The West’s Quest – Law & Liberty

Robert Nisbet is best known for his books The Quest for Community and The Twilight of Authority. Luke Sheahan joins the podcast to discuss a new edition of Nisbet’s lesser-known but perhaps most important book The Social Philosophers, a sweeping account of the history of community and its treatment by Western political philosophers.

Related Links

The Social Philosophers, by Robert Nisbet, foreword by Luke Sheahan
Quest for Revolutionary Community by Luke Sheahan, Law & Liberty
Revolutionary Degradation by Luke Sheahan, Law & Liberty
Why Associations Matter by Luke Sheahan

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove (00:39):

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty, filling in this time for our regular host James Patterson. I’m pleased today to be joined by Luke Sheahan. Luke is associate professor of political science at Duquesne University. He is a senior affiliate in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the editor of The University Bookman, and he’s the author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism. And most recently, he’s brought back a new edition of Robert Nisbet’s book, The Social Philosophers, and he’s written a new foreword for that book, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So Luke, thanks for joining me.

Luke Sheahan (01:23):

Thank you for having me.

John Grove (01:24):

So let’s talk a little bit first about Nisbet himself and his place in the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. Most of our listeners will probably be familiar with his book, The Quest for Community. I personally feel like that book is often cited but not necessarily appreciated in its fullness, to say nothing of the rest of Nisbet’s corpus. So I think there are a lot of intellectual conservatives out there who probably haven’t read a lot beyond Quest for Community and maybe not The Social Philosophers. So tell us a little bit about Nisbet and his importance before we get into this particular book.

Luke Sheahan (01:59):

So Robert Nisbet was a significant figure in the twentieth century. So he’s one of the few leading lights of the conservative movement who spent his entire career in academia. So he started off at the University of California–Berkeley, and he ended his career at Columbia University, holding the Albert Schweitzer chair, and retired from teaching in 1978, and commenced with teaching in 1939. So long career, very storied. He gave the Jefferson Lecture, which is the highest honor given by the federal government in the humanities. So a very significant figure. He’s most famous for his book, The Quest for Community. So that book was published in 1953. He was 40 years old, came out with Oxford University Press. It still was, as you indicated, it’s read or at least cited all the time. And there he makes the arguments that communities, real concrete communities, have been in decline for some centuries, largely due to the ideas of the state, the state being the most cohesive and important community and the state being composed of individuals.

(03:21):

So this kind of individual-state dyad has grown at the expense of communities by which he means families, local communities, professional associations, religion, and religious organizations. All of these things have been squished in the middle between the individual and the state. Now that argument he carried on throughout the rest of his career. It was the main aspect of his scholarship and popular writing. Now what people don’t quite realize is that when you read Quest for Community, sometimes you’re left with questions. Sometimes I wish it was twice as long, so there are certain things, I just want to hear more about this, what do you mean? And if you ever think that reading Quest almost certainly, he did go more in depth elsewhere. He wrote another 20 books or thereabout where he really digs into some of these issues. So the book we’re going to talk about today, The Social Philosophers was published in 1973.

(04:27):

So 20 years after Quest. He goes much deeper into his concept of community. What exactly is he talking about when he says these communities? What is a community? What he means is not a statistical aggregate. So it means people who identify psychologically as the same thing. They’re are community and it endures through time. We are the same thing. We rely on each other, we’re going to help each other, and we are devoted some higher cause or purpose, the community itself. That could be—and he says we can form communities around all sorts of things—politics, we’ve done that for a long time; war, we’ve done that for a long time. The family can be a community of course, and has been for many millennia. And religion is another one. And these are really four types of communities that have been the ones that have been with us the longest—kinship, obviously for tens of thousands of years, but most recently and as the subject of social philosophy, war, politics, and religion. He says these three have really dominated over the last couple of millennia and always at the expense of kinship. They always came into being in conflict with the clans and tribes and patriarchal family.

John Grove (05:48):

I want to get into most of what we’re going to talk about. We’ll be talking about some of these particular forms of community and how he approaches them, but I think you’ve already started to introduce us to The Social Philosophers and what that book is. But just tell us a little bit before we get into the details about where this book fits in Nisbet’s Corpus and what value somebody who’s studying Nisbet, what value they get, particularly from The Social Philosophers, because a sweeping book, very, very wide scope, broad take on Western history and social thought. Is this the pinnacle of his scholarship? Is this sort of the central book to read?

