SOURCE: “Robert Nisbet and the Modern State,” in Modern Age, Vol. 39, No. 1, winter, 1997, pp. 39-47.

In the following essay, Perrin reviews Nisbet's life's work, focusing on Nisbet's developing theories concerning the cause of growth of the centralized territorial state and how that state has affected more local, social institutions.

Sociologist and historian Robert Alexander Nisbet (b. 1913) has been writing for more than half a century. Two overarching themes characterize his lifetime work. First, he attempts to reorient the formal study of social change in the social sciences so that the hoary metaphor of growth and development, a mainstay in conceptualizing historical change from the time of Aristotle to the present, yields to narrative history as such. In different words, Nisbet argues that social change cannot be understood as a kind of gradual, cumulative, necessary, directional, and inborn development of underlying potential (a view he dubs “developmentalism”).¹ Real history...