Robert Nisbet was an interesting thinker.  The first book of his that I read was History of the Idea of Progress.  I just finished Twilight of Authority (with a slight treatment over on substack), and I want to expand on what I got out of the book – mostly from his concluding discussion.  I thought I would quote him some, but I find I’ve written enough that quotes would only make this piece longer, and it’s a good book – you should read the whole thing (if you find this piece interesting).  At some point I will also be reading his Quest for Community, as I think that will be relevant to deepening my understanding of human organization (and how organization tends so strongly toward bureaucracy).

We most commonly, and casually, think of the political divide in contemporary partisan terms.  Which is fine, but it isn’t very satisfying, not least because both American political parties occupy relatively narrow niches either side of the center and the violent disdain for each other comes mostly from the outer fringes of both.  The only greater example of this that I know of in politics around the world are the two parties in Ireland that both claim to be the true successor of the independence movement there: Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.  In ToA, Nisbet digs deeper – as an intellectual should – not just into the 18th and 19th centuries, but all the way back to the real split, between Plato and Aristotle.

I have expressed my contempt for Rousseau, so it is only fair to note his reliance on Plato and to extend my contempt to him.  It took a long time, but in the course of my life, I went from being an idealist to seeing the idealist as a buffoon.  Plato cursed Western culture with the Ideal.  It is one of humanity’s deepest delusions.  Nisbet speaks to Plato’s idealization of the centralized, unitary state as the root of all totalitarian thought throughout Western culture.  Oh yes, of course this includes Marx, but more than simply him, it includes Rousseau who influenced more than Marx.  The state is the highest, foremost institution of human society in this thinking, and of course that appeals greatly to any who would worship power.  It is the state that can remake man in an idealized form and this is not merely a Marxist conceit.  It is unfortunate that the Renaissance resurrected the corrupt corpus of Platonic thought.  And I suspect largely because Aristotle was discredited through association with Thomas Aquinas in service of the Church.  Which isn’t to say there aren’t problems with Aristotle’s work, but it does proceed from firmer ground than the Platonic.  From Plato, Rousseau would conceive his General Will (in contrast to the ‘will of all’ as expressed democratically) and his belief that this General Will would and should be used to reshape not just human behavior but the human mind (for resisting it is evidence of error).  Of course it would take a God-like perspective to grasp this General Will, which should be clearly outside the reach of any human mind(s) save of course for that most human thing – hubris.  If Marx introduced an original error to Rousseau’s fundament, it was the teleological conceit – that history has a trajectory and you are on the right or wrong side of that.

Throughout all of Rousseau and his disciples lies the belief that all humans are unconditionally equal, and that any deviation from that – any scent of inequality – is a perversion of the natural order caused by some social institution’s distortion.  There is no institution that does not deprive humans of this equality – family (children are the slaves to their parents’ prejudices), property, and on and on.  Thus Rousseau would see all of these institutions swept aside so that true equality could reign, and there would be no detectable difference between people because they are in their perfect, equal condition.  Only the absolute and central authority of the state (in adherence to the General Will) can free everyone.  You can see how equal before the law, and equal opportunity become not just wrong ideas, but actual impediments to the true and proper equality – they foster unequal results.  Of course these days we call that equity (and this is the only necessary update from Nisbet’s term the New Equality).

Aristotle was amenable to pluralism, which can most easily be said to be a condition of non-uniformity (in contrast with the absolutist, centralized state of Plato and the pure equality of Rousseau); of various authority as expressed in differing human institutions of which the state is but one and not necessarily the highest.  Throughout Western history since the time of Aristotle there were many institutions and it wouldn’t be until the 16th century or so that the state would become one of the most significant.  If you think of our history, it is easy to see how we had many institutions – family, church, civic, social, recreational – and for a long time the split state authority under real honest to goodness federalism, even post Civil War (but pre-Progressive era).  It really is a chicken-and-egg problem of why and how those institutions decayed and the functions they had served were taken over by the state.  But Nisbet is quite clear, we are in an era when authority of all of the intermediate human associations has diminished (thus the Twilight) and been consolidated within the state.  The irony being he is writing in 1975, not in the last few years (and thus my other piece being labeled a blinding flash of the obvious).  And as he terms them “the clerisy of the state” – those who love the power arrogated thus – are eager to further diminish those competing institutions.  Nisbet notes that the family is an institution that the absolutists (of Rousseau as well as Marx) must attack, but I think even he could not imagine then where we would be today (and not just us in the U.S., but the utter failure of Marxism worldwide).

Now Nisbet was not a black-pill conservative, he did not see the inevitability of a dystopian future (and he spoke specifically to Huxley and Orwell).  He held out hope that though the tide may rise, it would not be the Biblical Flood.  He tended to see something of an eternal recurrence of this dynamic, wherein the centralization of authority in the state (with emphasis on the military and bureaucratic mode) ends up unstable and breaking apart, whereupon, the repressed institutions could be renewed as the authority of the state wanes (or collapses) and pluralism would be again ascendant.  Pluralism does matter in that it answers so much more of our needs as humans, though the unanswered question is – if this is so, why does it ever fail.  There must be something in us that harkens to the absolutist view, and I suspect it has to do with our desire for certainty and order in this world – even when those are illusions.

Finally, the political divide isn’t necessarily what you think it is.  Even populists aren’t opposed to over-weening government – as long as it is used for ends they approve of (recall that Bernie and Trump sounded quite alike at times in ’16).  They are almost as Rousseauvian as the progressives, and thus to distinguish each other one must be called communist and the other fascist.  Because that makes all the difference!   Even honest conservatives or classical liberals (wherever they might be) are stuck because there is no easy way to unwind the decay in the intermediate institutions and attempting to prop them up with government policy is folly of the highest order.  The great divide is between those who wear the blinders well (and they are the many, divided though they be), and those who don’t (and are cursed with seeing clearly and being ineffectual).