Nisbet traces the modern pursuit of equality back to Rousseau. He starts with John Rawls and Christopher Jencks, then follows Rousseau from the origins of inequality to the general will, state education and civil religion. He asks what happens to families, churches and independent associations when their differences become obstacles to political equality. His argument is that freeing individuals from dependence on one another can leave them increasingly dependent on the state.
Robert Nisbet — 1 recording in the archive.
Related reading: The Social Philosophers by Robert Nisbet.
Recent discussions of equality in this country during most recent years convinced me that for those proposing it as the primary objective of social policy, the underlying values and the overriding implications do not differ from those to be found in Rouso and are rarely if ever stated as forthrightly as we find them in Russo. Knowing how to read Russo seems to me just as vital today uh to an understanding of the scene around us as at any time in the past century or two. I think it was Matthew Arnold who used the phrase touchstone of excellence, singling out certain writers from the past whose works could be used as touchston as guides thereby to the present. And while I use the word excellence for Rouso in a context of many misgivings, I do not take an iota from his genius. He is an authentic masterpiece. There can be after all malignant masterpieces as well as benign masterpieces. 30 years ago this month in an article in the journal of politics [clears throat] I pointed out then relatively novel perspective formed of Rouso's philosophy and the emerging ideological foundations of totalitarianism. More recently, another work I suggested that Rouso's ideas were a better guide [clears throat] to the new left than anything easily derivable from Karl Marx. And today I would like to suggest that Rouso is extraordinarily useful to us as preliminary reading to any understanding of writers such as Christopher Jen and John RS and quite possibly the emerging platform of the Democratic Party. At the moment we find ourselves in a period of apparent calm. The surface of society again tranquil. The jacobans, babuists, communards willing for the moment to leave the field to a fresh crop of philosoph. Now filops do not like revolutions only their intellectual preparation. From the time of the sophus in fifth century Athens down through the humanists of the Italian 15th century, the philosophs encyclopedus proper and the French enlightenment, the coffee house intellectuals in the 1840s and France and other parts of Europe all the way down to the Eric Frms and Herbert Marcuses and Seight Mills of the 1950s. The pattern of the filop is a familiar one. First, through moralistic tract and text present social reality as nothing more than a set of traps, toils, injustices, inequalities, and petty tyrannies. Second, declare all existing institutions,…