Books by Robert Nisbet

This memoir by the eminent sociologist and historian of ideas, Robert Nisbet, views Berkeley from a different perspective. This book is a fascinating picture of Berkeley as it was a half a century ago in its move to become the most important centre of learning west of the Mississippi.

"One of our most original social thinkers," according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology

When first published, The Sociological Tradition had a profound and positive impact on sociology, providing a rich sense of intellectual background to a relatively new discipline in America

The primary purpose of Metaphor and History is to explain the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development

The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century.

The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book, The Quest for Community

The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us

When first published, The Sociological Tradition had a profound and positive impact on sociology, providing a rich sense of intellectual background to a relatively new discipline in America. Robert Nisbet describes what he considers the golden age of sociology, 1830-1900, outlining the major themes of nineteenth-century sociologies: community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation. Nisbet focuses on sociology's European heritage, delineating the arguments of Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in new and revealing ways.

This work aims to show that sociology is indeed an art form, one that had strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the 19th century, the age in which sociology came into full stature.

Explains the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. This book explores the concept of social change across the whole range of Western culture.

A discussion of the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. It demonstrates that the sovereign political state is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances.

A great moralist and social thinker illuminates the most vexing issues of our time¿war, old age, racism, abortion, boredom, crime and punishment, sociobiology, and seventy odd others¿in a dazzling book that is by turns hilarious and somber but always vigorous and stimulating. Upon each subject Robert Nisbet offers piercing and often unexpected insights.Joining the colorful company of Montaigne, Voltaire, Burke, and Mencken, Nisbet writes for his own age and with his own prejudices. He ranges from the historical to the contemporary, from great men to lesser ones, from pieties and wisdoms to fads and effronteries. The work, in other words, is neither philosophy nor a dictionary (except that the subject matter is arranged in alphabetical order), but the distillation of Nisbet¿s wisdom, learning, and profound moral conviction. He argues for liberty over equality, for authority against permissiveness, for religion but also for science, for the individual and his rights but against individualism and entitlements. The center of his thinking is the fervent wish for a community linked by history, religion, and ritual, in which children are raised by families rather than by the state, but in which blind custom and belief are questioned and creativity emerges. Determinism of any kind he finds untrue to human nature and history. Man is free to improve himself or destroy himself.