THE PRESENT AGE
Progress and Anarchy in Modern America
Robert Nisbet
Harper and Row, 1988
145 + xii pp., $15.95
There are two ways to read Robert Nisbet's recent book, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America as a medley of occasional essays by a distinguished social theorist and as a sustained argument against modern America, particularly its political life. The book recapitulates Nisbet's concerns from previous decades expressed in works going back to The Quest for Community in 1952. Once again he speaks of the threat to established community from economic modernization and centralized administration, the attack on standards and symbols of authority by the bureaucratic national state, and the supplanting of traditional belief systems by collectivist ideologies.
In none of these concerns is Nisbet unique. He is by self-declaration a social traditionalist--albeit a religious freethinker like David Hume, whose combination of philosophical skepticism and social conservatism he deeply admires. Nisbet is, moreover, a traditionalist who makes copious references to those, living and dead, from whom he draws insights and to whom he feels in some ways akin. Though his arguments often parallel the views of Michael Oakeshott (whom he quotes in earlier works) about rationalism in politics, one difference between the two thinkers is stylistic. Oakeshott writes cryptically in what seem extended soliloquies; Nisbet, by contrast, offers painless, accessible prose full of tributes to his teachers and comrades-in-arms.
He also sprinkles his writings and speeches with striking quotations and dramatic images. In The Present Age he begins by telling us how the framers might have regarded America two hundred years later. Once they "had recovered from the shock of seeing clean, strong, white teeth instead of decayed yellow stumps in the mouths of their descendants" and "had assimilated the fact of the astounding number of Americans who were neither crippled, disease-wasted, nor pockmarked from smallpox," they would have taken alarm at three less fortunate developments: "the prominence of war in American life since 1914, amounting to a virtual Seventy-Five Years War"; "the Leviathan-like presence of the national government in the affairs of states, town, and cities, and in the lives, cradle to grave, of individuals"; and "the number of Americans who seem only loosely attached to groups and values such as kinship, community, and property." By evoking this scene in which eighteenth-century lawgivers are allowed to observe the effects of modern hygiene as well as government, Nisbet underscores with artistic touch the distinctiveness of Western, particularly American, society since 1914.
All the sections of his book deal with this distinctiveness, though not with equal rigor. In the second section, "The New Absolutism," otherwise penetrating statements about political centralization in America are weakened by expressions of pique against Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Nisbet also goes to excess in presenting a wise, prudent Churchill (who is shown as fully foreseeing Stalin's treachery at the end of World War II) as a foil for a woolly FDR. Nor do the arguments gain plausibility from parenthetic, emotionally charged references to current events in America, such as the fate of Robert Bork as a Supreme Court
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