Paul Gottfried

Nisbet, Robert (1913–96)

Among well-known sociologists, Robert Nisbet was almost unique in considering himself a ‘conservative.’ He defined this orientation not in terms of conventional American partisan affiliation but as a sociological and anthropological perspective. Nisbet viewed human relations as requiring organic relations, which he assumed to be hierarchical and communally determined. Such relations seemed to Nisbet, natural and even beneficial; and his lifelong interest in nineteenth-century social theory and his efforts to locate organicist positions among social thinkers of the left, especially Emile Durkheim, can be attributed to an attempt to substantiate his understanding of basic human relations. Nisbet also significantly viewed contemporary America as departing rapidly and perhaps irreversibly from what he considered to be a good society. This concern pervades his studies of social theory; and it is possible to interpret his emphasis on the ‘conservative’ origins of sociology and his attack on leveling public administration from the 1950s onward as related reference points. Against the social disintegration and social engineering he already criticizes in his early work The Quest for Community, Nisbet poses his vision of personal authority and communal hierarchy. This vision is present in Nisbets writings, from his early studies of French counterrevolutionary thinkers through his final assaults on America in the present age.

The Rise and Fall of Christian Democracy in Europe

Abstract The role of Christian Democratic parties after World War II in helping to build stable parliamentary regimes in Western Europe deserves attention simply for their ability to survive. Such parties took root in Catholic countries and electorates and incorporated electoral organizations from the early twentieth century. After the war, Christian Democrats provided an alternative to the large Communist parties that were particularly strong in France and Italy. They also represented a link to the European past that was not implicated in the crimes of the Nazi era. Germanys Christian Democracy has proven the most successful of its kind. It moved beyond its original Catholic base to include a significant Protestant minority. And it has survived amidst the social and cultural changes and charges of corruption that have reduced their counterparts elsewhere to a secondary parliamentary force.

Sovereign state at bay

Among serious readers of his work, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is known as an analyst of the European sovereign state. Prom the 1920s on he wrote extensively on this entity, examining the historical context that gave rise to it and the legal arrangements it incorporated. He viewed the sovereign state as a legacy threatened by the emergence of new historical configurations. From various revolutionary ideologies and the tyranny of values to the breakdown of international order and the technological obsoleteness of military engagements of the kind that had taken place in earlier centuries on the continental European chessboard, the sovereign state, Schmitt believed, was now under seige. As an interpreter of the juspublicum Europaeum, the European legal and territorial order born in the early modem period, Schmitt plotted the rise and decline of a Eurocentric political life. In Nomos der Erde im Volkerrecht des Jus Publicurn Europaeum, published in 1950 but begun during World War II, he both traces the legal background of the European sovereign state and points to the challenges to its survival. Though it can be argued that Schmitt performs this task clinically, it would not be justified to see him as an entirely detached spectator. In remarks on Ernst Jiinger in 1955, Schmitt characterized himself as someone helping to check the final collapse of the European state system. Like the medieval Holy Roman Emperor, who was seen to preserve the last of the empires predicted in the Book of Daniel, Schmitt viewed himself as the katexon ti% apokalupseos, the one who thrusts himself between the present age and the Apocalypse. It is important to note this self-image, for it seems to me highly questionable that Schrnitt looked upon the system of European sovereign states, particularly those with internal cultural cohesion as well as limited geopolitical interests, as an expendable political arrangement. He did not consider the European sovereign state as one among other satisfying organizational