ABSTRACT
Robert A. Nisbet is often described in shorthand references as a "conservative". In place of the idea of progress Nisbet offered something less grandiose, but for him far more serviceable: the idea of community. To be sure, Nisbet's moral order was rooted in the tradition of American Protestantism—in which the varieties of belief somehow coalesced to form a marketplace of ideas that ran on a parallel track to the political system, with its own variations and disputations. Nisbet saw the world in dialectical polarities: on one side were the values of community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred. On the other side were individualism, equality, moral release from authority, and rationalist techniques of organization and power. It might well be that Nisbet's idea of the sociological as some sort of extension into the post-industrial and post-revolutionary world of the late twentieth century is but a feeling more for the literary than the scientific.
