Did the Decline of Community Create a Demand for Socialism?

So actually, let's maybe talk about his book, The Social Philosophers, first, because I think that ties into what you said here a little bit more.

I've written a review of it.

I think you edited or helped reissue the book itself.

In Social Philosophers, it's really kind of a tour de force, I would argue.

It shows just how well read and learned Nisbet was in terms of what he's drawing together.

But he takes that big picture you're asking about, like, how do people associate, what are the kinds of communities that humans have been a part of over the past several centuries? And he argues there's sort of three big ones, you know, three major keys, if you will, of community and then sort of three minor keys that are a little more modern.

And we don't necessarily have to go through all of them in detail.

But he talks about and I'm going to blank on one of them, but the military, the religious and is it just the political, the three major keys and just the ways in which these kinds of communities exist.

shape society or shape civilization.

And so he talks about Athens and like the thing about the golden age of Athens, Socrates and Plato and the democracy and how that era really comes about because of a reorganization of the communities that they formed from more familial, I guess, familiar is the default, but around other things.

So I'll let you answer that because I stumble around, but I found that very interesting, the way in which either military or political changes to society from a more kind of familial or tribal.

We're responsible, he argues, for the flowering in Athens, for some things going on in the Roman Republic.

So maybe talk a little bit about those kinds of communities and how he sees those playing out in various kind of historical episodes.

Yeah, so The Social Philosophers was published in 1973.

Nisbet, the next year he moved to Columbia for his last academic post, so it was a little bit later in his life.

The publisher ended up going under that year, so that it had been around for 130 years or something like that, so it was...

Not anticipated, I don't think.

But the book ended up not getting the attention he thought it would be.

So he actually thought that it would be kind of the sociologist version of the worldly philosophers.

So, you know, I think that book's in its seventh edition or something like that.

And he thought that's what he was trying to do, I think, was play off of that.

And that book, I think, was published in the 1950s first.

That didn't happen for him.

And it's really unfortunate because I think it's his most philosophically adept book.

As he said, it's an incredibly wide-ranging survey.