If he does not find his community in a subtle, organic, local manner—as revealed through the slow unveiling of tradition, especially in the English common law—the human person will create artificial and, often, gargantuan community. Since the breakdown of the medieval synthesis—in which all things held together through the unity of one faith in one God—the human person has become increasingly alienated from his rootedness in time and space. With the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, thinkers believed increasingly and emphatically that man’s true freedom came from his liberation from the past.

In 1953, Robert Nisbet published “The Quest for Community,” a book that reveals to us that our own quest has become something both natural and unnatural. That is, it is natural to desire to belong, but it is horrifically unnatural in the ways we choose to commune.

1953 was a banner year for the conservative soul and intellect. Russell Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind came out that year. As did Leo Strauss’s pathbreaking Natural Right and History. Daniel Boorstin published his close study of Americana, The Genius of American Politics. Eliot penned his critical play, The Confidential Clerk, and Ray Bradbury offered the world Fahrenheit 451.

The zeitgeist had yet to exhaust her resources, however, and Robert Nisbet produced his magisterial The Quest for Community, a work that mightily complemented the other works of that year, almost, but not quite, forming a whole with Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Oxford University Press released Quest on February 12, 1953, exactly a month before Regnery published Kirk’s book.

Notes of admiration for Nisbet and his book arrived from Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Presbyterians, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Augustinian priests, vice presidents of major corporations (Nieman Marcus and GM), Jesuits, David Riesman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and numerous others. Reviews glowed with enthusiastic endorsements for this “invigorating” study. Even reviewers who criticized Nisbet for employing too much sociological vocabulary liked the book. Not atypically, the Boston Globe stated: “Perhaps this book is not for the ordinary reader—its sociologists’s jargon, ‘frames of reference,’ and the like, bothered me for a while, but the brilliant backward view of history and the clarity of analysis of what can lie ahead is worth the effort demanded.” Indeed, the paper continued, “Freedom demands alertness to the words of good guides, among whom Dr. Nisbet may be numbered.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made a similar comment, claiming that, if anything, the author “over documents” his case and “labors his case.”

Still, whatever criticisms appeared upon the book’s initial publication, the book itself has had a long, long life, seeing new editions in 1961, 1970, 1990, and, most recently, in 2010. Each of these versions, though, is really just a reprint of the original, not a full revision as was the case of each subsequent edition of Kirk’s Conservative Mind. It was not, however, merely the right who liked the book.

No changes have been made in the text of the book for this printing. I do not mean to suggest that there are not changes I would make were I writing the book today. Such changes are inevitable: the product of time and circumstance, but chiefly one’s own development of thought. Any effort to incorporate these in a book written nearly twenty years ago would surely, however, be abortive. Far better, it seems to me, to leave the book with its imperfections rather than to try vainly to recapture the setting, mind, and mood from which the book originally sprang.

Yet, had Nisbet revised the book, he said, he would do three things very differently than he had with the original 1953 edition. First, he would write much more on the theme of alienation: alienation from the past; alienation from place; and alienation from things.” Second, he would give much greater analysis to the idea of natural authority as opposed to contrived power. Third and finally, he would have explored in much greater detail, the “wide diffusion of the ideology of centralized power.”

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