Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet was an American sociologist, born in 1913, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped found the sociology department, served as vice chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, and later held the Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia University. His 1953 book The Quest for Community argued that modern individualism and centralized state power had eroded the intermediate communities, such as family, church, guild and neighborhood, that once gave social life its meaning, a foundational text in what became known as communitarian social thought. His later book The Sociological Tradition (1966) traced the discipline's major concepts back to a shared reaction against the upheavals of the industrial and French revolutions. Though he began his career on the political left, Nisbet became an influential voice of philosophical conservatism in postwar American sociology. He died in 1996.