Making of Modern Society

218 Pages·1986·12.261 MB·English

by  Robert A. Nisbet

ROBERT NISBET
THE MAKING OF
ODER
OCIET
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“FTNHIS IS AN excellent book, and a val-
uable source of reference. The
autobiographical introduction is par-
ticularly fascinating.” TOM BOTTO-
MORE, Professor of Sociology, Univer-
sity of Sussex.
Robert Nisbet’s most recent essays focus
on the intellectual aspects of the making
of modern society.
He specifically examines the ideas of
progress and development, the ethic of
equality, the nature of totalitarian mys-
tique, and, finally, the requisites of a free
society. Among the major philosophers
and critics dealt with most prominently
are Vico, Turgot and Marx in relation to
the Western philosophy of progress, and
Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, and
Orwell on the battleground — of
egalitarianism and power.
Professor Nisbet’s new book of essays is
characterised by a reasoned and cohe-
rent structure of thought, one in which
ideas of progress, equality, and power
interweave.
By the same author
The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953)
The Sociological Tradition (Basic Books, 1966)
Social Change and History (Oxford University Press, 1969)
The Social Bond (Knopf, 1970)
The Social Philosophers (Crowell, 1973)
Twilight of Authority (Oxford University Press, 1975)
Sociology as an Art Form (Oxford University Press, 1976)
History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books, 1980)
Prejudices: a Philosophical Dictionary (Harvard, 1982)
Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Open University Press, 1986)
The Making of
Modern Society
Robert Nisbet
Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus
Columbia University and Adjunct Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Washington Square, New York
First published in the USA in 1986 by
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Washington Square
New York, N.Y. 10003
© Robert Nisbet, 1986
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nisbet, Robert.
The making of modern society.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Progress. 2. Power (Social sciences) 3. Individu-
alism. 4. State, The. 5. Associations, institutions,
etc. 6. Social prediction. I. Title.
HMI101.N5743 1986 303.44 86-23541
ISBN 0-8147-5761-8
Printed in Great Britain
All rights reserved
Contents
Introduction ]
PARTI
1. Developmentalism: A Critical Analysis 33
2. Vico and the Idea of Progress 70
3. The Future of Futurology 80
4. Turgot and the Contexts of Progress 95
PART II
5. Rousseau and Equality 113
6. Citizenship: Two Traditions 131
7. Many Tocquevilles 150
8. The Social Impact of the American Revolution 167
9. 1984 and the Conservative Imagination 186
Acknowledgements 207
Index 209
Introduction
The essays in this volume have been garnered from writing I have done
over the last decade and a half. They fall into the two major areas of
thought in which I have worked for the better part of the last half-century.
The first is the philosophy of developmentalism as it applies to the study of
society, and is represented here by the essays on Vico, Turgot, futurology
and contemporary sociology. The second area is that which, for want of
better term, I shall call political legitimacy, more especially the relation
between the Western state and the rights of not only individuals but social
groups and associations. The essays on Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville,
Orwell, the American Revolution and citizenship fall in this sphere of
thought.
I shall say more about the essays later. But first let me obey the
publisher’s kind invitation to set forth some of the pertinent episodes and
phases of my life. These, I promise the reader, will be confined for the most
part to what is directly germane to the main contents of the book. What
follows here is an academic rather than personal odyssey.
I
I was born in Los Angeles, California, 30 September, 1913. I never actually
lived in that city. I was present for my birth simply because my parents
loathed the small town of Maricopa in which they were then living, a
hundred miles north of Los Angeles in the Westside of the San Joaquin
Valley—in those years, still harsh desert, reclaimed only by the millions of
barrels of oil pumped annually by the grotesque oil derricks, which stood
like dead trees in a fossil forest. To my parents Los Angeles was paradise,
and exactly right for the entry into the world of their first-born. It was in
1913 that Willard Huntington Wright published his famously devastating
article on Los Angeles as the city of frauds, necromancers, spiritual
quacks, and ex-furriers making movies for the masses. But even if my
parents had chanced to see the article in Smart Set, edited by H.L.
Mencken, they would have been indifferent. My mother had been born a
1
2 The Making of Modern Society
few miles from Los Angeles, and it remained the city of her dreams.
I am very glad, though, that by reason of my father’s work they, with
me, were obliged to go back to Maricopa. Its ugliness and hostile challenge
to the human spirit drove me straight to books for haven and experience of
the vicarious. Maricopa, as if in penance for its physical failings, had an
excellent school system and also public library, and I profited from them
both. The curriculum of the first was standard and classic in that Pre-
progressive Age before Dick and Jane Readers had made their evil
appearance, and before psychologists and educationists had managed, in
an unsung, nefarious take-over, to steal the school system from its rightful
owners, the parents, in the interest of experimenting endlessly on the
tender minds of its captive pupils. Grammar school teaching was still for
the sole purpose of instructing in the Three-Rs, not for psychosurgical
penetrations of pupils’ minds in the interests of what would become known
later as Life-Adjustment. There was no nonsense about school
delinquencies of the pupils. Such delinquencies were regarded as
emanations of original sin, not afflictions of society, and were punished
accordingly. My knuckles still remember the sharp edge of a teacher’s ruler
coming down on them, whether justly or unjustly.
The public library, though, was my chief delight. Everything that the
formidable desert made impossible in the way of living was available
vicariously in the’surprisingly large number of books on the shelves of the
library. I had learned to read before beginning school—from sitting on my
mother’s lap while she read aloud—and while that added measurably to
success in school, it added immeasurably to the state of my mind. I read
novels in vast quantities, but by dint of browsing and experiment found my
way to other things, chiefly biographical and historical. In this respect
there was a supreme advantage available to me at home by virtue of my
