Robert Nisbet’s Visible and Invisible Communities

Communitarian Robert Nisbet’s most famous book, The Quest for Community, falls short of what it intends to prove. Nisbet misinterprets Tocqueville on the nature of individualism and fails to comprehend the nature of the modern state. Most importantly, he never asks whether the local communities which he takes to be so valuable could themselves ever be oppressive. The failure to inquire into the nature and substance of justice allows Nisbet to emphasize the evils of centralization while suppressing any possible benefits. Such an unbalanced argument ignores true subsidiarity and in the end renders itself incoherent.