Re: "Progress, " and leftists and rightists. Among many, many sources
see, Christopher Lasch, http://www.columbia.edu/~cf27/pubs/nisbet60.html
>...for a profound but peculiar combination of radicalism and conservatism,
see Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Re: "Civilization, " from the author of
this, http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-December/028295.html
Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris
[3] For an exhaustive and model intellectual history of the American right since 1945, see George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
[4] Nisbet shared a great deal with his fellow traditionalists Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, and Gertrude Himmelfarb and with neoconservatives Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond, Peter Berger, and Richard Neuhaus. His differences with other traditionalists can be briefly if inadequately summarized as follows. While sympathetic on each point, he stopped short of the Kirk's extreme formulations of Divine provenance, made less of centuries old intellectual errors than Weaver, but never moved so close to sympathy with the progressive possibilities of the state as Viereck. For Nisbet's criticism of Viereck as a "progressive," see David J. Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 200. The Quest and the New Left
The tumult of the 1960s and early 1970s saved Nisbet's “quest for community” from being the lonely preoccupation of Conservatives. The book took on a life quite separate from the public statements of its author, becoming, according to a bemused Nisbet, “something of a cult book for the New Left.” [20] Going out of print after moderate sales in the fifties, student demand led it to be reissued in 1962 under the updated title Community and Power.
A number of New Leftists such as Paul Goodman, C. George Benello, and the authors of the Port Huron Statement quoted Nisbet or echoed many of his major themes. [21] He shared with many on the New Left contempt for the national community offered by some liberals, hostility to the ideas and tactics of the Old Left, and a nostalgia for a vaguely defined pre-modern way of life. [22] He in no way anticipated the mass uprising of blacks or the upheaval of the student movement, but his Quest, however inadvertently, provided an explanation for the existence of so much discontent in the midst of abundance.
Yet the movements themselves, by challenging communities very close to Nisbet's own heart, soon forced him to clarify what he meant by community and power. [23] At the center of his concept of community lay not New Left themes of empowerment, participation, and freedom but rather his own enduring passion for localism, hierarchy, tradition, and authority. Having now power and place as a professor and administrator at the new campus of the University of California at Riverside, Nisbet threw himself into a second career as a critic of the revolution and an intellectual architect of the coming counter-revolution. [24]
[3] For an exhaustive and model intellectual history of the American right since 1945, see George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
[4] Nisbet shared a great deal with his fellow traditionalists Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, and Gertrude Himmelfarb and with neoconservatives Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond, Peter Berger, and Richard Neuhaus. His differences with other traditionalists can be briefly if inadequately summarized as follows. While sympathetic on each point, he stopped short of the Kirk's extreme formulations of Divine provenance, made less of centuries old intellectual errors than Weaver, but never moved so close to sympathy with the progressive possibilities of the state as Viereck. For Nisbet's criticism of Viereck as a "progressive," see David J. Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 200.