mother’s religion: The Christian Science Monitor—then as now one of the
great newspapers in America, and subscribed to by my mother throughout
her life. Newspapers in California, especially in the hinterland, were
dreadful, it was from the Monitor above anything else that I began to be
aware of nation and world.
Such good luck continued after my parents at last managed to escape
Maricopa and move to a lovely little central-coastal town, San Luis
Obispo. There too the schooling was extraordinary. High school, which I
commenced in 1927, had for the college-bound, four years of Latin (until
two years earlier, two years of Greek, taught by the superintendent of
schools), four of mathematics, English, history (beginning with ancient
history), science, including chemistry and physics, and the like. It was by
no means all work and no play; there was athletics for those so minded,
drama, band, orchestra, and so on. It is no wonder that private schools
were few to the point of absence in California in those years. The public
Introduction 3
schools were simply too great a bargain.
So much for the years before Berkeley. I realize that I have been
exceedingly spare, but I warned at the outset that what I wrote
autobiographically would be confined to what is directly pertinent to my
books and essays. After all, even if I had the knack of writing about such
cosmic matters as discovery of sex, matings with the female, dissipations of
mind and body, and the like, I would do as our currently pathetic crop of
American novelists do, write a novel about childhood and adolescence, not
waste these gems in an introduction.
II
I went up to Berkeley in the fall of 1932. It was then, as it is now, the jewel
of the University of California’s splendid system of campuses. For me the
Berkeley campus was fulfilment of dream, one I had had with me from
very early school days. I had seen it once when I was about 10 and ambition
was immediately set in concrete so far as my mind was concerned.
I need not remind readers of the Great Depression, which hit my parents
as it did so many others—very hard. When I reached Berkeley I had
enough money, from the usual summer’s work in a grain warehouse, to
cover initial fees and to take care of the first two or three months’ room
and board. And my parents promised what they could squeeze out for the
rest of the first year. But clearly part-time jobs were a necessity if I were to
finish college. I was lucky, once again; after a few months hashing in
fraternities for bare meals, I landed a job as one of the student assistants in
the circulation department of the university library. Now I had tenure, so
to speak, as student at Berkeley, the whole million-volume library at my
feet quite literally, and a pay scale that began at 35 cents an hour and rose
to a maximum of 45 cents with experience. I couldn’t have been more
thrilled by anything in the world. I will say more about my library job a
little later; it was to produce yet another boon in my life when I was about
to begin graduate work. But first the riches of the Berkeley campus in the
1930s.
It had, by virtue of state permission to set academic admission
standards at a reasonably high level—good student minds; as good,
certainly, as those at Stanford University just south of us. And Berkeley
had one of the best faculties among all universities, private or public, of the
time. There were enough Harvard-trained professors on the campus to
make the mission of equalling or even exceeding Harvard’s distinction a
veritably religious one. Whether it ever has is not the question; it is that
there was sufficient quality and also pride to make Berkeley eager for the
quest.
4 The Making of Modern Society
One of the Berkeley campus’s great advantages, one it had had from the
time it was founded in 1868, was that it was just across the San Francisco
Bay from the great city itself. Berkeley had inevitably participated in a
great deal of the cultural efflorescence that made San Francisco at the turn
of the century a brilliant and creative as well as naturally beautiful city. I
should add, political efflorescence also: many of the radical or at least
bizarre political currents which helped give San Francisco its bohemian
reputation, and stimulated the like of Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, Jack
London and Fremont Older among its claims to literary fame in America,
made their way to Berkeley. The writer, O.Henry, once declared San
Francisco, New Orleans, and New York the only truly interesting cities in
the US, ones worth comparing with the great capitals of the old world. All
three were notable in their rich mixtures of ethnic diversity, burgeoning
wealth, dedication to commerce, strong local patriotism, early cultivation
of the arts and sciences, broad tolerance for heresies and idiosyncrasies,
and, unfailingly, highly distinctive, soon famous, food and drink. One can
only grieve today at what is left of San Francisco; in a word, beauty alone,
without the pulsations of creative thought which so marked the beginnings
of the city and which helped make ‘Frisco’ one of the two or three most
admired cities of the new world. The ‘Beat’ literature of the 1950s was the
final, pathetic heartbeat of what had once been a giant’s energy and power.
Berkeley, in the beginning so dependent intellectually upon San Francisco,
has today become, along with Stanford, fifty miles south, the vis generatrix of
Northern California, indeed of much of Western America.
Like San Francisco, Berkeley in the 1930s had highly visible emanations of
political radicalism. Marx was very much a presence on the campus in student
activities and publications if not yet in courses in philosophy, literature, and
the social sciences, as has become almost ritualistic today at Berkeley and
indeed most other major universities. With Depression agonies being felt far
and wide, it was only natural that Depression-remedies should flourish in the
thirties, especially on university campuses in the United States. Berkeley had a
full complement of avowed Marxists in its student body and, in far less
measure, on its faculty. Most were Communists, fellow-travellers at least; and
at Berkeley this meant Stalinists, for unlike Eastern universities the campus at
Berkeley was singularly starved in its possession of Communist and Marxist
heresies. There Marx meant the Marx of Capital, no less, no more, and
Communism meant the Soviet Union and Lenin and Stalin. I suppose this is
one of the reasons why my early effort to become involved in campus
radicalism failed: it was suffocated for lack of the oxygen of doctrinal heresy.
To my knowledge there wasn’t a suggestion of Trotskyism at Berkeley in the
thirties, much less the smaller splinter-fry. By the blandishments of a young
woman I was briefly attracted to, who was a Communist, I went one night to
a cell meeting. Its stupefying orthodoxy and banality broke up my little love