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The Quest for Community in Twentieth-Century America
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18335 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
4,228 Words |
| Author
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William A. Schambra
William A. Schambra is a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprises Institute, on leave from the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, where he is the chief speech writer
for Secretary Louis Sullivan. The views expressed in this
article are strictly his own and do not necessarily reflect
the positions of Secretary Sullivan or the department. |
“The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature - needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity,” wrote Robert Nisbet in his classic work of political sociology from the early 1950s, The Quest for Community.
What is true for all people, at all times, has been particularly true for Americans in the twentieth century. Indeed, our recent history - especially our political history - reads as if we have been embarked on a great national quest for community. In the course of this quest, we seem to have oscillated between two alternative approaches.
On the one hand, Americans have sought membership and belonging through what Edmund Burke described as the “small platoons,” or traditional small communities of society - the family, church, neighborhood, and local fraternal, ethnic, and voluntary associations. On the other hand (and this is the approach recommended by this century's progressive liberalism), Americans have experimented with the idea of the great national community - a nationwide family or small town, as it were.
If we wish to understand how Americans go about satisfying the eternal quest for community, there is no better place to begin than with these two alternative approaches.
The Rise of the National Community
For much of our history, as sense of community was readily available to Americans through a complex network of “intermediate associations” - strong families, homogeneous neighborhoods, and the religious, educational, ethnic and fraternal associations of closely knit small towns. Such associations performed virtually all of the vital economic, cultural, and welfare functions of society. And because they were marked by a rough equality, or sameness, an easy familiarity, and a clear sense of belonging or membership, the spirit of oneness or community prevailed.
At the turn of the century, however, our “small platoons” came under assault as industrialization, urbanization, and other forces of modernity began to pulverize small communities. In their place rose teeming cities, characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, and populated by individuals who were treated as anonymous cogs in a vast industrial machine rather than as fully participating members of a community. Separation, isolation, loneliness, and alienation
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