Luke Sheahan (06:28):

Yeah, so his kind of three most popular books are The Quest for Community (1953), Twilight of Authority (1975), and The Present Age, which is his Jefferson lectures from the 1980s. So those three [are] his most popular. They’re most accessible to the public, so they’re not too long by any means. They’re written as lectures or adapted from popular writings, scholarly based upon his scholarship, but accessible. So he publishes his first book, 1953. He actually doesn’t publish a whole lot in the coming decade because he’s dean of the University of California at Riverside. And then at the age of 50 or thereabouts, he goes back to teaching and he starts to really publish. Interestingly enough, he starts to really publish in earnest really in the 1960s. So in his fifties and sixties is really when he gets, kind of hits his stride interestingly enough. So The Social Philosophers comes in 1973. He’s 60 years old. And it is you might say, his magnum opus, what he really has to say about community all comes together in that book. So if you’re willing to invest in the 400 pages, that’s really what it is. And so it’s basically a textbook in some ways. It’s very sweeping in terms of both temporally, chronologically, he’s going through everyone. And also in terms of the breadth. So it’s not just political philosophers, it’s social philosophers as the title indicates he gets into economic thinkers. I mean Marx is in there, Adam Smith is in there, Plato’s in there, Aristotle’s in there, Burke’s in there, Proudhon’s in there, Tocqueville’s in there. It’s Althusius, it’s everyone.

John Grove (08:13):

I remember the first time I ran across this book back when you had to go hunt for it on 8 books somewhere for the original edition, and it was just really eye-opening. I had no idea that Nisbet had written this stuff on Plato and Aristotle. He’s not somebody you immediately think of as writing on the entire scope of the history of political philosophy. So it was a very exciting find when I first discovered, when I first discovered this book. So I think a lot of people who study twentieth-century conservatism will like it and people who are more interested in that broad sweep of political philosophy will use it. I know I really focused on his discussion of community and how it was being replaced in Greece in the century just before Plato and Aristotle. I use that a lot in the last time I taught a classical political thought class.

(09:08):

It’s useful to a lot of people. I will note before we get into some of the specifics, it does seem to me that when he talks about The Social Philosophers and political thinkers, he is pretty historically grounded in them in that he’s very interested in understanding how they are responding to the crises of their time. So he’s not somebody who’s kind of goes back and just finds ideas sort of in a vacuum and kind puts them in conversation together as if they’re speaking the exact same language. He’s very historically focused. And in some ways, it seems to me that it’s a book that when you’re looking back at the scope of Western, the Western tradition in general, he sort of punctures the idea that you should go back there looking for some time when everything was just right. He really presents it as a continual history of tension and crisis and conflict. And most of the great political thinkers are the ones who are trying to understand that conflict. Some of them definitively taking a side on the conflict. Others, especially when you get to the plural community, are trying to figure out how these various tensions between kinship, politics, war, how they can all be made to fit into the broader scope of human life. But he is pretty historically focused. Is that right?

Luke Sheahan (10:32):

That’s right. And so interestingly enough, he was responsible for the kind of importation of history into the discipline of sociology. So he wrote a lot on the historical grounding of the sociological tradition and sociology as a discipline. And he held joint appointments between history departments and sociology departments at the University of Arizona and at Columbia. So it’s very historically grounded and it was very much for him, a matter of the discipline that this is how you did things.

John Grove (11:02):

Okay, well, let’s get into some of the specifics in the book. You’ve already set the stage for this a little bit, but the book is divided up into different forms of community that he says, even though they take very different forms and different historical times, you can sort of trace throughout the Western tradition different types of community that people are building around and starting to understand themselves as within. The one that’s in the background. It doesn’t get its own chapter, and I was kind of wondering why it doesn’t have its own chapter, but it’s sort of in the background of all of it is kinship community. So it starts with family ties and for the most part with kinship community, he’s talking about more traditional societies where the family is the absolute centerpiece of human life and then everything else he sort of presents as a response to kinship community. So just tell us a little bit about the importance he places on kinship community and what caused that to break down. Why is it because for the most part, kinship community is sort of spoken of as in the past. There are little remnants of it that sort of remain in various parts of history, but what launched the attack on kinship community?

