SOURCE: “A Dream Denied,” in Policy Review, No. 38, fall, 1986, pp. 88-89.

In the following review of Conservatism, Gottfried argues that Nisbet's rejection of both egalitarianism and religious enthusiasm renders his conservatism interesting but largely irrelevant to contemporary political debates.

Conservatism: Dream and Reality is the latest book in a string of distinguished works by Robert Nisbet, going back to The Quest for Community (1952) and The Sociological Tradition (1967). Although Nisbet's post-1960 books have been generally leaner than his voluminous early studies of social theory and social crisis, certain leitmotifs run through almost all his writings.

One is an often mordantly expressed concern about social leveling, which Nisbet sees as furthered through plodding bureaucracies as much as through acts of revolutionary violence.

Bureaucrats rule by obliterating inherited social distinctions and any institutional arrangements that stand between themselves and uniform control over others. Managerial government is not a value-free force.

As...