SOURCE: “Paradigm Lost,” in Washington Monthly, Vol. 23, No. 4, April, 1991, pp. 46-50.

In the following essay, Lemann assesses the continuing influence of Nisbet's Quest for Community, arguing that Nisbet powerfully captured Americans' nostalgia for small-town life, but that this nostalgia interferes with state actions needed to protect the nation and its values.

Every time a president of the United States proclaims himself to be in favor of returning power to states, cities, and neighborhoods, and opposed to our trying to solve national problems from Washington, he is echoing, probably unconsciously, a little book published in 1953 called The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet. Nisbet's work is the mother lode of anti-big-government conservatism in America. Views like his certainly existed before The Quest for Community, but they weren't expressed with nearly as much drama and intellectual elegance and so had less force and respectability. Just as black nationalism had a...