Luke Sheahan (12:23):

So kinship for him is the background of everything. As far as we know, human beings have spent most of our history and kinship groups, clans, tribes, these sorts of things. As far as we know, thousands and thousands of years, that’s how we lived. And obviously the kinship community is very important for procreation. You have to have some sort of coupling as far as we can tell, you need to be raised by your own parents or something close to it. Human beings even today are continued to come into existence and to be raised in that way.

John Grove (12:55):

Give us another 15 or 20 years and we’ll see.

Luke Sheahan (12:59):

Yes, but this is how it’s done. And so everything is in that. That’s the backdrop for everything. And authority structures in these places are fairly sophisticated, grounded, and shaped the human brain in terms of just how we are, but it doesn’t handle certain crises. So these kinship groups run into a sort of crisis, usually a crisis of war. There’s some sort of conflict. And it turns out the kinship group good for all sorts of things, existed for tens of thousands of years, not so great at winning wars. So just because your grandpa is your grandpa doesn’t mean he’s good at military strategy. Doesn’t mean he’s good with a sword or an ax. So an individual who is good with the sword and ax and is good at commanding on the battlefield presents a conflict, a challenge to the authority of the kinship structure. And so you have this war community is what he calls it.

(13:59):

You get a crisis of war of some sort, the general rises and he wins. But how does he win? He has to exercise absolute authority over the individuals, probably young men under his command, which means he has to break the kinship tie. They are not under their fathers and grandfathers, they’re under him. And his authority has to be absolute. So that means it has to trump the kinship group. So it creates that challenge. And then once that challenge is put into place and it’s successful, you end up with a permanent tension between the kinship group and the military community. Now some places, Rome kind of famously negotiated that for a number of centuries. So when the general returned to Rome, all the soldiers across the Rubicon, everything’s different. Not Caesar, but previous generals, when they crossed it was different. So you cross over, the soldiers are now under the authority of their fathers and grandfathers again, their complete authority. Whatever booty they had, they have to turn over to their family. All those rules apply. The general’s no longer the general in Rome, but that of course falls apart later when Caesar crosses, he remains the general, the individuals remain under his command. And that’s the crisis of Rome.

John Grove (15:17):

Importantly in Greece particularly, he says in Greece you didn’t have as much of that negotiation. It was more of a continual assault of the military and then the political community against those kinship bonds.

Luke Sheahan (15:33):

So Nisbet sees this as the rise of Cleisthenes in Athens. So he comes in, Solon had already tried some rearranging, it didn’t really last. Cleisthenes comes in and what he does is definitively breaks the power of the Athenian tribe. He utterly annihilates them. And so all of your identity is in your quote tribe, but it was a political identity. It was not a kinship identity. And that just changes everything.

John Grove (15:59):

It reminds of French Revolution sort of stuff. The way it describes it, right? It is you have these divisions that are just random divisions. You’re put in a group that that’s your group and it had nothing to do with your background, with your previous life. And so Burke’s line about nobody being committed to a square mile of territory or something like that where he says nobody feels commitment to be part of a zip code basically. And that was kind of the point for Cleisthenes. So that was the whole point. He doesn’t want people to be committed to those local because he wants all of their commitment to be focused at the polis level. So we’re already kind of getting at that. But the military community and the political community, and this is maybe one of his more provocative arguments, maybe a somewhat skeptical, even cynical argument or way of understanding politics and the origin of politics. He says the political state and the political community are very closely tied to the military community and war. So how does he understand that the relationship between war and politics?

Luke Sheahan (17:08):

Yeah, so what he sees here is Cleisthenes for example comes in. He’s the general, he reorganizes, but the war is over. So he says the political community, it’s the military community at peace, when it becomes institutionalized. We no longer refer to you as the general, we refer to you as the first citizen or the president or the emperor. We come up with another term for you. But it says the structure is the same. So military community, you got all the soldiers, the warriors, and you have the general. Well in the political community, you have the sovereign, you have sovereignty, and you have citizens. And the sovereign is, well, sovereign/ [He] has absolute authority over the citizens. He said, well, it kind of looks the same structurally. Now the political community becomes much more, you might say evolved. It changes. It starts to attach—the military community, what is it about? Dealing with the crisis of war. But the political community, what is it about? Well, first it’s maintaining order. First, it’s breaking the authority of the kinship, but then it starts to acquire other things. It starts to be about justice and morality and the highest life, where is the highest life? Is it in the family? Is it in the village? No, it’s in the polis. It’s in the political community. That’s where we achieve our full humanity.

