CONSERVATISM
Dream and Reality
Robert Nisbet
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
118 pp., $18.95
FORTY YEARS AGAINST THE TIDE
Congress and the Welfare State
Carl T. Curtis and Regis Courtemanche
Lake Bluff, III.: Regnery Gateway
443 pp., $18.95
Conservatives have never been a particularly optimistic lot. While liberals could argue that this was the best of all possible worlds, the conservatives feared that they might be correct. For American conservatives, the unfettered capitalism, individualism, mass democracy, and egalitarianism of the United States were perceived as especially inhospitable to the conservative vision, and American conservatives, at least prior to 1980, have suspected they were probably irrelevant. Thus Albert Jay Nock entitled his autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Robert Crunden described twentieth-century conservative critics of American culture as The Suerfluous Men, and Clinton Rossiter termed American conservativism The Thankless Persuation. While the election of Reagan boosted conservative morale, it did not completely quiet doubts within the American Right, including the authors of these two books, that the condition of the body politic is, if not terminal, then at least critical.
The sociologist Robert Nisbet has always been one of the more somber of American conservative intellectuals. For the past half century he has been pondering the crisis of western society and the relevance of the conservative vision, summed up, perhaps, in his thin book Conservatism. Nisbet first came to public attention in 1953 with the publication of The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, which argued that the Western world was undergoing a crisis brought on by the diminished role of local social institutions, such as the family, church, guild, and neighborhood. For centuries these institutions had provided the moral and social context for freedom and security. During the past several hundred years, however, they have been gradually divested of their responsibilities and power by the forces of nationalism, militarism, Benthamite individualism, liberalism, and socialism. This assault on the traditional structure of European society had led to what Ortega y Gasset called "the revolt of the masses." The "masses" were people without ties to society who, in their quest for community, turned to the centralized power of the nation-state. The logical end of the eclipse of the local community was thus totalitarianism.
The defense of the private sector against the individualism of Mill and Bentham or the collectivism of Rousseau and Marx has been, Nisbet writes in Conservatism, the "hallmark" of conservative politics. For the past two hundred years, conservative politics has been marked by "greater affection for the private sector, for family and local community, for economy and private property, and for a substantial measure of decentralization in government, one that would respect the corporate rights of the small unities of state and society."
The supplanting of the traditional
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