SOURCE: “The Anatomy of History,” in Commentary, Vol. 48, No. 5, November, 1969, pp. 85-9.

In the following review of Social Change and History, Wrong favorably compares the work to Nisbet's earlier The Sociological Tradition since Social Change and History foregoes broad characterizations of individual thinkers in favor of close examination of the metaphor of growth as it developed throughout Western history.

Robert Nisbet adopts in this book the same approach to intellectual history that he employed in his previous book, The Sociological Tradition. Instead of concentrating on individual thinkers or on recognized schools of thought, he follows the late Arthur O. Lovejoy in seeking to isolate “unit-ideas” which have dominated the thinking of many men of different countries and eras who were often on opposing sides of the major intellectual and ideological controversies that occupy the forefront of conventional histories of thought. In the earlier book Nisbet identified five such...