured, Robert Nisbet, The Conservative Mind, Timeless Essays|

In the retrospect of forty years I can see my book, The Quest for Community (first published by Oxford University Press in 1953), as one of the harbingers of what would become by the end of the 1950s a full-fledged renascence of conservatism. There had been authentic and forthright individual conservatives before the 50s; among [...]