SOURCE: An interview in Psychology Today, Vol. 7, No. 7, December, 1973, pp. 43-52, 57-64.

In the following interview, Glasgow asks Nisbet his views on the growth of centralized bureaucratic and military power and the role each has played in fostering individual alienation.

My first meeting with Robert Nisbet was one morning last July in a Del Mar motel overlooking the Pacific. The first impression was of a leanly handsome sharp-featured man with just a touch of elegance—even in his casual beachwear of sports shirt and slacks. Nisbet's remarks, as I set up the tape-recording machine for our conversation, concerned, of all things, Betty Grable, whose obituary he had read earlier that morning. Grable's death had evoked memories of boyhood days in San Luis Obispo, California, and the pop culture that revolved around the big bands. Nisbet had heard Grable when she was a mere band-singer and recalled that he...