A Sociology of the Permanent Things: Nisbet’s Tocquevillian Philosophy
Academia is hardly considered a hospitable environment for conservatives today, but sociology has become particularly antagonistic toward dissenting points of view. Just this fall, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay, “Left-Wing Bias Is Corrupting Sociology,” arguing that the field has become little more than a “political monoculture.” Rather than rigorously pursuing an account of reality using the discipline’s tools, its practitioners have largely become nothing more than sophistical activists seeking out new justifications for progressivism.
One titan of the field, though, prophesied this dire state of affairs. Robert Nisbet, a longtime sociologist at the University of California, Berkley, the University of Arizona, and Columbia University, turned to the discipline as an antidote to ideology. Inspired by great thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, he attempted to develop a sociology that aimed higher than instrumentalization. Although he is now mostly remembered for his 1953 masterwork, The Quest for Community, a new edition of his more neglected book, The Social Philosophers, more fully reveals the extent to which Nisbet’s particular approach revolved around a profound appreciation for—and allegiance to—the “Permanent Things.” While he was no doctrinaire or mouthpiece for a faction, it is for this allegiance that Nisbet deserves to rank foremost among conservative minds.
Of course, Nisbet was not the only conservative mind looking to revitalize twentieth-century scholarship. Around the same time that he emerged as a leading thinker in sociology, the humanities—and specifically the history of political ideas—were undergoing a renaissance due in no small measure to the influence of Leo Strauss. Confronted by the problems of modern tyranny and nihilism, Strauss and his students turned back to ancient political philosophy to rearticulate the transcendent truths around which our civilization has been established. Whereas most political scientists adopted a vulgar materialism and scientism in this period, these true and better scholars sought out a more enduring, even spiritual, way of thinking about politics. And like these efforts in the political sciences, Nisbet’s achievements in the social sciences primarily direct his readers to the highest human activity: philosophy.
Read more in the Russell Kirk Center’s University Bookman.
