“The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature - needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity,” wrote Robert Nisbet in his classic work of political sociology from the early 1950s, The Quest for Community.
What is true for all people, at all times, has been particularly true for Americans in the twentieth century. Indeed, our recent history - especially our political history - reads as if we have been embarked on a great national quest for community. In the course of this quest, we seem to have oscillated between two alternative approaches.
On the one hand, Americans have sought membership and belonging through what Edmund Burke described as the “small platoons,” or traditional small communities of society - the family, church, neighborhood, and local fraternal, ethnic, and voluntary associations. On the other hand (and this is the approach recommended by this century's progressive liberalism), Americans have experimented with the idea of the great national community - a nationwide family or small town, as it were.
If we wish to understand how Americans go about satisfying the eternal quest for community, there is no better place to begin than with these two alternative approaches.
The Rise of the National Community
For much of our history, as sense of community was readily available to Americans through a complex network of “intermediate associations” - strong families, homogeneous neighborhoods, and the religious, educational, ethnic and fraternal associations of closely knit small towns. Such associations performed virtually all of the vital economic, cultural, and welfare functions of society. And because they were marked by a rough equality, or sameness, an easy familiarity, and a clear sense of belonging or membership, the spirit of oneness or community prevailed.
At the turn of the century, however, our “small platoons” came under assault as industrialization, urbanization, and other forces of modernity began to pulverize small communities. In their place rose teeming cities, characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, and populated by individuals who were treated as anonymous cogs in a vast industrial machine rather than as fully participating members of a community. Separation, isolation, loneliness, and alienation seemed to be the fate of modern man.
Progressive liberal like Thomas Dewey, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Theodore Roosevelt understood the danger of this situation, but they despaired of resurrecting the local community in the face of modernity's seemingly irresistible transformations. Nonetheless, they believed that community could be supplied but in an entirely new (and improved) way.
A strong central state, they believed, could re-create the sense of family and community - only now, at the level of the nation as a whole. A progressive income tax could level out the extremes of wealth and poverty that threatened community. The state could absorb the social welfare functions previously belonging to intermediate associations and perform them more efficiently and
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