Robert Nisbet is not a communitarian in the modern sense. He combines an older view with a resolute concern about state power.
Nisbet offers the best and most readable resources for thinking about community from a non-Left perspective.
Prof. Luke Sheahan wrote the forward to a re-release of Nisbet's Social Philosophers. The book is more like a review of intellectual history through the social lens of community.
Check out Dr. Sheahan's website to learn more about his work, articles, and published material.
Thanks again for checking this out!
Shawn
AI summary and chapters:
Host Shawn Whatley interviews political scientist Luke Sheahan about Robert Nisbet’s thought and Sheahan’s foreword to the re-release of Nisbet’s The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought. Sheahan describes Nisbet as a major 20th-century conservative whose The Quest for Community argued that modern state power erodes the authority of families, churches, and voluntary associations, producing alienation and instability. They discuss Nisbet’s “idea-systems” of community and his typology of military, political, religious, withdrawal, revolutionary, and plural communities, with the plural community linked to the American constitutional order and multiple overlapping authorities. The conversation addresses legitimacy versus raw power, authority’s dependence on local institutions, the role of political theology, and how weakening intermediate communities contributes to loneliness, deaths of despair, and ideological movements.
00:00 State Power and Alienation
00:33 Meet Luke Sheahan
01:29 Who Was Robert Nisbet
03:17 Quest for Community Thesis
04:07 National We-ness Critique
06:02 Social Philosophers and Ideas
08:05 Reprinting the Lost Book
10:09 Three Core Communities
11:32 Military to Political Shift
13:33 Religious Community Rise
15:12 Withdrawal Communities
16:55 Revolutionary Community
19:59 Plural Community Vision
22:13 Pluralism and Authority
24:43 Protestant vs Catholic Order
29:15 Community Beyond Protestantism
29:51 Legitimacy From Local Ties
31:58 Alienation And Mass Society
36:41 Authority Versus Power
41:19 Prejudgments And Liberal Crisis
45:22 Do Ideas Shape History
54:37 Social Health Versus State Power
58:19 Rebuilding Associations Closing