John Grove (18:36):

I’ll pause right there and say, is all of that sort of just a rationalization in his view? Because a lot of political philosophy, especially people who study political philosophy, not me, because I’m already healthily skeptical of all this stuff, but for a lot of people who study political philosophy, they’ll say, well no, he’s presenting all a political philosophy as if it’s just basically a rationalization. These people have power, they have control that was justified militarily. And then they find these reasons to justify maintaining it in peace. So you could kind of see the history of political thought and political theory as being just this big rationalization for people to hold on to power.

Luke Sheahan (19:20):

He does see it as at least originating there. You’ve got to give it. Why does the military community continue after the war? You got to give a reason. And so if you say, well, because this is the highest life, because this is your true identity as being a citizen. This is more important than your family. You’ve got to give a reason for it to continue. So he does see it as a bit of a rationalization. Now that said, he does say, look, we probably couldn’t have civilization and clans at the same time. Something else had to come into existence. So we could have civilizations as we understand them and we could have art and music and high culture. That probably was never going to come out of the clans as much as he appreciates the scholarship on the clans, not as a primitive way of existence in this kind of demeaning way, but it’s not going to give you civilization as we understand it. And it’s given us all sorts of great things. He says, you’re not going to get there. But nonetheless, what happens at the beginning of political philosophy is trying to justify to rationalize what has happened. And some of it’s, it’s not necessarily a cynical rationalism of they were just trying to hoodwink people, but what’s done is done. They broke the power of the clans. The polis existed. Socrates comes along, this was in the past, it happened. So now what do you do? And they’re trying to say, well maybe there’s some good here too. And what does it mean to live in the polis we live in?

John Grove (20:51):

Right. That’s a good way of putting it, is that there’s almost the sense that they’re sort of discovering something that it seems like there is something that they’re getting out of that and they have to kind of figure out what it is, which is a little bit higher than just rationalization. It’s sort of a process of discovery that a political philosophy is doing there. We’re going to come circle back to politics in a bit when we talk about the plural community. But he goes through a military and political community, you mentioned in the third form of community, that says is very dominant in Western thought, is religious community. Then he has these other two, the ecological community, which is sort of like a community of withdrawal from everything else. And then also the revolutionary community. We don’t have time to go through all of those.

(21:48):

I picked out the revolutionary community. I wanted to ask a question about, because you wrote a very interesting piece for us at Law & Liberty in a very revolutionary year, 2020, or at least it felt like it at the time, called the Quest for Revolutionary Community. And there you kind of indicated that Nisbet’s idea of revolutionary community can really help us understand some of the dynamics of the everyday radicalism that’s sort of in our society today. Not necessarily people who are true mouths, but sort of banal revolutionaries of our own times. So tell us about the revolutionary community and how that notion might kind of help us understand our own times.

Luke Sheahan (22:36):

So the way he frames this is there’s the three dominant types of community, which we talked about, military, political, and religious. Sometimes you come to a period in time where those three fail, by which I mean they fail to really offer a satisfying community to a critical mass of people or at least a critical minority of people. And there are two reactions to this: revolution and withdrawal. So the revolutionary community is the type of community formed around, well, revolution. And he outlines each of these communities with having several elements. So the elements of the revolutionary community are myth, the myth of human goodness. So we’re looking around, I see a lot of corruption in our society. Politics is corrupt; religion’s corrupt; wars are all for selfish corporate gain, whatever. And we got to tear this stuff down so we can get back to the human goodness, which is lurking under the surface, but we, we’ve corrupted it through capitalism or whatever.

