Individualism lacks a sense of civic virtue, eschews prescription, and is selfish. Individuality expresses freedom within sociopolitical parameters, and blends with pluralistic insitutions which intermediate the state. Robert Nisbet’s

Quest for Community

explores how people ought to live together.

Hobbes endorsed authoritarianism as removing barriers to individual autonomy; the Enlightenment more destructively sought to diminish intermediaries as irrational and oppressive, trusting in the reasonable state. Neither has proved out. Nisbet turned to book 2 of the

Politics

, supplmenting Aristotle with Burke and Tocqueville.

In the

University Bookmanwrites:

… A western democratic world in crisis needs above all “harmony,” but a harmony that resists the temptation to settle for a unanimity or unison that is the counterfeit of true harmony. This is the great task of contemporary politics for Nisbet and for us: combining civic and social harmony with a political unity that respects pluralism as such. This means that pluralism is not enough. Our great institutions, public and private, must relearn how to speak and act authoritatively again, imbued a genuine sense of public purpose.