Book Description

"We live in an age of economic interdependence dominated by large welfare States. It is an age of spiritual insecurity, alienation, preoccupation with human identity, and widespread quest for community. Why is this? Why has the quest for community become one of the dominant social tendencies of the 20th century? What are the forces, the changes and dislocations, that have joined to make the problem of community so obsessive in modern literature, philosophy, and social science, and in popular thought and behavior as well? Dr. Nisbet deals with these questions not merely in the familiar terms of the impact of technology, secularism, and industry, but in political terms of power. Above all else, he argues, centralization of power and, with this, widespread bureaucratization of function and authority, lie behind the contemporary quest for community. These political forces, having weakened the contexts of traditional community, make difficult the establishment of new and relevant forms of community. Even worse, as the totalitarian societies have shown, political centralization in its absolute forms can take on the trappings of community. The major problem of our time, Dr. Nisbet concludes, is the devising of a political order in which decentralization and pluralism will make possible forms of community whose very diversity and multiplicity will be the guarantee of their members' freedom from absolute power" -- Back cover.