(23:37):

And the only way we can get there is violence. That’s the second element: the necessity of violence. You cannot have reform in a corrupt system. You have to overthrow it and it has to be violent. And this violence. So his third element is the holiness of sin. It’s good. Now, normally we think violence is a necessary evil. Of course you have to do it, but that’s only because you’re in a crisis. But no, for the revolution community, it’s a good thing. It’s to be celebrated when you behead people, this is to be celebrated. When you torture people, this is to be celebrated. So why we see eruptions of horrendous violence at revolutionary periods in kind of an astounding way. So think of the Soviet Union. You look at the stats of how many people the Soviets killed versus the czar, and it’s astounding. So you have an authoritarian czar and you have a revolution.

(24:29):

And not just the revolution, the continuing torture and death that continuous for decades afterwards. It’s just astounding. But yeah, it’s a holiness of sin. You have to have violence, you have to have this. And then number four, you have to have terror. Now we’ve used terror for a long time to control people, but for revolution, it takes on a whole new dimension. So I tied this into, I actually wrote two articles for Law & Liberty on this. So understanding the eruptions in the summer of 2020 in this term. So notice the revolutionary community has a political element. It wants to take over the political order, the corrupt political order, but it has a religious element. They have dogmas attached to it and they’re going to advance them, the revolutionary dogma. And they’re also a military component to, it has to be violent. So all these protestors, they were wearing jackboots and fatigues.

(25:22):

They looked like they thought they were in a militia and they were capturing parts of Seattle and holding them, and declaring them independent. There was a political element to it, a religious element to it, and a war-like element to it. They killed people, and they intended to kill more. And so there’s a total element to this. This is the fifth element, totalism, absolute control. Not just over your soul but over your soul and everything else. Political order, the religious order, military power. There are going to be no voluntary associations here. It’s taking over everything. And this final element is the elites. It’s always elite-driven. So this was true in 2020, we saw these ideas. They’re from academic departments. They’re articulating the revolutionary doctrines that they were advancing and that were driving it. And this has always been true of Marxist doctrines. It’s these elites who create them, whether it’s linen or Marx or whoever.

(26:24):

And then it’s imposed from the top on the masses. So I kind of identified all these in my article for Law & Liberty going on the summer of 2020. And I think cancel culture was very much driven by this revolutionary community. We saw these elements there. So you think of terror was very much what we are going to do is going to ruin your career. We’re going to get you fired, and we’re going to make sure you never get hired again. So you might not be dead, you might not be maimed, but you’re going to lose your house, you’re going to lose your friends and maybe your family, but you’ll have, your life will be ruined for the next three or four decades, however long you last. So all these elements seem to be there. And the totalism aspect is interesting. So we can’t have somebody on Twitter with 150 followers say something I don’t like. We have to go after them. And it was a bizarre aspect. I mean, I don’t really care what happens in San Francisco. I think it’s crazy. I might retweet something about it, but I’m not particularly interested in ruining anybody’s lives there. But they are really interested in ruining our lives on the other side of the country. But that seems to me to be the revolutionary community at work. So Nisbet offers this analytical tool to understand certain movements even in our own age.

John Grove (27:42):

Right. Yeah, I like that he sort of presents the revolutionary community as taking, as you just said, taking elements of politics of the military and of religion and blending it into one big mass. And that then overpowers anything else. Anything that claims to be religious community, the stable status quo, political community and so forth, all needs to be brought under this sort of revolutionary umbrella and be dominated by that form of community. So that’s kind of a good segue into the last form of community that he talks about, which is sort of the inverse of that. And that’s what he calls the plural community. And in this section he introduces or expands upon this distinction that he says between sort of monistic understandings of community and plural understandings of community. And all of the previous ones I think that he had talked about, he talks about in a very, he presents as kind of monistic character in the sense that it’s a form of community that presents itself as dominant and as the one that needs to be controlling that the political community as he discusses it in his second chapter, is a form of community that is precisely above and over and more important than kinship, more important than or potentially sort of maybe in tandem with military community more important than religious community.

(29:14):

And then when he talks about religion, he’s talking mainly about people who see religion as the dominant form of community and one that politics and military are subordinate to that. The plural community is the one that starts to introduce some nuance and some difference there. And he says the plural community starts with, I believe this is the “diversity of the human mind.” And he says, the plural community recognizes the diversity of the human mind and then says we need to have different forms of community if you’re going to have community that sort of reflects that diversity of the human mind. And so plural community is the first one that seems to allow for multiple forms of community. So tell us a little about his concept of this.

