A Dark Future Seen at Twilight

Twilight of Authority By Robert Nisbet Oxford, 272 pp., $10.95 Nisbet’s thesis is that the West is in a state of decline, a “twilight age,” characterized by a loss of social authority and hierarchy, and a decline in attachment to political values, coupled, perhaps not paradoxically, with the spread of an oppressive state machinery. As the state, in the name of equality, attempts to ensure not equality of opportunity but equality of result, and is supported in this effort by a “clerisy of power” (including “the greater part of the intellectual, especially academic, class”), it necessarily becomes an engine of leveling. Private power centers and institutions that mediate between the individual and the state are weakened so that ultimately the state will face only a mass of individuals. In that lies the prospect of tyranny.

Indeed, Nisbet predicts that the future lies with military socialisms presiding over masses of persons unsupported by intermediate institutions, barbaric regimes governing in the name of equality. “If our problem were only a world scene increasingly dominated by the military socialisms or only a domestic setting of combined political centralization and social erosion, there would be reason for doubting that America will, like other Western nations, turn increasingly to a variant of the war state. But the fact is, both of those conditions are present, and in mounting intensity, and against them any thought of arresting or reversing the processes of militarization of society seems rather absurd.

About the Author

Robert H. Bork

The late Mr. Bork was a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

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Twilight of Authority By Robert Nisbet Oxford, 272 pp., $10.95 Nisbet’s thesis is that the West is in a state of decline, a “twilight age,” characterized by a loss of social authority and hierarchy, and a decline in attachment to political values, coupled, perhaps not paradoxically, with the spread of an oppressive state machinery. As the state, in the name of equality, attempts to ensure not equality of opportunity but equality of result, and is supported in this effort by a “clerisy of power” (including “the greater part of the intellectual, especially academic, class”), it necessarily becomes an engine of leveling. Private power centers and institutions that mediate between the individual and the state are weakened so that ultimately the state will face only a mass of individuals. In that lies the prospect of tyranny.

Indeed, Nisbet predicts that the future lies with military socialisms presiding over masses of persons unsupported by intermediate institutions, barbaric regimes governing in the name of equality. “If our problem were only a world scene increasingly dominated by the military socialisms or only a domestic setting of combined political centralization and social erosion, there would be reason for doubting that America will, like other Western nations, turn increasingly to a variant of the war state. But the fact is, both of those conditions are present, and in mounting intensity, and against them any thought of arresting or reversing the processes of militarization of society seems rather absurd.