SOURCE: “A Friend of the Family,” in Newsweek, September 27, 1982, p. 78.

In the following essay, Goodman reviews Nisbet's changes in political ideology, noting the consistency of Nisbet's defense of the family and other social institutions.

Robert Nisbet is by all odds the jolliest Jeremiah now practicing. In person, as in his books, he dwells on the dire condition of our society with unfailing zest, brightening with his style the gloomy landscape he portrays. One is apt to leave the company of this tall, ruddy, 69-year-old remembering that he favors jogging shoes and feeling that things just cannot be as bad as he says.

Since 1978, when emeritus was added to his title of Albert Schweitzer professor of the humanities at Columbia University—“I was fed to the teeth with teaching”—Nisbet has been continuing his explorations of the territory where sociology, intellectual history, moral philosophy and political science meet. The...