Luke Sheahan (30:01):

Yes, his final chapter is the plural community. It’s his answer to all the tensions and conflicts that have come before that he identified before. He says, look, human beings seem to have actually these different needs in our minds. The political community is making a point. The religious community is making a point. The kinship community is certainly making a point. The problem is neither, none of those give the final answer. So if we were to collapse into those type of community, you end up with tensions. It just seems like each of those communities can’t actually do everything. And one would argue, I certainly would, that the American Constitutional Order is a plural community. So what that means is there’s just this inherent baked in plurality, recognition of these different communities. So you take, we have a military community, we have a military, but it’s subject to the civilian powers.

(30:52):

So we recognize it’s there, it’s real, but it’s subordinate to the overall community. I mean, of course we have federalism. So yes, we have political powers, but they’re split up and we recognize there’s just different levels operating and it’s baked into the name of our country, the United States. And even beyond that, the religious community. So religious liberty. And what does that mean? Does it just mean individuals free free-floating citizens, get to believe whatever they want? Maybe that happens. But what it really means is organizations, concrete institutions exist that can make religious claims on their members. And in fact, I’ve argued before, and I think I’m right, that our system carves that out. So you take our tax exemption regime, Supreme Court has said that these tax exemptions are our subsidies, and it’s tried to justify that in various ways. I think that’s wrong. What it actually is, is a recognition that the religious community makes a very real claim upon us, and we can make donations to that.

(31:53):

They can tell us you have to tithe, then you tithe. And our tax regime says, we’re not going to count that. So we don’t say, “yeah, we’ll leave you with some money. You do what you want with it.” We’ll say, “we actually take that off the top. We will only make a tax claim upon what’s left over after you have paid your dues to your religious community.” So the plural community you recognize, yeah, religion makes a claim upon you, and we’re going to give it its space. Your family makes a claim upon you. We’re going to give it its space. Politics of course is there, but it’s going to be a limited government that will make a claim upon you, but it’ll leave space for all of these other associations. So the public community tries to leave them in place. So other elements of the public community, decentralization, for example, he calls functional autonomy. So all these groups to fulfill their function, whatever it is, they’re going to be autonomous insofar as they can do that and as insofar as they don’t stomp on the other or invade the other spheres of existence. So he doesn’t talk about sphere sovereignty or subsidiarity very much, but you can see those lurking in the background. They’re kind of articulations in various religious traditions of a plural community

John Grove (33:00):

Is the plural community—this is this question I legitimately just kind of struggled with—is the plural community a different understanding of politics? That’s not the sort of militarized political community, but it is a different notion of what politics is, and that’s how the plural community takes its shape is by having this specific notion of politics that doesn’t try to dominate?

Luke Sheahan (33:25):

Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s the best way to see it. So see it as the political community he talks about is a particular type of political community. The plural community is a particular type of political community. So that’s one problem with his language is I know why he does it. He’s talking about political philosophy as such, Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau. But it gets confusing. And when I talk about those with people, they’re like, there were collective action problems that were being solved prior to Socrates and Plato. So how is that not politics? How is that not the political community and the plural community? I say the United States is a plural community, but surely it’s a political community. That’s how we talk about it. It’s a government and all of that sovereignty.

John Grove (34:08):

When he says political community, it’s sort of like Nisbetian term of art there that he has a very specific meaning with the political community, but there are other forms of politics, political activity that can be taking place. So before we move on from the plural community, I wanted to ask, why is the plural community so difficult? He opens the chapter on it by saying that it has “taken a rather poor second place to philosophies which have made their point of departure the premise of underlying unity and symmetry.” So he says that the monistic forms just seem to have dominated. Why is the plural community so difficult?

Luke Sheahan (34:46):

Yeah, so Plato seems, sorry, Nisbet seems to think that Plato is maybe responsible with this, and that’s a compliment to Plato. He’s utterly brilliant. So he gives this, articulates this vision of politics and it just captures the Western imagination and we kind of keep working in his mold. And Rousseau, Nisbet despised Rousseau, as many conservatives did going back a long ways. And so Nisbet hated him as much as anyone, but there’s no denying his utter brilliance. And so that was kind of a problem as he articulated the political community, the total political community in such beautiful terms, it’s hard not to be enamored of it. And so he said, that’s our problem is we ended up with some really talented guys on the other side and we’ve just been caught in that web. So that might be part of it. Part it might be precisely that philosophy as such is aiming to give an account a total account and to understand reality.

