Robert Nisbets Understanding of the Ideas of Emile Durkheim

Robert Nisbet placed Emile Durkheim firmly within his own conservative tradition, dating back to anti-Enlightenment thinkers on the Right like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. They had defended tradition Christian morality and an orderly, hierarchical society with a monarchy and established church, and were skeptical of liberal claims about progress and rationality. Nisbet thought that modern capitalist society had created the seeds of its own destruction by undermining traditional culture and morality, which opened the door to genocidal and totalitarian ideologies like communism and fascism in the 20th Century. This was partially the result of the weakening of intermediary institutions like the church, guild and civil society that had stood between the isolated individual and the power of the state. He found that the general direction of urban, industrial society in the West had been statist and authoritarian, including both the warfare state and the welfare state. At the same ti me, capitalism had also encouraged moral permissiveness and self-indulgence, since traditional Christian morality had stood in the way of mass consumption. Yet the individual under capitalism might have been materially more affluent, but also morally and spiritually empty, highly isolated and alienated and lacking any real ties to society and community. Both the Left and the Right shared many of these critiques of capitalism and its culture, and both claimed Durkheim as one of their own. In