Nisbet, Robert - Brad Lowell Stone (essay date spring 1998)

Brad Lowell Stone (essay date spring 1998)

SOURCE: “A True Sociologist,” in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, spring, 1998, pp. 38-42.

[In the following essay, Stone briefly reviews Nisbet's life and work, emphasizing Nisbet's criticisms of centralized power and the romantic individualism of Jean Jacques Rousseau.]

Henri Bergson once observed that a true great thinker says but one thing in his life because he has but one point of contact with the real. By this Bergson meant that although a great thinker may have a variety of interests, he typically embraces one great truth that animates each of his pursuits and serves as a guide to lesser truths. Whether or not this holds generally, it is true of Robert Nisbet, who passed away on September 9, 1996, three weeks short of his eighty-third birthday. In each of his thirteen books, beginning with The Quest for Community (1953), and in virtually every one of his numerous...

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