(35:48):

When we apply it to politics, we can’t help but to give it a unifying theme. So if I’m going to take all of philosophy, narrow it to politics, the tendency will be to try to give a total account under politics rather than saying, hang on, this is plurality. When I articulate this, if you have a unifying mind that needs to be completely coherent, you’re not going to be happy if I say, yeah, those religious institutions, they can do things, the governments can do things, families can do things, and there’s going to be tensions between them, and we’ll work it out, right?

John Grove (36:21):

You’re supposed to give me answers.

Luke Sheahan (36:23):

There’s certain, a cast of mind that is not satisfied with that and will never be. And so I think he kind of thinks there might be something in the human mind that wants the unity. It might just be that Plato was just so good, we’re kind of stuck in his mode and we’ve never been able to free ourself from it. It’s kind of hard to say. But nonetheless, as an empirical fact, it’s true that Burke did not get as much play as Rousseau. Aristotle doesn’t seem to have gotten as much play as Plato, at least from most of our history. Plato seems to have been the dominant one. And even today, we still want to speak in terms of politics and we struggle to say, we even think of the conservative refrain. We want limited government. Well, we don’t want limited government as an end in itself, per se, as if just if we limit governments, sure, why not?

(37:11):

It’s because we believe in all of these other institutions. The family has a positive authoritative role. When we talk about separation of church and state, what we don’t mean is well, because we don’t want the church to have an authoritative influential role. It’s that we want it to have an authoritative role. We just don’t think that that’s a state. It’s not that there’s going to be some overlap in politics. It gets more complicated than just church and state, but that we actually think it’s a real thing. I love it when I hear about some religious leader taking to task some politicians: “You are a bad Catholic and you’re not going to take communion if you keep it up.” Great, you’re doing the right thing. You’re skirting your authority over your parishioners as you want to. And that tension is a very real tension. That politician elected to be a politician to the district or whatever. Also a parishioner in the church, there’s a tension there, very real tension. And I say amen to that. The plural community says, that’s great.

John Grove (38:09):

I just saw a tweet—or an X or whatever they’re called on X now—yesterday by some it was fairly, I’m assuming fringe figure, but it was a successful troll because it was going all around Twitter where he said, if any church is holding a service in anything other than English, you’re undermining the nation. And I was preparing for this podcast at the moment and I was thinking, oh my goodness, here’s the political community and the religious community in tension. And this person, I think, is sort of a Christian influencer, but it seemed very clearly to have chosen the political community there over in that tension. The comment on Plato segues pretty nicely to my next point, which is that it’s such a sweeping book, and it covers so much territory. There is, and a lot of different thinkers, readers will be bound to disagree with some of his takes on some thinkers. Plato will be one.

(39:04):

I don’t have a dogmatic interpretation of Plato, but there are parts where I was like, well, maybe Plato is trying to get at something more nuanced than the way he presents. I think he gets Luther very wrong. I agree. Luther in particular, this question of the church and the state, I think, is in some way prefiguring an element of the plural community because I think a lot of Luther’s thought was precisely what you were saying, that the church is supposed to be doing something very distinctive and very different. And that was one of his big complaints about the Roman Catholic church is that he felt like it was doing all sorts of extraneous stuff that wasn’t the function of the church. But I think he misses some of that stuff. People will disagree with Plato,  might even be a few people who like Rousseau who are going to read it, which I don’t quite understand that, but they are out there. Can you sort of disagree with some of his substantive interpretations of these people while still kind of gaining the broader insight of the scope of the book?

