Nisbet's 11
Eleven (yes, count them, eleven!) points of conservatism
Greetings everyone. I’m off to Grand Rapids tomorrow for the annual Acton University. Amazingly enough, I’ve been participating in Acton summer events since 1991! Yes, I’m that old. In 1991, I attended the Acton summer conference in North Bend, Washington, home of Twin Peaks.
Tomorrow, I’m lecturing on J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Nisbet. Here’s a little bit about Nisbet’s analysis of conservatism. He thought, unlike Kirk, that there were eleven central points to conservatism.
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Robert Nisbet
While most of us would give Russell Kirk and his 1953 magnum opus, The Conservative Mind, primacy of place when considering the foundations of post-conservatism, Kirk did not, of course, create the movement in a vacuum. Somewhat famously, in The Conservative Mind, Kirk offered six canons—or tenets—to describe conservatism. Hoping vehemently to avoid the creation of conservatism as an ideology, he recognized that conservatism offered a way of existence based on dogma rather than system. As some points, Kirk offered six tenets, but at other times the numbers fluctuated from a low of four to a high of 10. The first time Kirk offered his tenets was actually a year before The Conservative Mind appeared, describing four principles in the periodical, World Review. These included 1) “a moral view of the nature of society”; 2) the supremacy of the natural right of property above all other rights and against the threats of “leviathan business and leviathan union”; 3) the “preservation of local liberties, traditional private rights, and the division of power”; and, 4) “national humility.” Taken together, Kirk called them, presumably with no small amount of irony, “a brief programme.”
In that same year, 1952, Robert A. Nisbet also published a list of conservative tenets, but he did so in an academic journal, The American Journal of Sociology, and he presented eleven different points of conservatism. Though it is extremely unlikely that Kirk or Nisbet read each other’s work, prior to 1953 (when they became close friends and intellectual allies), the similarities between Kirk’s definition and Nisbet’s definition are startling. Not surprisingly, Kirk’s are most poetically written, and Nisbet’s lean much more toward the language of the social sciences. Yet, despite these differences, there is far more in common than not, and it makes the present-day reader realize just how many minds and hands and souls it took to bring conservatism into being.
In his excellent article, “Conservatism and Sociology,” Nisbet rooted his eleven ideas as contributions from sociology as an academic discipline. After all, he stressed,
Sociology may be regarded as the first of the social sciences to deal directly with the problems of dislocation involved in the appearance of a mass society. Economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology long remained in the 19th century faithful to the precepts and perspectives of 18th-century rationalism. Sociology, however, from the very beginning, borrowed heavily from the insights into the society that such men as Burke, Bonald, and Hegel had supplied.
Correctly, Nisbet presumed that most of the social sciences had been shaped, rather dramatically, by radicalisms, secularisms, liberalisms, and various ideologies. If anything, the nineteenth-century liberals and radicals had become rather smug in their assumptions.
All the major tendencies of European history — the factory system included — were widely regarded as essentially liberating forces. By them, men could be emancipated from the ancient system of status and from communities within which initiative and freedom were stifled. For most mines in the 19th century, conservatism, with its essentially tragic conception of history, it's fear of the free individual and the masses, and its emphasis upon community, hierarchy, and sacred patterns of belief, seen but one final manifestation of that past from which Europe was everywhere being liberated.
Sociology, in contrast to liberalism and radicalism, had merely focused on the aspect of being social—that is, man being in relationship—and had, thus, best reflected the more obscure aspects of nineteenth-century conservatism. That conservatism, though, reflected some of the most important concerns of humanity. "In the contextual ideas of history there are also conservative ideas,” he explained. “Such ideas status, cohesion, adjustment, function, norm, ritual, symbol, are conservative ideas not merely in the superficial sense that each has as its referent and aspect of society that is plainly concerned with the maintenance or conserving of order but in the importance sense that all these words are integral parts of the intellectual history of European conservatism."
In almost every way, the neglected and minority position of conservatism in the nineteenth century had transformed into the dominant position of the twentieth century. Originally, Nisbet claimed in direct contrast to Kirk, real conservatism did not harken back to Socrates, but, rather, emerged in reaction to the horrors and confusions of the French Revolution. Indeed, it arose in direct response to the French Revolution, just as the revival of conservatism in the twentieth century emerged in direct response to the horrors and confusions of Communism and Fascism. Slowly, in the nineteenth century, the reaction took shape as a coherent school of thought. “An idea system which possesses no decisive importance in one generation or century frequently provides the materials of the dominant intellectual perspective of the generation or century following,” Nisbet explained. “Such is the historical significance of the idea system of conservatism.” Critically, then, “a historical structure of ideas, conservatism has received much less attention in the history of ideas then have individualism and rationalism, systems which so notably held the intellectual field in the 19th and early of 20th century, conservatism has come to exert a profound influence upon the contemporary mind.”
In the long run—meaning, by 1952, for Nisbet—conservatism had proven its worth, for no respectable scholar or thinker of the 1950s thought only in terms of change and progress. Rather, by the middle of the twentieth-century, he rightly focused on the needs of order—in the human soul and in the human community.
Today, we plainly find a radically different orientation. The major orientation is not change but order. Gone is the rationalist faith in the power of history to solve all organizational problems, and gone also is the rationalist myth of the autonomous, self-stabilizing individual. In the place of these older certainties there now lies a widespread preoccupation with phenomena of institutional dislocation and psychological insecurity. More than any other, it is the concept of the social group that has become central and contemporary sociology. As a concept it covers the whole set of problems connected with integration and disintegration, security and insecurity, adjustment and maladjustment.
