Nisbet was born inLos Angeles in 1913. He was raised with his three brothers and one sister[1] in the small California community ofMaricopa,[2] where his father managed a lumber yard. His studies atUniversity of California, Berkeley culminated in aPh.D. insociology in 1939. His thesis was supervised byFrederick J. Teggart. At Berkeley, "Nisbet found a powerful defense of intermediate institutions in the conservative thought of 19th-century Europe. Nisbet saw in thinkers likeEdmund Burke andAlexis de Tocqueville—then all but unknown in American scholarship—an argument on behalf of what he called 'conservative pluralism.'"[2] He joined the faculty there in 1939.[1]
Nisbet's first important work,The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, [1953] 1969), claimed that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows to combat the centralizing power of the nation-state.New York Times columnistRoss Douthat called it "arguably the 20th century's most important work of conservative sociology".[5]
Nisbet began his career as a leftist but later confessed a conversion to a philosophical conservatism.[6] While he consistently described himself as a conservative, he also "famously defended abortion rightsand publicly attacked the foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan".[7]
He contributed toChronicles. He was especially concerned with tracing the history and impact of theIdea of Progress.[8] He challenged conventional sociological theories about progress and modernity, insisting on the negative consequences of the loss of traditional forms of community, a process that he believed was greatly accelerated byWorld War I. According to British sociologist Daniel Chernilo, for Nisbet, "The sociological interest in the formation of modern society lies in whether and how it can re-invigorate forms of communal life and, if not, in understanding what will be the consequences of such failure." Nisbet, thus, "inverts what had been until then the mainstream proposition that society was more important, both historically and normatively, than community".[9] Chernilo also critically observed that Nisbet's "argument on the Great War [World War I] that marks the transition from community to society offers a one-sided view of the historical process as moving unequivocally towards a decaying condition".[10]
