Paradigm lost; the shortcomings of the small-town solution.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Nicholas Lemann is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.

* The Quest for Community. Rober Nisbet. ICS Press, $10.95.

Every time a president of the United States proclaims himself to be in favor of returning power to states, cities, and neighborhoods, and opposed to our trying to solve national problems from Washington, he is echoing, probably unconsciously, a little book published in 1953 called The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet. Nisbet's work is the mother lode of anti-big-government conservatism in America. Views like his certainly existed before The Quest for Community, but they weren't expressed with nearly as much drama and intellectual elegance and so had less force and respectability. Just as black nationalism had a life apart from Malcolm X but is now impossible to imagine without him, hostility to centralized liberal democracy has become inextricably linked to Nisbet. That The Quest for Community was recently republished,* nearly 40 years after it was written, is testament to the triumph of Nisbetism as the stated creed of American politics at the highest level.

Ideas are, understandably, usually discussed in presidential campaigns at the bromide level only. Reading Nisbet is therefore extremely useful, because it provides a full explication of the case against big government that we are used to hearing in the form of a one-liner. During the past quarter-century or so, hostility to the federal government has gone from being the province of Southerners and Babbitts to taking over at least a part of the house of liberalism-that part that rereads Small is Beautiful and favors the slogan "Think Globally, Act Locally." The antibureaucratic, antifederal government "New Paradigm" movement that is associated with White House aide James Pinkerton has succeeded in making suspicion of Washington into a smart-hip-conservative (rather than dumb-rube-conservative) position, and Pinkerton has attracted a good number of liberal followers too. It looks as if Nisbetism is well on its way to becoming, finally, consensual, which is all the more reason to look at it closely. Doing so reveals that Nisbet's argument is more interesting and complicated than you might think, but also much less airtight.

The urge to merge

Nisbet begins with the premise that all people have a deep, fundamental need to belong to some kind of community-that the notion of the free individual as the basic social unit is ridiculous on its face. The whole thrust of modernization-defining it very broadly to include most political and social developments since the Renaissance, and even some before that-has been to chip away at the institutions through which most people have fulfilled their need for community. These are the family (especially the extended family), the stable town or village, the church, rigid social and economic classes, and guilds for people in the same line of work-the set of institutions that together constitute the traditional form of authority that the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies called Gemeinschaft. Such "intermediate associations" are, to Nisbet, unquestionably the ideal structures around which to build human society; he is a conservative in the literal sense of the word, meaning that he regards change with suspicion. "The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modem intellectual can be found guilty of," he observes sourly at...