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politicians and bureaucrats of that city, by treating them as prime daemons
behind the current deterioration of the world. In Nisbet, this rather
populist sentiment is clothed in elegant language, enriched by apt allusions
to
the grand tradition of European thought since the Greeks. All the same,
this slightly narrow definition of the prime target gives an impression of
parochialism
to
a non-American reader.
3. Hierarchy . This is a more contentious and hence spicy ideal. No one
would openly espouse centralization, as once they would not espouse sin;
but hierarchy, inequality, is quite another matter. It was Raymond Aron,
who is rightly one of the European sages whom Nisbet invokes, who
observed that one of the deep troubles of industrial society may be its
aspiration for an equality which is not compatible with its real organiza–
tional requirements. But Nisbet 's critique is, alas, not very specific social–
ly. Inequality is justified by a general principle applicable (if at all)
anywhere: "Hierarchy in some degree is ... an ineradicable element of the
social bond ... " In a book concerned with our present discontents, we
should have liked
to
hear a great deal more abour the specific forms of our
contemporary social bond, rather than about the bond
an sich.
His dislike of contemporary egalitarianism -and perhaps his overrat–
ing of ideas as sources ofsocial trends -leads the author
to
take a good swipe
at John Rawls 's
Theory of 1mtice.
But the weakness of the approach
exemplified by that book seems
to
me
to
be rather in its a-sociologism, its
willingness to return ,
nur mit ein bischen anderen Worten.
to
the State of
Nature,
to
what we would do if we were starting society afresh. But we are
what our histOry has made us . The fact that we are born into a complex and
constraining social heritage, with all this implies, is not simply an unfortu–
nate complication which one can usefully think away when doing social
philosophy. On the contrary, it is the very essence of our predicament . The
Gedankenexperiment
resulting from imagining the contrary is a sterile one: as
Raymond Aron has noted, it feeds us back our values, good or bad, with the
quite illusory benefit that they are now derived from some purer, less
contentious premises .... But Nisbet, disappointingly, seems willing
to
argue with this position on its own terms, rather than challenging it more
fundamentally.
4. Tradition . In his high valuation of this manner of conducting
human affairs, there is more than a merely verbal affinity between Nisbet's
views and those of Michael Oakeshott.
I mean reliance upon, in largest possible measure, not formal law,
ordinance, or administrative regulation , but use and wont, the uneal–
culated but effective mechanisms of the social order, custom, folkway,
