Robert Nisbet

Posted by john on May 17, 2005, 11:29 PM | #

There is something bizarre about the one-sidedness of Mr. Chapman and other libertarian-leaning people’s claim that the state is solely or mainly responsible for the “erosion of community/society”.  Supposedly, the state, by providing something of a safety net, “relieves you of the ‘burden’ of maintaining the high degree of goodwill and mutual self-interest which maintains a community/society”.  Why it is that, for example, social security or medicare have this destructive effect, while health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, private pension plans, stock portfolios, etc, etc do not is a mystery to me.  The reality is that the market is far more effective at replacing the traditional community and its functions than is the state.  Free market zealots are prevented from seeing this rather obvious fact by the heavy ideological blinders they refuse to remove.

Posted by Andrew L on May 18, 2005, 01:48 AM | #

There is a very important point, How did our parent, and their parents etc , cope, they survived thank you very much, and made us stronger, the State, in all aspects is making people dependant on it, untill the State collapses, then people have absolutly nothing, no Friends, Family , etc,Only some braindead burocrat Tripping on some Utopian Ideological tangent fit for the mental Institution, The state is your friend, Well unless you have tryed to communicate with a Beurocrat, then you might have a second thought. Yep Stuff the State, People power, more realistic social patterns. Just Imagine this, where will the population be if we had a Great depression, my parents survived, I will have a chance, but what about the state dependant, Druggoes and all. Good by, Instant polulation culling.They would have absolutly no Idea how to survive.

Posted by ben tillman on May 18, 2005, 11:55 AM | #

JR—

I recently completed Nisbet’s “The Quest for Community” and was very impressed.  A thought-provoking and insightful book indeed.

Posted by ben tillman on May 18, 2005, 12:08 PM | #

There is something bizarre about the one-sidedness of Mr. Chapman and other libertarian-leaning people’s claim that the state is solely or mainly responsible for the “erosion of community/society”.

The only problems with the claim are (1) it igores the fact that the cause is bidirectional; the growth of the state and the disintegration of the community each cause and are caused by the other in an unfortunate feedback loop, and (2) it fails to identify the underlying cause or causes that set this process in motion. 

Nisbet’s observation that individualism and the state go hand in hand is well supported by his discussion of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. 

Of course, there are other ways of approaching the problem, but ultimately one must conclude that where there is a state there can be no community.  When one understands the issue fully, one sees that this is a tautology.  The thing that makes a community out of a population—an enforceable moral code—is *by definition* absent from a society subjected to a state.  Nor is this libertarian proof by definition.  The definition we refer to is not libertarian but Weberian.

Posted by John S Bolton on May 18, 2005, 05:08 PM | #

The real question, though ought to be whether aggression may legitimately be used to break up community of values, and natural communities, in order to have an inclusive statist society. Until the 1940’s, the US gov’t enforced racial and religious covenants on real estate transactions. Did private parties use aggression to establish such communities, or did the government, by aggression nullify those contracts? If this distinction is glossed over, the moral crux of the matter is obscured. Obfuscating the aggression involved, plays into the policy which would justify all manner of tyranny, by saying we can make minorities feel better about themselves. There is nothing about modern technology which drives this process on. On the contrary, it was the development of automotive and other transport technology on a mass scale, which allowed for the covenanted developments to grow at an awesome pace. Today we have also government schools’ propaganda working furiously against any such tendencies like the contractually exclusionary communities regrowth.