A few words on the general nature of this book will perhaps be of use to both students and general readers. I regard the book as falling in the area bounded by what is commonly called intellectual history on the one hand and social history on the other. The title properly suggests that the larger part of the book is concerned with the philosophers and the systems of ideas that form the mainstream of Western social philosophy and provide indispensable background to any full understanding of the contemporary social sciences. No single trend in recent years has been more vivid in the social sciences than the reawakening of interest in the sources and channels of the ideas, perspectives, and values that lie beneath the varied theories and methodologies of the social sciences.
But as I look over what I have written, the book seems to me to be almost equally a social history of western Europe since the time of the Greeks. It has never been possible for me to think of ideas except in their relation to institutions, processes, and events. I would have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to have presented the history of the fundamental ideas of Western social thought apart from the nature and crises of the fundamental institutions in Western social history. Hence the attention I have given in each chapter to the sociological elements of the type of institution—or as I choose to call it, community—that is under consideration. Apart from the social history of militarism, politics, religion, revolution, ecology, and pluralism, however abbreviated such history must be for purposes of a single volume, I could not have made the ideas discussed seem other than disembodied. Hence, too, the considerable amount of attention, often necessarily at the expense of detailed treatment of certain philosophers and their ideas, to key events and processes, to conflicts and crises in the social history of the West, reaching all the way from the fragmentation of kinship society in ancient Greece and Rome through the rise of Christianity, the first ecological communes, the national state with its fateful centralization of power, the rise of modem revolution and war, down to the great military-revolutionary states of twentieth-century Russia and China.
That this book is selective in its treatment goes without saying-or apology. How could it be otherwise? If there are ideas and events the reader expects to find and doesn’t, I can only offer him in counterpoise those in the book which he perhaps had not expected to find.
Although the structure of the book, its division by themes or topics instead of conventional periods of Western history, is discussed at some length in the Introduction, let me say here; by way of prefatory emphasis, that I have long distrusted the conventional narrative method as the means of trying to bring history, either intellectual or social, alive. The truth is, history—in the objective sense of all that has happened in the past—falls into no pattern or structure in and of itself. To suppose that the narrative, unilinear, storylike, first-this-and-then-and-then pattern of historical writing so commonly found is history is to suppose nonsense. I do not suggest that there is any method or structure we can provide that will be a faithful representation of subject. Modem historians are only just beginning to be aware of the profound issues regarding the relation between investigator and subject matter that physicists have been aware of ever since the seminal works of Bohr and Heisenberg. I mention this in passing only to reassure those readers who may think at first sight that my topical approach to Western history in this book is a wanton violation of what used to be called the “seamless web of history.”
Robert Nisbet (1913–1996), a former Guggenheim fellow and member of the American Philosophical Society, was the author of many books, among them The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom; Social Change and History; The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America; and The Making of Modern Society.
Read more in The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (American Philosophical Society Press, 2025 [1973]).
