Nisbet, Robert - David Brooks (essay date September 1996)

David Brooks (essay date September 1996)

SOURCE: “Robert Nisbet's Quest,” in Weekly Standard, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 30, 1996, pp. 14-15.

[In the following essay, Brooks praises Nisbet's analysis of the sources of increased political centralization and the inevitable effects of this centralization on social institutions.]

Robert Nisbet was ailing when Hillary Clinton uttered the most remarkable line of the presidential campaign—“it takes a president” to raise a child. Nisbet died on Sept. 9 of prostate cancer at the age of 82, ending a distinguished career as a sociologist and public intellectual. But his life's work is a refutation of Mrs. Clinton's declaration. Nisbet was a devastating critic of the politicization of everyday life, of the way family, friendship, and community have been suborned by the state. He anticipated, by nearly half a century, much of the current talk about family, neighborhood bonds, and reducing the...

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