Luke Sheahan (40:00):

Oh yeah, I think so. So Plato’s the classic example. So his reading of Plato is a little oversimplified and I think he knows it’s oversimplified. So he is saying, Plato gave us this vision. Is Plato way more complicated and sophisticated and brilliant? Yes, yes, he is. There’s a ton in Plato. Nonetheless, that vision of the political community, in simplified form from what Plato’s articulating about ordering the soul and all these things, yes, that seemed to have captured the political imagination in the West. That seems to be accurate. And people who defend Rousseau, they’ll be like, oh, read the constitution of Poland or whatever, that nobody reads and didn’t have very much influence. And it says, okay, but what does Rousseau say about the social contract as it took on the world and took over the world? I mean, we have to look at that. And so we can have our fun intellectual debates in academia over the proper interpretations, but in concrete, historical reality, what characterizes our understanding of the modern state, what part of Rousseau? It’s the part that the French that influenced the French Jacobins, it’s the part they took out of him. That’s what captured the imagination and that’s what dominated politics and the French Revolution and dominated politics since. So do read him with, he knows he’s not giving the definitive account of these guys,

John Grove (41:22):

And that’s not really what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to provide their influence in that broader sweep of history. That’s right. Yeah. That point about capturing the imagination, I always think of when I’ve taught political theory before, classical political thought, how much more engaged the students are with Plato than Aristotle. You get such a huge drop off when you go from the Republic to teaching the Politics because now you’ve just got this guy who actually wants to look at the world and just sort of explain what it’s, instead of, Plato has these just soaring imaginative situations that capture the student’s mind. You talk about the communism of women and children for a week or something like that, and then you get Aristotle and even Aristotle. So it should be mentioned. I think you sort of hinted at this, he places Aristotle very much in that plural community.

(42:16):

There would be plenty who would maybe argue, Aristotle is a political community thinker because you have all that language in Book One of the Politics that everybody likes to quote, “man as a political animal,” the polis is by nature in some readings are all these other communities sort of point towards the polis. That’s sort of the final culmination of everything. But what I found interesting is more I’ve read, the more I find it’s the boring chapter or the boring books in sort of the middle of the politics that everybody sort of likes to skip over, jump over to whatever it is, book seven that has this ideal king, skip over all this boring stuff about democracy and oligarchy. But it’s in there that you really get all that stuff about plurality because here it’s just like, look what is a real polis? A real polis has oligarchs and has democrats and they find all these various ways to institutionalize their authority and that’s what these constitutions are. I just mentioned that to bring back what captures the imagination might not necessarily be what captures the phenomenon that’s being investigated there. Alright, well we’re about to wrap up here. You got one minute, two minutes. What’s important about reading Nisbet today? Why should more people read Nisbet in general? Why should they read Social Philosophers?

Luke Sheahan (43:37):

So I think reading Nisbet today in particular, The Social Philosophers, gives us a way of thinking about politics, about political regimes, about freedom of association. I’ve connected a lot of Nisbet’s ideas to First Amendment rights that’s fresh and timeless. So there are some tired old debates. I mean, you take individualism versus statism. Nisbet kind cut through that very quickly. That’s a false dichotomy that we’re looking at. And so Nisbet helps us to see through these false dichotomies. And so I think really kind of deeper motifs going on underneath. He said, you can quibble about the way he discusses certain thinkers, but his basic typology is a really helpful way of thinking through when I’m looking at something right now, is this the religious community this guy says it is? Or is this the political community? And start thinking really hard about that. What is going on with these riots?

(44:33):

What is going on? I think they’re seeking community in revolution. And I think that tells us there’s been a failure in politics and religion and society at large to account for something. And that’s why we’re seeing these eruptions and they can be very dangerous. They can help us understand them and start to identify what’s going on. And then the plural community gives us a helpful alternative so we don’t have to argue about whether we should have a Christian nation or not a Christian nation established religion or not established religion. In some ways we might be thinking in terms of the political community and we’re just arguing within it, but we’re not actually outside of it and it can give us motifs and ways of understanding what’s going on that really, I don’t know that any other thinker really goes as deep as Nisbet and as thorough as Nisbet does and really giving us a really helpful typology and thinking through these things.

John Grove (45:24):

Alright, well that’s great. I really enjoyed reading. This is the second time I’ve read through The Social Philosophers and I benefited from it both times. It’s an elegant new edition. It’s from The American Philosophical Society Press. It is available now and it’s definitely worth your time, with your read. So Luke, thanks so much for joining us here on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Luke Sheahan:
My pleasure.

James Patterson (45:48):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.