All of this, Nisbet noted, contrasts dramatically with the more naïve claims to individuality as the sovereign center and unit of study.
Taken as a whole, he continued, the conservative of the nineteenth century identified three major areas of concern within human existence. First, the conservative had worried about the rise of the masses, “of populations relentlessly atomize socially and morally by the very economic and political forces which the liberals and radicals of the 19th century hailed as progressive.”
Second, the nineteenth century conservative understood that with the rise of the masses, the individual would find himself (or herself) alienated from existence, “of widening aggregates of individuals rendered steadily more insecure and frustrated as the consequence of those moral and intellectual changes which the rationalist saw as leading to creative liberation from the net of custom.”
Finally, third, the conservative of two centuries ago recognized the great dangers posed by the rise of power as opposed to authority, “of monolithic power that arises from, and is nurtured by, the existence of masses of rootless individuals, turning with mounting desperation to centralized authority as a refuge from dislocation and moral emptiness.”
Though conservatism arose as a reaction against the French Revolution, limped along in the nineteenth century, and came of age in the twentieth century, it had to rest on some previous standard, especially given its argument that the greatest human laboratory is human history. That model rested in the realities and the idealization of the Middle Ages.
For men such as Burke and banal, the French Revolution was but the culmination of historical process of social atomization that reach back to the beginning of such doctrines as nominalism, religious dissent, scientific rationalism, into the destruction of those groups, institutions, and intellectual certainties which had been basic in the Middle Ages. In a significant sense, modern conservatism goes back to medieval society for its inspiration and for models against which to assess the modern world. Conservative criticisms of capitalism and political centralization were of a piece with denunciations of individualism, secularism, and egalitarianism. In all these historical forces the conservatives could see, not individual emancipation and creative release, but mounting alienation and insecurity, the inevitable products of dislocation in man's traditional associative ties.
And, just exactly what is conservatism. As already noted, Robert Nisbet offered eleven principles or tenets.
First, the conservative must deal directly with the very “nature of society.” Society is legitimate and constituted, never created. No two men came together and said, through a social contract, let us construct society. They do that within society, all of the time, but they do not do this at the beginning of all society. Rather, society “is an organic entity, with internal laws of development and with infinitely subtle personal and institutional relationships.” The individual will cannot create society, but it can pervert and distort it, mocking its very being.
Second, Nisbet claimed, conservatives understand that society is superior to the individual, in the sense that the individual cannot be understood except within the realm of the relational. The abstract individual does not exist, nor ever can exist. Instead, the person—that is, the individual in relationship—does.
Third, Nisbet believed, following from the first two points, conservatives recognized that the “irreducible unit of society is and must be itself a manifestation of society, a relationship, something that is social.”
Fourth is the recognition that all things within the social are interrelated and interdependent. No one thing can happen within the larger social framework that does not affect and change all other things within the social framework. Isolation, generally, is not an option of a functioning society.
Fifth, Nisbet continued, is the realization that individual persons have specific and definitive needs and wants. One cannot—without irreparable damage—neglect the most human things, whatever our rationality might claim about such needs and wants.
Sixth, echoing Aristotle’s assertion that nothing in nature is in vain and God’s assertion that each person is made in the Imago Dei. “Every person, every custom, every institution, serves some basic need in human life or contributes some indispensable service to the existence of other institutions and customs,” Nisbet wrote.
Seventh, it is not enough to recognize that large societies are made from smaller associations. Instead, the larger society must recognize, cultivate, and hone such smaller associations. As such, Nisbet believed, societies must reflect what Edmund Burke so eloquently argued at the end of his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France.
We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.
Eighth, a true conservative must recognize the realities of social existence, that humans have strange and varied wants and needs, and that social cohesion can easily break apart because of individual egos and struggles for mysterious things. In essence, though Nisbet was not Christian, he demanded that realism recognized sin as a primary fact of existence. It did not celebrate it, but it also did not ignore it.
Ninth, and deeply related to the eighth point, the real conservative insists “upon the indispensable value of the sacred, nonrational, nonutilitarian elements of human existence.” After all, he continued, no reasonable person believes that man can “live by reason alone.”
Tenth, Nisbet cautioned, the true conservative recognizes that individual excellences force us, properly, to understand that inequality is essential as a part of human relations. One person’s excellences, by definition, make that person extraordinary, at least in some practice or art. Sin makes us equal in our faults, but excellences make us brilliant in some varied aspect(s) of our lives. From this inequality and the consequent hierarchies and statuses that result, men can truly progress from infancy (of the person and the species) to the adulthood.
Finally, but critically vital, the conservative never allows power (the presumption of power as well as the assumption of power) to replace authority. "Far from being an artificial thing, a necessary evil at best, as the liberals had argued, authority is the substance of every form of relationship. Authority does not degrade; it reinforces,” Nisbet claimed, offering only his most initial glimpses on a subject that would shape much of his future professional life. “It is force that degrades, the kind of force that must ensue when the normal authorities are dissolved."
Though less poetic than Kirk, Nisbet had every right—especially given the timing of his eleven tenets of conservativism—to be considered a “father of post-war conservative” as does his Michigan ally. His points, to be sure, are thoughtful and inspiring.
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Hope to see some of you in Grand Rapids! Yours, until very soon, Brad