Patrick Deneen, Robert Nisbet's Quest

As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being. Shorn of the deepest ties to (extended) family, place, community, region, religion, and culture - and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy - we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man - the State. Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities - shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man sought belonging through distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious belonging, now in the Church of the State itself. Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation. It would provide for our wants and ; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and incomplete allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes - following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville: ”It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”

Nisbet understood that a radical disjuncture had been introduced by modern theories of “social belonging” that seemed to resemble some aspects of older Aristotelianism, but which in fact were fundamentally distinct. Aristotle, and Aristotelians like Aquinas, insisted that such any conception of a good and flourishing human community required a basis in familiarity with a particular people and one that had continuity over time. Theirs was an argument about human scale: our ability to comprehend a common good, and our willingness to act on its behalf - to feel a sense of obligation and indebtedness to our inheritance from the past and a sense of duty born of gratitude toward the future - requires a fairly intimate, on in which we can have some sensory connection of our actions upon others and theirs upon us, and a setting in which memory plays a large role. Such a community has an enlarged sense of humanity’s temporal dimension, one that expands beyond merely one lifetime instead to include a strong sense of generational gratitude and obligation. Only in such a setting can we intuitively understand that without our forbears, we would not have achieved our own humanity, and thus that we are obligated to give as good as possible to future generations.