SOURCE: “A Humane Sociologist: Remembering Robert Nisbet,” in University Bookman, 1996, pp. 29-39.

In the following essay, Kirk praises Nisbet's Quest for Community for showing the individual's natural desire to form strong social attachments and the ways in which this drive persists in an era of centralized political and economic power.

The Quest for Community suffers from none of the usual vices of sociological writing: it is not equivocal, or marred by pedantic empiricism, or afflicted by meliorism, or afraid of metaphor, or dominated by a caste spirit. On the contrary, it is a readable and manly book, almost wholly emancipated from the barbarisms of social-science rhetoric, as its author is free from the dreary pedantry and poverty of imagination which characterize most of his colleagues in the social sciences. Mr. Nisbet is dean of letters and arts at the new University of California at Riverside, one of the...