DATE
By Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug
Last winter, I sat at my laptop and attempted to finalize my spring syllabus for a class on “American political and social thought.” At the small liberal arts college where I work, I am the sole political theorist, which means that my classes span the scope of Western political thought. My upper-level classes are broad, roughly chronological, and taught on a four-semester rotating basis: ancient and medieval political thought, American political and social thought, modern political thought, and contemporary political thought. Of the four, American political and social thought is by far the hardest to design. While the reading lists for my classes on the ancients or the moderns write themselves—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas for the former, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill for the latter—a complete list of texts does not come ready-made for American political thought. After The Federalist Papers and Democracy in America, what comes next?
I perused my predecessor’s syllabi for the class, looking for inspiration. On one old reading list, I noticed a title that had not occurred to me: Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age. As I thought about it, a number of things commend The Present Age for an undergraduate class. It’s under two hundred pages long, written in accessible language, and a good example of more contemporary American political thought. Students would be able to digest it and consider it. I had personally appreciated Nisbet’s thought since I encountered The Quest for Community in graduate school. I could not say what my students might make of Nisbet in the present age, though.
Some context for Robert Nisbet: he was born in 1913 in Los Angeles, California, earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Berkeley in 1939, and served in the Pacific Theatre during WWII. After the war, he returned to Berkeley, and wrote The Quest for Community, his first and most famous work, in 1953. Nisbet also spent time at the University of Arizona, Columbia University, and the American Enterprise Institute, and passed away in 1996. The Present Age, published in 1988, is one of Nisbet’s final works. In it, Nisbet accounts for the political developments of the 20th century, and identifies what were, in his view, their central causes and effects. This work synthesizes many of the most important ideas from Nisbet’s nearly fifty-year career, and in particular revisits the original thesis of The Quest for Community: that American individualism and American statism are mutually reinforcing phenomena, and both are to be mistrusted.
Nisbet seemed to me, at first glance, a strange suitor for this rising generation. While he lived closer in time to them than the likes of Plato or Locke, I thought that Nisbet might suffer by merit of his proximity. I worried that my students would find him outdated, or even perhaps a bit uncanny—a thinker who wrote of a world very similar to the one in which they live, but one devoid of terms such as “smartphone” or “social media” that represent powerful shaping forces in modern politics and society. More than anything, though, I was concerned that some of my students might discount Nisbet because he is considered “conservative.” Because part of my job is to teach my students to judge ideas on their merits, regardless of ideological labels, I decided not to teach Nisbet as a conservative qua conservative; instead, I decided to let Nisbet speak for himself.
I put the book on my syllabus. I did not expect that, out of every text we read for that class, it would be the one that resonated most deeply with my Gen Z students. The Present Age explores the intertwining expansions of individualism and statism in the 20th-century United States over the course of three sections, respectively entitled “The Prevalence of War,” “The New Absolutism,” and “The Loose Individual.” In each of these sections, my students found something that resonated with them, ideas that reflected their own impressions of the political world into which they have been thrust. Our classes on Nisbet were the most dynamic classes of the semester. Students dropped by my office at surprising rates, wanting to talk about specific passages in The Present Age. When the final paper of the class came due, over half of my students chose to write on Nisbet. It seems as though Nisbet may have written a book ahead of its time. Gen Z may be his most receptive audience to date.
Take the first section of The Present Age, “The Prevalence of War.” In this chapter, Nisbet locates the beginning of the titular “present age” as 1917, the year the United States entered World War I. Prior to entering WWI, he characterizes the United States as a pluralistic but internally peaceful nation, centered on towns and communities loosely held together by a national government. The onset of war changed this, though, and thrust the country into a “world of nations,” with Woodrow Wilson at the helm, eager to use the war as an opportunity to advance his internationalist theories of politics. In many ways, Nisbet argued, WWI did the things wars always do: it changed culture and society (think jazz music and cubism), it unified people around a common cause, and it secularized by demanding loyalty to the United States above and beyond convictions regarding “life, dignity, property, family, and religion” (The Present Age, 10-11). But WWI was different in that it brought about two irrevocable changes that would define the century to come: a culture of materialistic hedonism, and an internationalization of American politics that would, from that point forward, forever lift the political gaze of Americans to Washington, D.C. and beyond. WWI also established the conditions necessary to set off World War II and the small-scale wars before and after—what Nisbet called the “Seventy-Five Years War” of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that the United States had (and has) not officially declared war since WWII, Nisbet, writing in 1988, viewed America’s present age as one wholly born of war and militarization.
Thirty-odd years since Nisbet published The Present Age, my students also feel as though they live in a political order shaped by war and conflict. Like Nisbet, many lament the seemingly never-ending expansion of the American armed forces budget and the consolidation of military power in the hands of the president. Their lifetimes have been marked by ongoing “military conflicts” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, carried out at the word of sitting presidents and never labeled as official wars by the U.S. government. Many of my students regard this power with suspicion, uncertain that the state represents their true interests when it comes to war. My students also agreed with Nisbet that wars tend to change politics and culture. Modern warfare is opaque and secretive; some of my students offered that this reflects the increasing opacity and secrecy regarding all national politics in the United States.
