SOURCE: “The Political Animal,” in Modern Age, Vol. 18, No. 4, fall, 1974, pp. 424-26.

In the following essay, Gow compares Nisbet's Social Philosophers with Wilson Carey McWilliams' The Idea of Fraternity.

What is community? What impells men to enter into society? Is society natural or artificial? Such questions have agitated the interest of men ever since they began pondering the riddles of life and the universe; but these questions are of especial and urgent interest today. When we speak of “community,” observes Robert Nisbet [in The Social Philosophers], we usually use the word in its oldest sense of “relationships among individuals that are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, of social cohesion or moral commitment, and of continuity in time.” Closely related to the idea of community is the idea of anticommunity, that is, of the fear of the “social void, of alienation, of estrangement from others, even...