In the second section of The Present Age, “The New Absolutism,” Nisbet examines the way in which American militarism provided a vehicle for the centralization of politics (an increase in “statism”) in the twentieth century, Today, the United States hosts a bureaucracy larger than any “true” totalitarian regime. Nisbet held that freedom is eternally under threat under such conditions. In particular, he argued that the growth of government power has had deleterious effects on the former pillars of American civil society: local schools, churches, associations, and the like. Increasingly, these community institutions became subject to federal regulation, and their ultimate ends subverted toward service of the federal government. A great levelling of American communities ensued. Federal bureaucratic regulations and Supreme Court rulings, he argued, snuffed out variation in local and regional governance. The ever-multiplying federal rules governing the lives of individual Americans produced uniformity and sameness; such rules are unfriendly to innovation and creativity. In time, Nisbet maintained that this sort of absolutism redefined freedom in the American context. By and by, Americans are free only to live pre-scripted, predictable lives pre-approved by federal regulatory bodies. American freedom under the new absolutism means only comfort and predictability, as opposed to true liberty to do what one desires within the broadly-defined limits of the law.
No one is more acutely aware of the diminution of their freedom as Gen Z. Many of my students are convinced that they will never be homeowners, that their political order will never improve (so why bother voting?), that they should not bring children into what seems like an unsalvageable world. Unlike their parents and grandparents, members of this generation often express a feeling of confinement in life—that they have few true choices that might make any real difference in their lives, and certainly no true upward mobility. In reading The Present Age, a number of my students identified that part of the “stuck-ness” so many Zoomers feel is, in part, due to Nisbet’s new absolutism. Federal regulations have constructed roadblocks and perverse incentives that make it more difficult for young adults get married, have children, buy property, travel without a car, start and maintain profitable small businesses, or begin thinking about a far-off, perhaps unattainable retirement. The corral of the absolutist vision of American “freedom” begins to feel more and more crowded as Gen Z enters adulthood. Nisbet’s work affirms my students’ sense that their own row will be more difficult to hoe than those of previous generations. He laid the blame for this not at the feet of “late-stage capitalism” or “neoliberalism,” but the new absolutism of American government and the ever-tightening vice grip of regulation.
In the third section of The Present Age, “The Loose Individual,” Nisbet details how American individualism grew up alongside the rise of statism and the new absolutism. Statism guts community; absolutism gnaws away at the institutions that separate individuals from their government. Nisbet was a student of Alexis de Tocqueville, and wrote his dissertation on Democracy in America. He, with Tocqueville, viewed thick associational life as the firmest foundation for American politics and, like Tocqueville, lamented its fragility. As associational life erodes, replaced in every instance by the encroaching state, so to erode human relationships. Modern Americans, Nisbet wrote, are not connected through place or even, to some extent, family. Instead, they are connected only through exchange—employer pays employee, employee pays for goods and services. Without firm connection to places, people feel justified in liquifying their assets, purchasing stocks and bonds—soft property—instead of real estate or land—hard property—that requires real-life cultivation and stewardship.
All of these conditions lead to the life of the loose individual. Rootless, self-interested, completely atomized, the loose individual can follow money from city to city at a moment’s notice, unencumbered by the things that kept generations of his family in one place. The loose individual is Patrick Bateman, or Jerry Maguire before he wrote his memo. The loose individual might feel free, in some ways, but is entirely without a safety net. He has no people, no place. The sole entity he can count on to provide for him in times of need is the government. This is Nisbet’s cycle. Absolutism feeds individualism feeds absolutism. Community, the antidote to both evils, get chewed up and spit out in the process.
Some of my students, I came to realize, feel doomed to the life of the loose individual against their wills. In a conversation with one student, she intimated to me that, far from feeling as though she has a choice between “hard” and “soft” property in the way Nisbet laid out, she feels propertyless. To live a comfortable life, it seemed that she would have to take a job somewhere, anywhere, that might afford her a chance at any kind of property at all. The idea that she would want to be somewhere in particular—that community might matter—was an idea she could not afford to entertain. My students do not want to feel rootless. They do not want to feel unattached. And yet, many of my students described watching their graduated friends become the exact kind of loose individual that Nisbet detailed, and told me they anticipate similar futures for themselves. From our tiny college town, they will likely fly in a million different directions—New York, Chicago, Austin. This was always the plan. While reading Nisbet, I could see some of my students beginning to question if the plan was, in fact, a good one.
My students have inherited this world. They did not create it. They were born well into the twenty-first century, when absolutism and individualism were both bloated from feeding on each other. They were born into warfare, overregulation, and isolation. They know many of these things instinctually, simply from growing up in twenty-first century America. As I watch them peer out at their lives with a trepidation and dread few living generations have had to bear, it seems unfair that, over thirty years ago, Robert Nisbet saw it all coming. This self-professed (though often atypical) conservative spoke the language of Gen Z in 1988, and perhaps even as early as 1953. He called out the train coming down the tracks and still, no one stopped it.
But, as unfair as all of this is, my students’ affinity for The Present Age gives me great hope. Young people do not simply want to assign blame for the problems of the world they inherit. They want to understand the problems, and they want to fix them. In and out of class, my students expressed a deep longing for belonging, for true community, the kind of associational life that Tocqueville described and Nisbet thought we had lost. I have hope that, if they can keep that longing alive, this generation with nothing to lose may turn the tides of American politics and culture. They might be the ones, after all, to buck the twin dangers of statism and individualism. They might be the ones, after all, to revive the American quest for community.
Dr. Kirstin Birkhaug is an assistant professor of political science at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where she teaches classes on political science and American politics. Her research focuses on early American political thought, with an emphasis on the contributions of women. She also serves as book reviews editor for the Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy.